Escalator

Riding the 'Up' escalator at Spadina Station from the Southbound platform.

I'm trying out Soundcloud for hosting this one. The fact is that recording and editing the sound is a lot more fun than the steps needed to create the video files that Smugmug can host. It's enough to discourage me from posting anything, even when I have a lot of recordings that I like.

The problem is that Soundcloud looks like it rolls over older content, which means that eventually any links that I post here will break. (Flickr does the same thing with photos, which is why I stopping using it. Plus it sounds like the name of a horse in a tacky country-western theme park show.) So if I decide that I like Soundcloud then I will either still need a permanent way to host my favourite files, or recognize that nobody is actually listening to this stuff anyway, let old sounds expire, and delete this blog.

 It's good to have options.

Fire Van

 Fire van southbound on Yonge, passing Gerrard.

It's not the cleanest recording, and doesn't catch the beginning of the siren. There's also something that sounds a bit like static, but I'm fairly certain that it's the sound of the wind-driven snow hitting the Rode windscreen. The conditions were bad enough that I didn't even catch the number on the van as it went by.

The recorder was hand-held without the suspension mount, which I only do when I'm in a hurry, but I can't say that I can hear any handling noise.

Walking: Snow

Walking on Queen Street in the snow.

Keep the volume at moderate levels for this one: there's a large peak in the middle.

Snow adds interesting squeaking and crunching sounds to footsteps, while giving a wet muffle to road noise. This was recorded while walking with the shockmounted recorder held around knee-level, facing away from me and toward the street. The initial results had me confused because the stereo image was flipped – then I remembered I was dangling the recorder upside-down. I've restored their proper orientation for the finished recording.

My favourite part of this recording comes around the 20-second mark: I saw a streetcar coming, so as soon as I was clear of a small side street I stopped walking to catch its pass-by. Then there's the tinkle of a bell as someone goes into a convenience store, and I move along. A fun little vignette.

I'm pleased to say that I'm learning from practice, and had presciently set the levels on the little Sony so that the streetcar didn't quite clip when it went by. I did normalize it to -2dB, but that was mostly to remove a slight stereo offset. It was recorded in wide stereo using the Rode Dead Kitten wind protector, which did an excellent job of protecting the mics from snow.

Regulator

The sound from a natural gas regulator diaphragm.

Recorded with the Sony PCM-D50's mics in the wide stereo setting. XY stereo might not have picked up the traces of traffic in the left channel. Handheld without a shockmount, using the Rode Dead Kitten in fairly high wind. From the Senator David A. Croll Apartments, née Rochdale College, 341 Bloor Street West. Run time 45s, with a short fade added at the start and longer fade at the end, but otherwise unprocessed.