Synesthetech

Recording birds in a Lincoln Square apartment window, April 18, 2009 (photo by Alessandra Gillen)

Later this month, Alex and I will be moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I’ll be entering the MFA program in Art & Design at the University of Michigan this fall. Although I’m really excited about what lies ahead there, it means not only leaving a lot of great friends, but also leaving a sonically-rich world-class city for a much smaller college town.

With that in mind, I’ve been trying to document even more of the sounds around me as I make my final rounds throughout Chicago. I’ll be posting them here in batches over the next few weeks. I’ll also be doing a going-away performance on WLUW’s Something Else program on Sunday, May 17, and I’m planning on one of my sets being a mix of untreated field recordings of Chicago which will use many of the recordings here among others I’ve made over the years.

1. Automated voices in Union Station (3:31, 7.1MB mp3)

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   One of my favorite sound spots in all of Chicago. I could listen to the Amtrak track identifiers all day.

2. Event setup, The Great Hall, Union Station (2:20, 4.6MB mp3)

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   While I was waiting to pick up some friends, I recorded an event that was being set up in Union Station’s Great Hall, a wonderfully reverb-heavy space.

3. John Hancock Tower open-air observatory (1:05, 2.4MB mp3)

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   A great place to stand and listen, but difficult to make a recording without the sound of other people on the observation deck!

4. Birds in Lincoln Square apartment window (1:09, 2.7MB mp3)

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   Heading to the Metra on the morning of Alex’s birthday, we stumbled across this ground-floor apartment window with a birdcage and a very talkative bird. I didn’t realize at the time that there are also lots of other birds inside the apartment, which you can hear in this recording.

5. Morning weekday traffic, 143 E. Chicago Ave. (10:47, 22.2MB mp3)

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   Downtown rush-hour on a fairly quiet stretch of Chicago Avenue, a block away from the Museum of Contemporary Art.

6. Michigan Avenue construction (5:11, 10.8MB mp3)

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   Standing in front of the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue, I recorded the work being done at the recently-demolished building across the street. Lots of great traffic sounds, too.

7. Afternoon traffic on Lake Shore Drive (9:28, 18.9MB mp3)

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   Nice stretch of droning traffic sound, recorded while sitting at a bus shelter right on Lake Shore Drive (while not actually waiting for a bus). Nice mix of foot and vehicle traffic.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

This weekend, Alex and I went hiking at the North Park Village Nature Center, a great little sanctuary that’s only a half hour bus ride away from our apartment. The colors weren’t quite as close to peak as we’d hoped, but we both managed to get some decent photos of early autumn. A slideshow of my photos is above, and here’s the Flickr set.

I wasn’t able to do as much recording as I’d hoped; even though the park wasn’t very crowded, we were almost always within earshot of people talking. I managed to get one decent recording:

• Traffic with falling leaves (3:00, 5.5MB mp3)
  Alex led us off one of the trails into an employees-only area of the woods. It had a pretty thick canopy of trees, but was fairly close to the border of the nature center’s land which rests on a busy street. While we were taking pictures I noticed that each time a breeze came through, leaves started falling pretty loudly all around us. Of course as soon as I turned my recorder on the wind died down completely, but eventually I captured three really nice waves of falling leaves, all very close together. Keep your ears peeled for barking dogs, crying children and Alex’s footsteps near the end.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

PHOTO: Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. More photos on Flickr.

Here’s a selection of some of the field recordings I made on a recent trip to San Francisco. All were made with the built-in microphones on my Zoom H2 recorder.

1. Walking to the Pride Parade (5:26, 10.2MB mp3)
   A very slow approach full of sirens, conversations, and echoes until it explodes into “Celebration.” When we scheduled the trip, we had no idea we would be there for the Pride Parade; it was a very cool bit of serendipity to be able to see it and record it!
2. Pride Parade marching band singing “Goin’ To The Chapel” (1:39, 3.3MB mp3)
   With all the excitement about legalized same-sex marriage in California, this was easily my favorite moment of the parade.
3. Port of San Francisco intersection alarms with street musician (2:44, 5.3MB mp3)
   Some of my favorite sounds to record are electronic interface sounds in public places, and the traffic signals in downtown San Francisco do not disappoint.
4. Traffic on Market Street (2:49, 5.4MB mp3)
   After a few unsuccessful attempts at recording the sound of the trolley car guide rails whipping against the overhead street cables, I finally got a few decent seconds of it near the end of this recording of traffic on Market Street.
5. Mooring chain on ship, Hyde Street Pierr (1:40, 3.4MB mp3)
   The national park at Hyde Street Pier is a much-welcomed relief from all the crazy tourist trap stuff you’re inundated with the second you arrive at Fisherman’s Wharf. I mean, I like cable car toys, Golden Gate Bridge shot glasses and sourdough as much as the next guy but it gets to be a bit much after a few blocks; so to find an educational park free of advertising in the middle of all of the capitalism was pretty amazing. This recording was made while crouching down on the pier in the park with my hand through a fence, trying to get as close to the mooring chain and away from the wind as possible.
6. Underground cable for cable cars (1:29, 2.9MB mp3)
   Another crouching-in-public recording, I knelt down on a sidewalk above one of the trap door covers that allow access to the underground cables which power the cable cars. According to Alex, everybody who walked past stared at me trying to figure out what was so interesting about the sidewalk, then quickly gave up.
7. Standing at West Oakland BART train platform (7:04, 13.1MB mp3)
   This train platform recording is practically a symphony of train sounds, bird calls, synthesized voice announcements, and a mother and child deciding where to go next. I could have recorded this spot for half an hour and not gotten bored.
8. Alarm test on UC-Berkeley campus (0:50, 1.7MB mp3)
   “This. Concludes. The test.” Also, distant carillon bells.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.