Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Field Recording

Click here for clip 1 (01:20 mp3)
Recorded 3/13/2011 at 4:50 PM

Click here for clip 2 (01:13 mp3)
Recorded 3/13/2011 at 5:45 PM

Click here for clip 3 (00:53 mp3)
Recorded 3/13/2011 at 4:12 PM

I am going to elaborate slightly on the second clip I have uploaded. Instead of simply describing the clip, I'm going to tell a story about the recording of it. I didn't want to do my drift alone, so I asked my friend Fernando to come along with me, to which he surprisingly agreed. Whilst doing the drift, we encountered a pond with a few ducks. We followed these ducks, trying to find a spot where we could possibly record them. However, every time we would set up, the ducks would calmly swim away the moment we would hit the record button; not making a sound.

Needless to say, we began to get frustrated.

Finally, we gave up on the ducks and moved to a spot to just record a few birds and the ambiance of the water, when two of the ducks came over and began to fight in the water, splashing and quacking like they were trying to make it up to us for leaving earlier. It was an amazing coincidence, and it was probably my favorite part of the experience.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

My Drift Strategy

For a field recording project, I am required to do a drift, or a random walk. For my drift, I decided to take the process completely out of my hands. The ideas of using random decision making objects (IE: dice, cards, etc) to decide which path I take intrigued me, so I decided to go with that strategy. However, I did not want to be encumbered with having to pull out multiple objects and interact with them on every turn of my journey. I instead wanted to use an object I take with me everywhere anyways: my cell phone.

Being that I own an HTC Evo, a device that runs on the Android platform, I can develop and run my own software for it. For this project, I developed my own custom application in which I can input which directions are possible for me to turn. After I input this data the software chooses a random direction in which to travel.

I look forward to actually using this application in the "wild", and seeing how it helps my project.