Looking for fresh ideas for a soundtrack, improv, theatre sound effect...?
I have decided to share some field recordings. Please note that the quality is limited because they were recorded with an iPhone microphone. I decided to share them anyway, because many sounds can be re-built with other instruments, or there may be cases in which the gritty quality is not that important. Theatre and illusions work well as long as you have some audible material to provide the aural illusion for the scene. Still, I have to look into using something portable that produces higher quality field recordings.
All the recordings are open source, CC-BY-SA, feel free to use them for noncommercial purposes as you please (small theatres and local bands count as basically noncommercial). For commercial purposes (corporate, advertising, films, ...), please contact me first.
Enjoy the collection here. I may add more files in the future if I encounter interesting sounds, so do check back once in a while.
What I have learned while doing field recordings so far:
1. Record multiple takes.
While working on the raw material, I realised that the quality of the recordings differs greatly. Some are fantastic, others are less usable due to some extra random noises that happened during the recording, different acoustic conditions, and so on. Since the human ear is trained to pick up interesting sounds (cocktail party effect), I was not aware of this issue while recording. It is much easier for my ears to focus on the sound that interests me, compared to a standard microphone. Also, perhaps try different settings, positions, and try to find acoustic sweet spots.
2. Use good, but light and portable equipment (if you want to use the original file in a recording or theatre play later). 90% of all audio production effort lies in recording a sound very well. You can never fix a crappy recording with EQing or other features in the DAW. It is not a sewage plant. Signal loss is signal loss.
3. Use every opportunity, do not postpone recording. It's better to have a low quality version than none, 5 seconds are better than none, and so on. You never know if you come back to that particular place later in life. You may enjoy a sound but not consider it interesting enough for your projects at the time - and later regret not having recorded it. This has happened to me in another field - while watching a pretty insect. Because I did not take a photo, I never found out which species the insect was. I have learned my lesson.
The files are:
David Lynch Aufzug
The freight elevator at Wiener Stadthalle. It sounds amazing, like taken directly out of a David Lynch film, maybe Eraserhead. It sounds even better when you are standing inside. Perhaps it would need some stereo or otherwise "immersive" (binaural) recording.
Horn Bergensbanen
This is the horn heard on the train ride from Bergen to Oslo, a standard train horn. Its lower frequency is somewhere between F4/G4 (a second), and the upper frequency is roughly an F5. Its dissonance is funky, in a way. Imagine a song like Run DMC's It's like that. The Bergensbanen horn would work in a similar way, by providing a wham! that structures a funky groove.
Metropolis Berlin
Correction: In an earlier version of this text, I hypothesized that Metropolis may have been inspired by the sound of the Berlin subway. This is not true!
- The wagons of the current model did not yet exist at the time the song was written.
- Bartos writes about the creation of the song in his book. The song probably came into existence by improvisation and writing sessions. The working title was supposedly "Don Wolga". (source: Kraftwerk-fan Georg J.)
So, instead, this is a case of "urban machines imitating art". Perhaps, the engineers designing the trains listened to Kraftwerk. We may never find out. In any case, it is very fitting, since the subway also provides an everyday soundtrack to metropolis life in Berlin.
Listen closely, and you'll find out where Kraftwerk may have gotten the inspiration for the intro to Metropolis. As a kid, I had a long toy stick with a small piece moving around on the inside and making a sound while it moved from one end to another, changing its pitch as it moved. The sound of Berlin's U7 is similar, maybe from an e-motor or from airflow going through a tube somewhere in the subway car whenever the train leaves a subway station. It has a strong sawtooth wave flavour, with many overtones.
It's very different from e. g. the starting sound of the Taurus trains, which is more like a string instrument to my ears. (you can compare them here)
Stereo Testing File
Not a field recording, just a fun little thing I did - vocs panned hard to the left - vocs in the middle - vocs panned hard to the right. Fast and easy test to see if all loudspeakers are working and if you have a stereo or mono config. I speak German in this one, but the gist is easy to grasp.
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