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.

Heater

A heater in a parking garage.

This heater has a wonderful rattle to it; I recorded two perspectives and had a hard time shutting off the recorder. So this is both the longest recording I've posted – it was cut down to fit under Smugmug's 10 minute limit – as well as the most complex sound that I've mixed. I've worked in both perspectives, and then added a third track that's had its duration stretched by twenty times and then pitched down to add some additional low end.

 I don't usually monitor the audio when I'm recording ambiances, but for capturing specific sounds it made a huge difference. It's something I'll be trying to do more often as the weather improves.

Pape Bus

The 72A Pape bus on a Saturday afternoon.

The bus was fairly empty; I sat in the very back with the recorder on the seat nearest the window. The audio in this clip covers the trip between The Esplanade and Lower Sherbourne as the bus makes its way toward – but not quite to – its signed destination of Union Station.

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.