4th of July Ambience 2021
Posted on July 6th, 2021
Direct High Quality FLAC download or play
The sound was captured on a Shure MV88 stereo microphone, placed on my back deck in Seattle, Washington. The audio was recorded onto my iPhone. The recording is about 30 minutes in length from 10:08 PM to 10:38 PM on July 4th, 2021. There’s almost no processing other than normalization and 5 second fades at the beginning and ending.
New Year’s 2021
Posted on January 11th, 2021
New Year’s London, UK, 2021, recorded from an open microphone in Kilburn, London. I used the built-in audio recorder in VLC media player to capture the streaming mp3 file from the URL on Locus Sonus Soundmap. The recording starts at approximately 11:54 PM, December 31st, 2020 and runs to about 12:02 AM, January 1st, 2021, London Time.
New Year’s Chicago, 2021, recorded from an open microphone somewhere in Chicago. The same technique was done for this recording as for London. I recorded from approximately 11:54 PM, December 31st, 2020 to about 12:04 AM, January 1st, 2021, Central Standard Time.
High-quality FLAC download or play
Here is my recording of New Year’s 2021 featuring the sounds of the celebration around midnight at my home in Seattle. The recording starts at about 11:54 PM, December 31st, 2020 and ends at about 12:15 AM, January 1st, 2021. I made the recording on my iPhone using my Shure MV88 stereo microphone.
4th of July Ambience 2020
Posted on July 6th, 2020
This recording was made on July 4th, 2020. I started recording at 9:50 PM and stopped at 10:30 PM with the same setup and recording technique as in 2019.
Here’s the setup in VSTHost for 2020. Note the little dip on the left side of the equalizer (-3 dB at 60 hertz, back to 0 dB at 50 hertz and 70 hertz. There may have been a slight amount of 60 hertz hum, although I didn’t actually hear it and the effect on the sound was minimal. There were so many fireworks, I was able to really set a good level on the Focusrite interface before starting to record. There was no clipping and it maintained good dynamic range, too
General Electric Superblow Hair Dryer Commercial
Posted on February 16th, 2020
Here is a General Electric Superblow hair dryer commercial -16 – millimeter film from the late 1960s or early 1970s, from Richard Lyons’ collection of 16-millimeter films. This one includes a “China Girl” and other information on a few frames before and after the commercial. “China Girl” images were used by film lab technicians when processing the film.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-forgotten-china-girls-hidden-at-the-beginning-of-old-films
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_girl_(filmmaking)
New Year’s 2020
Posted on January 7th, 2020
High-quality FLAC download or play
New Year’s London, UK, 2020 recorded from an open microphone in Kilburn, London. I used the built-in audio recorder in VLC media player to capture the streaming mp3 file from the URL on Locus Sonus Soundmap.The recording starts at approximately 11:54 PM, December 31st, 2019 and runs to about 12:06 AM, January 1st, 2020, London Time.
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High-quality FLAC download or play
New Year’s New York, 2020 recorded from an open microphone in Queens, New York. The same technique was done for this recording as for London. I recorded from approximately 11:54 PM, December 31st, 2019 to about 12:06 AM, January 1st, 2020, Eastern Standard Time.
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High-quality FLAC download or play
New Year’s Chicago, 2020 recorded from an open microphone somewhere in Chicago. The same technique was done for this recording as for London and New York. I recorded from approximately 11:54 PM, December 31st, 2019 to about 12:06 AM, January 1st, 2020, Central Standard Time.
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High-quality FLAC download or play
Here is my recording of New Year’s 2020 featuring the sounds of the celebration at midnight at my home in Seattle. The recording starts at about 11:54 PM, December 31st, 2019 and ends at about 12:16 AM, January 1st, 2020. Along with an inexpensive Dell laptop computer, I used VSTHost with LoudMax and ReaFir for VST plug-ins. One microphone was placed outside a living room window at the front of my house, facing west, and the other just outside on my back deck, facing east. This year there were gusty winds up to forty miles per hour. The microphone at the front of the house was subjected to the strong wind and I covered the microphone with a fuzzy “dead cat” wind screen. That helped somewhat, but there was still some wind noise causing distortion and clipping. Pictured below are the microphones, adapter cables and wind screen for the microphone at the front of my house.
In addition, a wire was connected from the metal window frame (where one microphone was placed just outside) to the outside metal cabinet my Focusrite audio interface to reduce hum pick up.
Untitled Strange Sounds
Posted on September 14th, 2019
Here are some recordings I made using Soma Ether, SDRSharp, VSTHOST and free VST plugins.
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Here is an unprocessed recording of the Ether box. I connected it to my iPhone through an inexpensive analog-to-digital converter. A wav file was made using a recording application. The waveform looks quite unusual, as well.
Here are some links:
VSTHost server appears to be down as of this post.
VSTHost
Free VST Host
Free VST Plugins
Behringer UCA222 DAC-ADC
Apple Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter
Soma Ether
Airspy/SDRSharp
Old Radio Spots – Handy Andy
Posted on September 7th, 2019
“Just north of the Sunvalley Shopping Center on Contra Costa Boulevard.”
Summer Rain on My Bamboo
Posted on August 11th, 2019
Direct high-quality FLAC download or play
I made this using only my iPhone and Shure MV88 stereo microphone.
Background Music From Hell
Posted on July 22nd, 2019
Eight songs (will remain nameless) from an internet radio station that specializes in vintage background music being played through SDRSharp, software defined radio. The software radio tuner was set to capture directly from the computer sound card. Another bit of software known as a “virtual cable” was used to direct the sound from a media player or browser to the input of SDRSharp. The software tuner was set to upper sideband and de-tuned up slightly to create the dissonant effect.
4th of July Ambience 2019
Posted on July 5th, 2019
This is my recording of the 4th of July for 2019, done similarly to 2018. Microphones are inexpensive electret capsules encased in facial tissue. I used phantom power to electret plug-in power adapters from Naiant Studio to connect the electret condenser microphones to balanced XLR inputs.
This is a wide stereo recording. One microphone was placed outside a window facing west in my living room and the other outside a sliding door on the east side of the living room. The metal window frame of the living room window has a wire running from it to my Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface to reduce hum pick-up. The audio was captured with VSTHost and a little light processing performed with Audacity audio editor. All of that was done on an inexpensive laptop computer running Windows 10.
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