Project #1 - Documentation for Uncanny Dynamics

The cats should have been easy to record. We had practiced for weeks during the hot Texas summer, although I had not set out the microphone except the night before. They did everything right, but I did not have the preamp gain set high enough. They were to hiss, growl, mew, and run around under foot when I came out the door until I spread the food out. No, not that night. Two of them did not show up; of course, it was the rowdy ones who stirred up the others. So goes another uncanny recording session.

It took three sessions at the Austin airport for the right airplane to fly over my microphone. After setting up off the end of runway 17L near the firestation, no flights took off but I saw several leave from the long runway, too far to get a good recording. So, I moved to a location off the end of runway 17R to see four Texas National Guard helicopters takeoff over my original location. It is all part of the sport of field recording.

About dusk on the third airport session, I finally captured the sounds I wanted: within minutes of each other, two American Eagle jets departed on 17R, fast and noisy. They were number 26 and 27 of the 28 jets I recorded taking off in all 3 sessions.

The sounds were recorded in Logic as four ambisonic a-format tracks, decoded to 6 tracks with VVMic (center front channel is set to zero), then edited in Audition where an interleaved wav file was exported to Premiere (with a SurCode license). I added a black video track and titles before burning a DVD.

I made my presentation in darkness, with a standing audience free to move about the room so that they could discover the sound sources and movement.