Soundscapes: baseball, a walk to work, and trains

Last December I bought my self a Zoom H4n, a portable recording device. I primarily wanted it so that I could record podcast episodes on the go. What I've found, though, is that it's great for collecting sound for soundscapes.

I made this while I was at Spring Training in March.

I have several more minutes of sound than what is presented hear. I wanted to keep the track relatively short while still getting in all the interesting sounds I wanted, so it is an edited soundscape, though, I would be very impressed if you could tell where all the cuts are.

A few weeks ago I made another soundscape as part of a project for my sound design class.

That's my walk into work. This is unedited.

Finally, this is one from my MART 110 class at the University of South Carolina a few semesters ago.

We were supposed to create a soundscape that attempted to elicit some emotion from the listener. The basis for this was from the movie The Shining which has some pretty killer sound work. The one scene that kept sticking in my head while working on this project was when Wendy was pushing the cart through the hotel. That scene reminded me of trains, so I decided to find some train sounds that I could edit together.

Subway sounds are some of the most unsettling eerie sounds and those are the sounds i eventually settled on.

I have audio for two more soundscapes that I plan to release. One is from a class final and the other is from a baseball game that had a heckler.

Portrait of a Sound Design Artist

This is a really cool video my media arts teacher had us watch:

A man standing alone in a shed hitting a bath with a mallet could be seen as mad, but in the world of sound design, it's the norm. Ali Lacey is an eccentric sound design artist, and this short portrait allows us a closer look into the world of sound design. Directed, Shot and Edited by Josh Bennett - http://stormandshelter.com Music and Sound Design by Ali Lacey - http://novoamor.co.uk/ Check out his latest sample library - http://goo.gl/Ng34AQ Filmed at Stylee Studios in Snowdonia National Park, North Wales. Produced by Storm+Shelter http://stormandshelter.com http://facebook.com/stormandshelter http://twitter.com/strmnshltr

As an accomplished podcaster this is really interesting stuff. I've started getting into other forms of audio such as the soundscape I did over Spring Training which a few people seemed to enjoy. I would love to do a project that puts together several different sounds into a song like the video above, one day.

Make sure you check out the Soundscape section under Media for some of my non-podcast audio work.

Carlos Correa And The Sweetest Sounding Double

I saw this first on Astros County today and man what a great video by Evan Drellich over at the Houston Chronicle caught at the backfields of Osceola County Stadium.

Good buddy David G. Temple picked it up at NotGraphs and I have to agree with his assessment that it is just absolutely perfect. It's so perfect in fact that I've made it into a notification sound on my phone. I'll have more on that up at The Crawfish Boxes tomorrow morning.

I'll be making my annual trip to Kissimmee, Florida, soon to see the Astros play and visit the backfields and this year I've decided to capture some of the sounds of Spring Training and make a soundscape. It'll probably end up being a post at TCB, but I'll also be sure to add it here.