Collage in the Field
This week's theme is transportation.
I spend about eighty minutes a day on Metro North's New Haven line. I took my minidisc recorder with me one morning earlier this week and recorded an entire one-way trip.
Collage #1 "Announce": I cut out the station announcements from the track and pasted them together next to one another. This makes the commute seem a lot shorter than it actually is. :) (Download)
Collage #2 "Doors": This consists of the sound of the doors closing and opening at each stop, along with the warning bell that rings just before the door closes. (Usually the doors are open for about fifteen to twenty seconds before the warning bell rings; I've cut out the audio for that duration.) (Download)
See below the jump for more, including the amazing MetroCard symphony.
My ride on Metro North ends at Grand Central Terminal. The picture above gives you the impression that it's a very busy place, which it is; however, I've always been struck by how quiet it is, even when hundreds and hundreds of people are rushing through it. I made a five minute recording while standing a few feet away from the information booth in the center of the station. Afterwards, I extracted just the audible footfalls and the audible speech. Surprisingly, neither of these total more than twenty seconds.
Collage #3: "Speech" - Audible speech collected from a recording of Grand Central Terminal at rush hour. (Download)
Collage #4: "Footfalls" - Audible footfalls collected from the same recording. I suppose most people wear quiet shoes. (Download)
Collage #5: "More Footfalls" - I layered and looped the sounds from "Footfalls" to make it sound like how it looks like it should sound: lots of people moving around. (Download)
The entrance to the 4-5-6 line from Grand Central is always busy, so the turnstiles are constantly making that high-pitched beeping noise. If you stand in the right spot, they sometimes make a continuous tone. I recorded that, then layered the recording and changed the pitch to see what it would sound like if you could make the turnstiles sing.
Collage #6 "Metrochord": The MTA turnstiles play a major chord. (Download)
I enjoyed playing around with the Max/MSP patch that Peter sent out earlier in the week, so I adapted it to get the random seek location using the Perlin Noise function from Processing, instead of the random object in Max. The result is that it will consistently seek to the same part of the audio file, moving smoothly toward the beginning or end of the file. The following two collages were made with the resulting patch.
Collage #7: "Perlin Stutter Conversation" - My girlfriend has bronchitis and is trying to quit smoking. This is a conversation we had last night, finely diced and julienned. (Download)
Collage #8: "Perlin Stutter Train" - An excerpt from my recording of a ride on Metro North, similarly prepared. (Download)