He watched them all night...

https://soundcloud.com/niloufar-e/untitled

Tehran , The Leviathan !

Sometimes you cannot help but to think of Tehran as a gigantic, ugly, scary pandemonium, a colossal sluggish monster that is always rumbling in the background of almost everything and I mean it ‘’everything’’ and you just cannot shut it up, not even for a fleeting flash of time.
For me it is not just one monster, two actually! It is both Leviathan and Behemoth, mingling constantly in a grating cacophony of jarring
noises, jumbled cries and unfortunate rhythms. As it is always fascinating to face your fears, therefore as an act of heroism I went on a quixotic quest to listen to the beats, a ‘’recording journey’’ if you will to the nooks and crannies of the city to log whatever I hear.
However, this time was a little different, as it was not just ‘’field-recording’’ but I decided to mock the beasts and punctuate the howl, yowl and growl of the city by the serenity of some music. In an attempt to accent the dichotomy of what I am actually hearing and what I would probably like to hear, I am trying to illustrate the delirious, almost schizophrenic, effects that urban spaces have on us.
At one side there is the city with all its ‘’unforgiving stridency’’ and at the other side the counteracting reaction of our mind desperately trying not to give up. The result is a delusional combination of placidity and clamor.

https://soundcloud.com/niloufar-e/soundscape-tehran

Chris Watson

 Today I'm going to write about Chris Watson,who specialises in recording sounds ambiences , natural and other location sounds and the recording session we had with him during Iran-Uk sonic residency at sound department of LCC.

Watson is one of the world's leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena , and for Touch he edits his field recordings into a filmic narrative. For example the unearthy groaning of ice in an Icelandic glacier is a classic example of , in Watson's words , putting a microphone where you can't put your ears. He was born in Sheffield where he attended Rowlinson School and Stanningtone College (now part of Sheffield College) . In 1971 he was a founding member of the influential Sheffield-based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire . His sound recording career began in 1981 when he joined Tyne Tees Television . Since then he has developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals , habitats and atmospheres from around the world. As a freelance recordist from film , tv and radio , Chris Watson specialises in natural history and documentary location sound together with track assembly and sound design in post production. 

He started the workshop talking about the relation between sound and space and the importance of sound design in architecture.He knew that I'm interested in Acoustic Architecture so he recommended a book called " Spaces speak , are you listening?". He said it's a very good reference book and it's by Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter from MIT in Boston . Barry Blesser is the man who invented digital reverberation, helped start Lexicon in 1971.The book starts with the story behind cave paintings and the relationship between sound , image and space in them which led to the idea of cave paintings  being the first experience of motion pictures and it moves on to contemporary architecture , the disaster that ends with the rooms like we live in everyday and unfortunately every other modern building as well.

He then introduced different type of recorders that could be useful for field recording.He argued it's much more challenging to get out and get a recording that encapsulates the sounds of a place than taking photos of that place. Being a recorder for long time he said he still finds it quite difficult simply knowing where to start. Before starting a record you should at least be sure about some factors such as perspective , dynamic range or...perspective is the relative distant between the source of the sound and the microphone and by that we have two kinds of recording in terms of perspective. "close perspective recording" and "distant perspective recording" . Dynamic range is a measurement of the difference between the quitese possible sound (silence) and the loudest possible sound that can be handled by a given medium.

After he shared his thoughts on kit and technique , playing various recordings of his own work. We'd then head outside in the afternoon , using the university's equipment to put the theory into practice.

Currently Chris Watson is working on a new work to be installed at opera North in Leeds from the 27th Feb. to 15th March 2014. The piece is titled Hy Brasil and will be an Ambisonic sound installation re-creating the soundscape of an island that may or may not have existed off the south west coast of Ireland during the 16th century .He believes that recording can be an art form and it all depends on presentation.

If you are interested in field recording I suggest you take a look at his works on his website where you can view archive videos and download various tracks. I'm sure you'll be fascinated by many of his works. http://www.chriswatson.net/

Virtual Studio Technology (VST)

Virtual Studio Technology (VST) is a software interface that integrates software audio synthesizer and effect plugins with audio editors and hard-disk recording systems. VST and similar technologies use digital signal processing to simulate traditional recording studio hardware in software. Thousands of plugins exist, both commercial and freeware, and a large number of audio applications support VST under license from its creator, Steinberg .Steinberg's VST SDK is a set of C++ classes based around an underlying C API. The SDK can be downloaded from their website.We did some soundsculpting with Iris Garrelfs yesterday at London Cllege of communication sound department using this software.It's free and easy to work with.I try to find some tutorials and upload them later. http://www.steinberg.net/en/home.html

The Soundscape and Society

In describing the soundscape’s capacity to convey information, Truax(1984) describes sound as a mediator between listener and the environment.This relationship is illustrated in the image.As the soundscape deteriorates, so awareness of the subtleties of environmental sound has withered in proportion.As a result, the meanings sound holds for the listener in contemporary soundscapes tend to be polarised into extremes—“loud” and “quiet”; noticed or unnoticed; good (I like) or bad (I don’t like). Compare this level of sonic awareness(and the results of the listening tests mentioned earlier) with the Kaluli men of Papua New Guinea who,according to Feld (1994)can “… imitate the sound of at least 100 birds, but few can provide visual descriptive information on nearly that many.” In other words,environmental sounds for the Kaluli tribe comprise a continuum offering a limitless range of subtleties.In the developed world, sound has less significance and the opportunity to experience “natural” sounds decreases with each generation due to the destruction of natural habitats. Sound becomes something that the individual tries to block, rather than to hear; the lo-fi, low information soundscape has nothing to offer. As a result,many individuals try to shut it out through the use of double glazing or with acoustic perfume—music. Music—the virtual soundscape—is, in this context, used as a means to control the sonic environment rather than as a natural expression of it. Broadcast speech and music provide the same opportunity for control, turning the sonic environment into a commodity. Networks, transmitters and satellites extend the acoustic community across the entire planet, a fact that has been utilised for fair deeds and foul.Schafer refers to the latter use of sound as “sound imperialism”

The Journal of Acoustic Ecology,Volume 1,Number 1