Tag: footsteps

February 9th

In 2009 I contributed a project to Sound Diaries awkwardly titled Unspectacular February. We had just published a series of recordings from the first minute of 2009 full of fireworks, excitement, and new beginnings and so it seemed like we should follow this up with something from the everyday business of being. The result was a series of one minute recordings capturing the everyday activities of the kitchen – the sound of the dishwasher, kettle, fridge, toaster, cutlery drawer, microwave and the more distant sounds of the house – television from the next room, footsteps upstairs, the washing machine in the shed. I thought that I should mark the passing of ten years by doing this again. I’m in a different kitchen now but many of the objects are still the same.

We’ve reached day nine of unspectacular february and finally there really seems to be nothing much going on. You can hear the sound of me putting my car key back in the wooden box where we keep most of the keys and you might be able to hear some footsteps upstairs and me sitting on a sofa. Such excitement!

(February 9th 2019 putting the car key in a box, nothing)

Footsteps from the peripheries of performances

Performance #1: Lee Riley’s 2nd Audiograft 2012 version of Guitar Drag

Kit: A pair of Naiant X-X omnidirectional microphones and a Zoom H4 recorder

Recordist notes: I was waiting for Lee Riley’s guitar sound to come into Pembroke Street on his route into the town centre. After moving around the street, I found a good place for recording his arrival at Modern Art Oxford, and waited there, trying to avoid the drone of a nearby air conditioning system. I declared my recording activities by holding the recorder in plain sight and keeping it in my hands. I had a small talk on the subject of footsteps’ sounds with a man standing outside a nearby pub, and continued to wait for Lee Riley (and the sounds of his performance) to arrive. – Valeria Merlini

[mejsaudio src=”http://www.sound-diaries.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/TheSoundOfFootstepsSTE-050-CUTok_mixdownLR_zazie.mp3″]

Performance #2: Cartridge Music, performed by Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Lee Patterson, Robert Curgenven, Patrick Farmer, Ferran Fages, Daniel Jones and Stephen Cornford

Kit: A pair of Naiant X-X omnidirectional microphones and a FOSTEX FR-2LE recorder

Recordist notes: I was waiting for the performance of John Cage’s Cartridge Music to come to an end, and listening to the interplay between the sound emanating from the Drama Studio (where the performance was taking place) and the environmental sounds around it. Low bass tones inside the performance mingled at times indistinguishably with the low drone of an aeroplane above, and a man pushing a heavy cart somewhere around the campus. I had the idea to spread my microphones out as wide as possible, trailing them over the railings outside the studio, so as to capture some fleeting impression of the crowd’s experience of the concert as they left the building, talking together. I heard applause, then the crowd began to exit, and then I listened to the footsteps. – Felicity Ford

[mejsaudio src=”http://www.sound-diaries.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/cartridge-music-footsteps.mp3″]

13.47 …looking at art

On a recent visit to Berlin to perform it pays my way and it corrodes my soul with Stephen Cornford at LEAP, I made these recordings. Whenever I could I stopped and recorded my situation from the raucous queue outside a nightclub in Oxford to the escalators at Stansted and a Mexican dinner in Berlin. The recordings were made using an Edirol R-09HR.

Extra context here.

[mejsaudio src=”http://www.sound-diaries.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/13.47-…looking-at-art.mp3″]
13.47 …looking at art