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.