MDDN 314: Samples Galore!

I managed to borrow a TASCAM DR-40 from the university today, and went out and got some great little recordings with it. The idea for this was to get a little sample library going. I had to discover however that it's not as easy as I initially thought it was going to be. The recordings were fantastic, but that problem that I face in Wellington is that the wind can be really tough to work around, as if it hits the microphones, WHAM, recording semi-ruined. Not so sharp. But I worked with what I had and got some outside and inside recordings. It's also a bit tricky to get noiseless recordings of specific things. I'm going to try again another time with an external microphone to see what I can get.

I also experimented with editing my audio in Audacity, so as to make a usable sample.


The first recording in my list was the gentle bubbling and gurgling of the Aro Park fountain. It was a lot of fun to record this one, and is probably one of my most successful. It's got a bit of quirk to it. part way through you can hear the sound of some seagulls squabbling, as there were a bunch of them having a drink and bath in the fountain. Quite sweet, really!


This sample is interesting, but not always the most pleasant to listen to. I flipped my flatmate's bicycle upside down and experimented with turning the pedal and getting a recording of the wheel spinning. Unfortunately, since his bike was a "fixie", it doesn't make that wonderful clicking noise that some bikes make when their wheels spin. Ah well.


This one is very much an ambient track, as it picks up all manner of noises happening on the road I stationed myself at. There's a little bit of construction noise in the background, and sometimes you can hear people walking past me. But the recording itself is really good.


The two recordings I have on the cafes are both really nice, as they capture the ambience of the cafes well. The first one was taken in a bookshop cafe, so the way the sound scatters in the room was really nice. It created quite a muffled, warm, round sound.


The second cafe was really pretty inside, having these wonderful concrete and brick façades, which of course changed the common cafe soundscape significantly. The music in this cafe was much more prominent as a result, and the echoing of the long, hall-like cafe was really quite nice.


The next sample that I recorded was a walk down Cuba St. I like this recording because of how the different sounds of the street come and go as I walk past them. This constantly changing scape works really well as just a recording but maybe not really that well for a sample.


This sample of a supermarket check-out area works really well at capturing the ambience of the space. This sample worked out quite nicely and was fun to play with in Audacity.