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Maple sap sounds on our live stream

The sounds of running maple sap are now on our live stream on the Locus Sonus soundmap.

The sap is running in New England and beyond, and is harvested through the late winter/spring to be boiled down into the gold of the north, maple syrup. You’ll also hear locals like black-capped chickadee, tufted titmouse, and downy woodpecker.

We connected a pair of LOM Uši Pro and stuck them under the lid with magnetic clips, then ran them into our SoundcampStreambox.(More information on the Streambox, including how you can make one yourself, is here.)

Video by orangecookie
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Lyman Loop, Westhampton MA

Ambisonic recording decoded to Blumlein stereo

A windy day in the Lynes Woods Wildlife Sanctuary, on the Lyman loop. Nearly still under the trees, with no other people and no virtually wildlife except for some distant crows, the sky above the trees was on the move. I love the full sound of the rush of wind high up in the sky, and the Sennheiser Ambeo microphone seems to enjoy it too. Here I have decoded the recording in Bluemlein stereo; I often find Blumlein gives a rich rendering of the sense of space, with detail and room.

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Chew toy windscreens, pt. 1

The best way to keep wind noise from overwhelming your recordings is to keep a bubble of empty space between the inside of your wind screen and the capsule of your microphone.

As Chris Watson puts it, wind makes noise when it stops. With only a foam or furry windscreen, the wind stops when it hits your microphone capsule and creates noise. This is why you see sound recordists carrying around mics that look like blimps: the microphone sits inside a metal or plastic frame, which is covered with soft materials such as felt, fake fur, or other fabrics. The soft materials slow the wind as it passes through the frame, but it’s the empty space inside that makes the biggest difference with cutting wind speed and preventing the microphone from being blasted directly with wind.

All-in-one recorders may come with a small furry or foam windscreen, which do OK with keeping out low-speed puffs of air from a speaking person or a curious animal’s sniffing snout. They can’t really keep out air moving faster than a light breeze. Even third-party furries like the Rycote Windjammer made for the Sony PCM-D100 can’t slow down the wind much. But you like your all-in-one recorder for its portability and quick deployment, right? Mounting it in a blimp windscreen the size of a rugby ball will make it hard to keep the recorder in your coat pocket or handbag.

In this project, I set out to build a windscreen basket for my Sony PCM-D100, using a dog’s rubber chew toy. Don’t worry, I didn’t take a toy away from a dog, and my cats have no interest. This is another project based on an idea I got from the ever-resourceful Michael Rosenstein.

This particular brand mesh-ball dog toy has one solid hexagon, so I cut that one out to make the opening. The ball was a good size to fit over the built-in mics of the Sony, though it partially covers the signal overload lights on the front as well as some of the sockets on the sides. This is a problem even when using the Sony’s furry windscreen alone; it’s down to the design of the Sony, a company famous for well-designed products but also for sometimes sticking with poor choices like allowing the Walkman brand to be the Wile E Coyote to Apple’s Road Runner.

Next I stuffed the rubber ball up inside the Rycote Windjammer. This can take a few tries to get it in straight.

Fitting this new combination over the Sony again is a bit of a challenge. The rubber “legs” of the inner structure want to fold up inside as you are trying to make the basket go over the top completely. Using a thin piece of wood or stiff plastic (like a picnic knife) might help at this point. The Rycote as a foam skirt that normally goes up inside; I rolled that down and put a rubber band around the bottom of it. This helps keep out breezes coming from behind.

Overall, there’s definitely an improvement in how my Sony experiences wind noise; it’s by no means perfect, and I’m looking at other possibilities like lining the inside of the rubber ball with a thin layer of felt or foam.

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“Stereo” contact microphone

A two-channel “stereo” contact mic, based on a design by Boston-area sound artist Michael Rosenstein. Made by modifying a 1/8″ stereo plug => 2x 1/4″ plug cable.

I cut off the two larger jacks and soldered large piezo discs onto each lead, then sealed the connections with shrink tubing and plasti-dip. I used red dip for the piezo disc that connects to the ring of the tip-ring-sleeve (TRS) mini-plug, which would be the right channel in a stereo configuration. I put “stereo” in quotes for this mic because, while it’s a two-channel mic that works great with a mini-plug input on any audio recorder, the recordings don’t attempt to depict a sound field like we expect from a stereo microphone array.

This means you can arrange the two elements in any relation to each other and it’s never “wrong.” In the above image, I clipped the two elements to each end of a strip of heavy watercolor paper, then left it out in the gently falling Western Massachusetts snow plugged into my Sony PCM D-100 digital recorder. The paper was heavy enough that it never became waterlogged, and was stiff enough that the snow made a satisfying pop upon impact. The result was a “stereo” recording of a tiny paper landscape.

In the below photo I’ve attached them to a wire shirt hanger, an adaptation of “The Watson,” a technique invented by environmental recordist Chris Watson for a quick, cheap, and effect stereo mount. (I’m not sure Watson himself invented the name for it.)

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Ultrasonisphere

Ultrasonisphere is the first piece conceived for the Ears In Space wave field synthesis array. It is composed primarily of the ultrasonic sounds used by bats for hunting and communication, along with other environmental and synthesized sounds. The bat calls were recorded using various means to translate them into the human hearing range. 

The Ears In Space wave field synthesis array is a linear array of 24 speakers coordinated by a Max patch, which creates sonic point sources in a two-dimensional space. These virtual sources are physically accurate and retain their position regardless of the position of the listener in the room. 

Wave field synthesis is best experienced in person; however, until we can all get together in physical reality, this version of Ultrasonisphere is a binaural rendering for headphone listening, attempting to recreate the experience of the Ears In Space array. I recommend listening on headphones with the volume at a moderate level. 

Thanks to Jo Kennedy for providing some of the bat sounds. 

The idea of the Ears In Space array was born from a series of spatial audio workshops held at EMPAC at RPI in Troy, NY; deep gratitude to many people for hours of inspiration, consultation, and discussion, both during and after the workshops. 

Recorded by Mike Bullock: early evening, front yard in Florence, MA USA; early morning, village of Aulus-les-Bains, France; and Jo Kennedy: Cemetery, Basque country, Spain.

credits

released November 13, 2020 
Sounds recorded by Mike Bullock and Jo Kennedy