My second business trip to San Diego, but this time I was armed w/my binaural mics! Barely had time, though, to record a measly 10-minute walk down 5th ave. in the Gaslamp district.

I've done some minor editing to remove a few screwups on my part; otherwise it's untouched. Anyway, here it is, such as it is. (Headphones highly recommended.)

Binaural San Diego
7m32s 7.84MB binaural stereo VBR mp3.

Here's a short excerpt from a recording I made of the grackles at nearby Highland Mall. This really has to be experienced to be believed. The trees in the parking lot seem to be growing these birds as fruit. It smells very bad, and I was very wary about getting too close.

Highland Mall Grackles
1.45MB vbr mp3

Phonography, or field recording, or sound collecting, has become one of my hobbies in the past couple years. I've been recording everything from the inside of my desktop computer to ambient sounds from the vantage point of a deer stand--micro to macro, as it were.

So I've decided to start posting some of these sounds semi-regularly. mostly they'll be short excerpts, so the sounds will be recordings of things that might lend themselves to sound-biting.

One of the concepts of phonography that most appeals to me is that of schizophonia; that is, sounds divorced from their normal context. Even the most ordinary, commonplace events can sounds quite alien out of their environmental context.

So, in that spirit, here's a short recording of the sounds of my fridge, using two identical homemade piezo contact microphones wired together for stereo imaging:

Fridge
3m33s, 4.9mb 192kb mp3