imomus | Blop, blop, pschit, plouf!

Blop, blop, pschit, plouf!

I spent a sunny Sunday walking around Hakodate recording sound with a couple of students. They had a video camera and were mostly videoing me. I had my little Fuji F601 digicam and was recording the buzz of generators in the market, the bubble of crab tanks, the rattle of toy trains at Hakodate station, the ghostly swoosh of cars passing on the elevated highway, the spongey slop of water at the docks.

The sound on my students' video camera was 44.1kHz stereo, whereas the sound on my little Fuji is 8-bit mono. So a rather absurd situation unfolded; the students documented, in gorgeous hi-fi, me recording sounds in crappy lo-fi. My recordings will be full of wind noise and scuzzy digital artifacts, theirs will be as beautiful and nuanced as these two fabulous recordings on Arte Radio, which you absolutely must listen to right away:

1. Geyser ("Blop, blop, pschit, plouf" -- the sound of a geyser in Iceland).

2. Appels de Tanger (a city, Tangier, Morocco, in full cry).

Hopefully I'll soon be making recordings as lovely and faithful as these. I've just ordered a new camera, a Sony Cybershot M1. It'll be delivered from Tokyo in a couple of days.

The Cybershot M1 is a very new camera, just released last month. It's a hybrid of a video camera and a still camera. There are stereo microphones and, thanks to MPEG4 compression and Sony's Pro Duo memory card, you can store almost an hour's worth of 30 fps video with stereo sound. I'm hoping the sound is in 44.1kHz format -- digicam makers never, ever seem to tell you their cameras' sound sampling rates, even in the technical small print. The lens is a bit slow, but the camera is sure to be an improvement on my ailing Fuji, which currently only takes photos if I give it a good slap. Don't tell me I've made the wrong choice please; I've already paid $564.44 of my Future University lecture fees towards the gadget. (That's considerably cheaper than the US price, and word is that the camera won't be released in Europe at all.)

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There's something odd about the link. Here's the url:

http://www.geocities.com/sparkligbeatnic/yoru_no_tanbo.mp3

Ah, those vivid, silky sounds caress my ears! And it sounds so hot there!

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They did, but not enough for a quality recorder. We have access to DV video cams, but they're clunky and heavy. I needed to replace my camera with something that had better sound. At least the new one will be 16 bit, even if it's not 44.1kHz.

This comes from a review on Amazon.com. Whether or not it is true depends on how much you believe the reviews on Amazon.com. Doesn't appear you will be getting 44.1kHz from your audio.

The video produced (at highest settings) is:

Size: 640x480
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Bitrate: 2734 kb/s
Audio: 2 channels
Sample rate: 24000 Hz
Depth: 16 bit
Bitrate: 123 Kb/sec

I used to listen at a house here in Orlando to the artifical surf of trucks, cars, motorcycles, and commercial vehicles at a house in the crotch of Y-shaped intersection, traffic flowing on both sides.

When the shipping behemoths rumbled past, the wood floors would shake, and afterwards pop and creak back into place like foam after a wave. You could sit there for hours, the pace regulated by the stoplight, and in twenty minutes be wherever you wanted to be. It was like a monastery of heavy-transit noise, and I miss it so; as loud as it was, it was as welcome as the heater or cold water in a glass.

That house belonged to

hat_over_eyes, and she was the one who got me turned on to you, as well.

You should do a documentary on design as a religion.

Funny you should say that, I did an article on that very theme which should be up soon on AIGA Voice...

You can do up to 96Khz recording through your iPod _without_ buying any expensive iAccessories, see: http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000147025394/

...and you get to choose your own high quality mic.

Easier said than done though... Installing Podzilla is easy, but then you're gonna pretty much have to build a custom dock connector and stereo mic preamp to actually be able to record in stereo at decent quality. I'm currently working on this, built an stereo connector, it certainly does work, but I'm getting a certain amount of interference, (and sound from the hard drive in my limited tests, which is worrying!) and dfinitely will need preamp.

Momus, you might want to look into getting a non-ipod mp3 player which can record. Unlike apple's with it's bizzare crippled secret recording function, other brands (Nomad Jukebox?) can actually record as a feature! Wow, imagine that steve jobs,... and would be cheaper than any pro recorder or camcorder but should do the job better than cheap digital cams... might be worth a look?

As an amateur field recording enthusiast, the Nomad Jukebox 3 is currently the best option for the price. Having digital in for an external preamp/adc is a killer feature, and unlike other mp3 recorders, its recordings have been proven to be flawless.

Its only problem is size, not that it's huge, but it's huge compared to an ipod. Is there a definitive howto on the ipod recording hack? Web information seems highly uncertain.

How does the size compare to a typical Sony minidisc recorder? That's what I've been using for the past year or so. I like it, but it would also be kind of nice to have immediate mp3 capability, considering that I tend to take my recordings straight to the home dock or laptop.

The JB3 is 4.84" x 5.12" x 1.38", or like a clunky old portable cd player. Much bigger than any MD recorder.

I avoid MD because the format has been deliberately broken to serve Sony's copyright interests. Hardcore archivists also reject the format because the ATRAC compression is lossy. (To my ears, MD recordings are tolerable, but once they get converted to mp3, the compression artifacts drive me nuts.)

> Is there a definitive howto on the ipod recording hack? Web
> information seems highly uncertain.
I seem to be an early adopter on this one, noone else online seems to have taken it beyond proof of concept stage... mind you all I've done so far is taken the dock connector off a cheapo 3rd party ipod charger and soldered 2 phono sockets on according to schematics found on the Podzilla site.

