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.

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.

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.

Subway

A fairly common sound: a T1 subway car running eastbound between Greenwood and Victoria Park stations.

I was sitting in the same position as in my previous subway car recording, except I was at the end of the second car instead of the fourth, and this time I faced the microphones toward the inter-car door to pick up more of the track and wheel noise. It's also a much longer run, five and a half minutes, as the train passes through Coxwell, Woodbine, and Main stations. I had planned on shutting the recorder down at Main, since I was only going to the next station, but the corrugations on the track were too hard to resist.

Since the recorder wasn't hand-held I was able to take a few photos to show the scene. The Sony is on its Rycote shock mount, which is on an Ikan grip bar, which is on my fifteen-year-old 'Ultrapod II' plastic tripod. The whole assembly is a fairly lightweight addition to my kit and folds down into a package that almost fits into the Crumpler Haven pouch that organizes my audio kit.

And I never think to remove the windscreen.

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.