Sound Walkabout
December 27th, 2007 andrea
Tonight in preparation for the Sonic Antarctica Concert on January 7th, Tia and I hosted a phonography workshop/soundwalk around McMurdo. We brought a variety of microphones and recording devices for people to experiment with and visited a wide range of sound environments, from the waste-water treatment plant to radarsat (aka the golf-ball – thanks to Nik Sinkola for opening it up for us!)
It seems to me that McMurdo residents have a high sensitivity to sound, in part I think because listening (radio communications, heavy machinery and vehicles, helicopters, etc.) is such an important part of living down here. You can see more photos of the walkabout by clicking on the thumbnail in this post.
This is a recording by Dr. John Mitchell from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics. An accomplished photographer, Dr. Mitchell is trying out the mp3 recorder and binaural microphone for the first time, you can hear the two of us talking briefly at the end of the recording: