Project #3 - Sounds of Silence in Dolby 5.1

I remember camping as a young Boy Scout at the old Camp Tom Wooten on Bull Creek. I remember that silence. I remember early in the morning hearing the train whistle as it entered far south Austin. After it crossed the Colorado River near the train station, I could begin to hear the low rumble of the engines as it climbed the grade northward along what is now MoPac. Those sounds are only dreams now, replaced with the delirium of the noise of a city. The space where I camped is now covered with streets and homes and Loop 360.

Among my favorite things to do is to sit beneath a tree in the woods listening to the sounds of silence: birds, insects, animals, the wind and rain. I have many hours of recordings on reel-to-reel and digital audio tape of this nothingness. It is a time to dream, to relax, to listen to the silence that I miss amidst the delirium as a city dweller.

I have often placed a microphone out a window of my home to capture the sounds of a thunderstorm, even taken a tape recorder camping. For this project, I wanted to capture silence in Dolby 5.1.

There are few places in Travis County where the noise of traffic or construction does not intrude on the natural sounds of silence. Such was the case on the morning that I planned to record for this project. I began at the Sandy Creek Park on Lime Creek Road past Volente during a very active thunderstorm.

I finally decided to go to the First Baptist Church Granada Hills Retreat Center southwest of Austin off of Camp Ben McCullough Road. Between thunderstorms, I ran microphone lines, then set up the microphone preamplifier and my laptop computer in the back of my truck. AC power was also available at a distance, so I ran about 300 feet of power line. Each microphone was recorded as a monaural track.

I selected a 4-minute segment of the near hour-long recording to play for my presentation. Since the 5 microphones were placed in a grid which matched the speaker placement in the ACTLab Studio 4B, the result was a playback of the ambience of that place in time.