Listening journal - Christmas Eve 2006

I attached my binaural mics to my glasses and walked up Nutmeg Lane behind Linda's mother's house, through a large development of McMansions. I spend a considerable amount of time at several locations, including a stand of trees and a bridge over a stream, before realizing that my Edirol R-09 had become switched off in the bag 20 seconds after I started it. The thought had in fact occurred to me some minutes earlier, the sneaking suspicion that maybe the recorder wasn't on, but I decided I wouldn't check. In spite of the missed recordings, I'm glad I didn't check - I did a significant amount of attentive listening with the idea in mind that I was recording. Funny how much that helped me focus; kind of a placebo effect.

Nonetheless, when I finally did discover the mistake and turned the recorder back on, with the hold switch on this time (but not before stepping in some dogshit, dammit), I found I was less focused for that recording. Perhaps it was because I felt this obligation to revisit the soundmarks, like doing a second take while knowing that the missed first take would have been just fine. I was not "into it" as much and not very focused, until I got back to the beginning of Nutmeg lane and found a suddenly very productive spot. On the corner I found myself standing among several obliquely moving sound fields: Cars driving downhill from the faraway 11 o'clock to nearby 3 o'clock, and past me; very delicate scratchings of dead leaves touching the branches that still held them, above my head a slightly behind me at 8 o'clock; And a dog barking at the faraway 2 o'clock. The dog's bark was medium-low pitched but contained a lot of raspy upper partials; he got an instant slapback echo coming from the faraway 10 o'clock, which lacked the upper partials and came across with much more lower freq reverberance, sounding like a second, larger dog.

I then walked around their backyard and got a closeup of the dryer vent, and more closeup cars whipping by. Looking forward to hearing these recordings back.

DOD Equalizer

Z. Vex Woolly Mammoth

Danelectro Practice Amp (tabletop size)

Contrabass bridge with piezo pickup

Homemade piezo contact microphone

Detail from power input - ROLLS test oscillator

Frequency potentiometer, ROLLS test oscillator

Waveform selector, unnamed scientific test oscillator

Small brush made from speaker cable