Even when I do get round to making a preamp tho, it'll still not be ideal, as the software has (as yet) no way to monitor the audio, no levels/peak indicator, no volume control. And I'm no programmer so can't do anything about this myself. My plan is to build the preamp and basically 'tune' it to a suitably max recording level by recording tests louder and louder, then check the wavs + see what's the highest it can get without clipping, hardwire it to that volume and hope for the best.

You can record mono without any modification though, through the headphone jack... but it sounds pretty much awful, the ipod's built in preamping is really quiet + hissy. Kind of fun though, and in an Agent Cooper type emergency I could use the headphones as a super-lo-fi dictaphone mic! :)

I definitely think the Jukebox 3 would be a much better option for serious use, the ipod thing I'm only pursuing because I have one already, and like my noise electronics DIY! :)

I'll probably write a how-to myself on my site if/when I complete the project.

Thanks for responding. I'm interested in the concept, but I'm a little nervous about sinking so much money into a DIY project that so little is known about.

I assume using the dock input bypasses the preamp? How is the sound quality of the ADC? Can you share a sound sample?

Yeah, the dock input is a stereo line-in, so no preamp. The left headphone out is a mono mic in. weird. I think it might be possible to use the actual dock as a line in in some way, but I don't have one so not sure.

The ADC is probably not amazing, but sounds passable for my purposes anyway. ... I haven't done any properly scientific tests yet, and haven't saved any of the sounds I recorded, but will do some time.

here's my thread about this on the ipodlinux forums... I'll post further results there at some point in the futures... there's some discussion of the Nomad etc too... http://www.ipodlinux.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=880

in my little experience a minidisc recorder and a good microphone are the best solution for sound recording on the field. spend more on the microphone, and if you go outside grab a 'cat' or a 'spongey condom' for it, to avoid wind-crackling.
I have made incredibly good-sounding binaural recordings of a soccer stadium using my minidisc and headphones as microphone.
I think most of the sound performance of your brand new camera would depend on the quality of the microphone.

The arte radio website is majestic, I am absolutely delighted. I feel like stopping taking pictures and take only sound snippets from now on.

Do you have any more links about pure sound recording enthusiasts?

(btw you dont have a del.icio.us page do you?)

cheers

pablo

That camera looks fantastic!

their recordings are beautiful! so clear! sharper than in real life. thanks for sharing.

both of those sounds are incredibly rich and alive. great to use as relaxing ambience, when you don't want music.

i like the photo, too. the aftermath of the blizzard, it seems.

Thanks for the interesting sounds and words, all you people. I had no idea there were so many people who liked to listen to (or make) field recordings as much as I do. That camera certainly looks nifty, but I agree with others that an mp3 recorder is a good idea, too, at least for backup--so much easier than the Sony Walkman recorder from my antediluvian days.

I have this new sort of boombox that tunes in internet radio stations via wifi without a computer, and you can get stations from all over the world, but amidst all that noise and chatter I've found myself tuning in more and more to this mysterious station which turns out, upon investigation, to be the live (?) sounds of Iriomote Island in Japan, which is courtesy of the soundbum.org website "Traveling with Sounds." It's all in Japanese, so I can't read it, and it doesn't work with my browser, but it looks fascinating. (Maybe someone out there could explain it to me.)

Now the ducks and crows outside my windows can blend in with the birds and ambient sounds of Iriomote, which makes for a sort of environmental mashup I rather like.

Yeah, I checked out that SoundBum website the other day, on Lehan Ramsay's recommendation. It seems it's sponsored by Pioneer, and they gave people recorders and sent them off all over the world. I was rather disappointed by the poor sound quality, though. They seem to have really compressed the audio.

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Great! More hours of my life to lose to sound...

And there's really no excuse for such compression in a broadband age. (I hadn't noticed the quality with my little speakers playing low in the background.) Too bad, because it LOOKS good, despite the commercial tie-in.

Wouldn't it be nice to have binaural microphones placed in forests and streetcorners and deserts around the world which you could tune into on a whim? That would be true "world radio."

In this week's Time Out New York:

Arakimentari
Dir. Travis Klose, 2004
In Japanese and English w/ subtitles. Documentary.

What's the difference between an artistic nude and a smutty picture? Nobuyoshi Araki, a cross between Robert Mapplethorpe and Russ Meyer, and frequently described as the most important photographer in Japan today, doesn't hedge his answer: There's no difference at all.

A balding, potbellied, middle-aged leprechaun with glasses, a bristling mustache and a fondness for T-shirts bearing a caricature of himself as a grinning cat, Araki shoots city streets, still lives, flowers, animals, landscapes and formal portaits. But his famm--all right, infamy--rests on a vast corpus of pictures depicting bare-naked ladies of every size, shape and age, many in bondage. Araki himself comes across as an earthy charmer. His models insist he's a perfect gentleman, even when they're tied up in elaborate knots and hanging from the ceiling, and his long marriage to his late wife, Yoko, is chronicled in a slew of photos.

American filmmaker Travis Klose is clearly a fan, but he dutifully juxtaposes interviews with detractors and enthusiasts. Admirers locate Araki's erotic work within the tradition of 17th to 19th-century prints by mainstream artists like Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro--and emphasize the puckishness of his vision. Detractors accuse Araki of being too prolific for his own good and argue that aestheticizing pictures of trussed beauties' genitals, artfully accented by flowers though they may be, is fundamentally disingenuous. In his evenhanded doc, Klose reports and lets you decide. - Maitland McDonagh

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Blop, blop, pschit, plouf!

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Thanks for the resources

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Record through your iPod

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Recording angels

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Re: KUNSTKOPF

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