Friday Snow

Spadina Crescent in the snow.

Toronto recently had a modest snow storm, which started on a Thursday evening and went late into Friday. This  recording was captured on Friday afternoon, at a time when the city would normally be humming, but the snow is a physical as well as acoustical damper.

Fortunately payphones aren't extinct yet, since they provide a handy shelter from storms. The recorder was placed on top of the pay, pointing toward the missing door and the two missing panes of glass that were conveniently facing the traffic.

Cuisinart

 

A Cuisinart four-cup blender doing its thing.

Penny likes to make frozen banana concoctions that come away with the consistency of ice cream. The sounds of the blender change with the forward and reverse of the blade, which are marked "chop" and "grind" on the control buttons; how the machine runs indicates the consistency of the mix. There's also a quiet little moment at the very end (2:40) that makes me smile every time I listen to it.

I've wanted to record this process for quite some time, and I've come away with more ideas now that I've finally done it. The kitchen is a very interesting room.

Concrete Pumper

Concrete pumpers working at Yonge and Bloor.

Concrete trucks were lined up for blocks along Bloor street, and some down Bay street as well, waiting their turns to supply the pumpers that were on the three accessible sides of the One Bloor East construction site. I took several recordings; for this one I faced the little Sony away from the action to catch more of the reverb from the surrounding buildings and the sounds of the passers-by. The rhythmic sound of the pump, its motor, and the alarms of the concrete trucks manoeuvring through traffic dominate the audio.

The video-for-audio file includes three photos. The first two show the recorder's position, while the last is looking west on Bloor street at the queuing trucks. I can count a dozen, which is only about half of them. Two trucks feed the pumps at a time, but it takes a long time to empty each one, leaving a lot of equipment idling on the side of the road.

Subway

An increasingly rare sound: a T1 subway car running southbound on the Spadina line.

Recorded between St. Clair West and Dupont station, this section of track includes the curving descent down Russell Hill, location of the fatal 1995 subway crash, as the tunnel drops under the Davenport ridge. I was sitting in the last set of seats of the fourth (of six) cars, with the recorder roughly equally spaced between the side of the car and the cab. Recorded shortly after 10pm on a Wednesday night, the train was fairly quiet and uncrowded.

I've added a short fade at both ends of the audio track, being careful not to step on the sounds of the door mechanism, and normalized the audio as I had left more headroom than necessary when I set the recording level. It was also my first time using the Rycote suspension mount that they make for hand-held recorders, which seems to work very well.

Dishwasher

My dishwasher late at night during the wash cycle.

This is an old GE model that's definitely not up to the current low-noise standards, but it still works, which is all we really ask of it. Recorded with the D50's mics in XY stereo configuration, without a windscreen, on the gorillapod. Run time 2:15, with a 1s fade at the start and 4s fade at the end, but otherwise unprocessed.