How does a city really sound?

I just took on a sound design project with Radio88.9 Milwaukee. I’ll be making some field recordings around town with a view to showing what Milwaukee sounds like. My approach to the content is interesting, but that’s a secret for now. But how will I record, edit and mix?

My plan is to record with my Marrantz field recorder and a shotgun mic and dump the audio files into my iPad to edit using DAW Multitrack. I want to avoid using my studio production system entirely and keep this project on mobile devices as much as possible. I’ll let on about the content of this project in a future post, after I’ve submitted the piece.

My next project will be to use my recently acquired Tascam 414mkII 4-track cassette recorder to begin producing music for the experimental digital cinema collaborative project my wife and I have started.

I read an article in TapeOp magazine last week that reminded me what is for many of us, our roots: recording songs on 4-track audio cassette tapes. What the article said that (re)interested me is the limiting and compression that comes about by squashing all that audio onto a 1/4″ analog tape. Plus, keeping things simple in four tracks or less forces a certain amount of focus.

Much of the percussion and synths for this project will be created on my iPad, played into the 4-track, mixed and then played back into the iPad to become music and sound designs that will drive what and how Melissa shoots. Then she’ll create short digital cinema pieces, 2-5 minutes long, entirely based on my musical interpretation of the pieces’ themes. The first theme: convex.

What does it mean for something or someone to be convex? Is it merely how something looks? Sounds? Behaves?

Deadline for the first piece isn’t yet set, I’m waiting until after my Radio88.9 project wraps next week.