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.

Helicopter

Five flights of a toy remote-controlled helicopter.

The first flight has a close pass from the helicopter, resulting in the recorder picking up some wind noise through the midweight Sony wind screen. I had tried using the heavier Rode screen, but it cut out enough of the high frequencies to make a noticeable difference.

The second flight includes the distinct sound of the helicopter hitting the stippled ceiling in my condo, followed shortly after by the helicopter colliding with the wall and tumbling to the ground. I can't really tell if all of the stipple-ceiling scratches on the top rotor blades affect its flight – this isn't a precision machine.

Flight number three was going really well until a bookshelf got in the way.

The fourth flight starts with a couple of quick spins of the rotors, which helps prepare the helicopter for a natural takeoff. Most of the time I hand-launch, holding the helicopter by the tail until it's stable and generating sufficient lift. This flight ended with the toy going nose-first into a wall and then falling about seven feet, which is no rougher than average.

The fifth flight that I included in this set – I actually recorded many, many more – is just a short hop with a soft landing at the end, just to prove that I could still do it.

The recorder was in the middle of the room, about five feet off of the floor, with the mics in wide stereo position and pointing at where I launched each flight. I've edited out some wind noise from the fifth flight, and cut out all of the fumbling and retrieval time between each, but otherwise the audio is as-recorded. Gain was set around 6, which is higher than I usually go, and a fair bit of background noise shows up in the quiet moments. But to put it in perspective, I had to learn to hold my breath for a few seconds before and after each flight to avoid contaminating the recording. From seven feet away.

A longer review of the helicopter is coming, but the short version is that it's a lot of fun and remarkably resilient. Even better, despite how it sounds, it has yet to do any damage to innocent parties.

Food Court

The food court lunch crowd at 10 Dundas East.

This location is notable for two things: its proximity to Ryerson University that has it dominated by students for most of the day, and the huge expanses of concrete and glass that accompanies absolutely no effort at sound abatement. It's loud. Very, very loud.

This recording is the first one that I've really edited. Chair scrapes and other sharp noises have been cut out, as have many of the recognizable words. A few still remain, stopping this from being a complete "walla" track, but catching the occasional snippet of conversation is more realistic for this location.

The mics were pointing upwards in order to avoid local sources and include more of the ceiling bounce. The low-cut filter was engaged at 75hz to deal with the overwhelming, but uninteresting, HVAC system. This resulted in an unoppressive and accessible recording, so I duplicated the audio, switched the stereo orientation, reversed it, and layered it back in. This second track had its levels compressed to create a more consistent sound and was then normalized to -6dB, while the main track was pulled up to -3dB.

The manipulated end results better reflect the scene as I experienced it – which is yet another way that phonography and photography are similar.