Elephant and Castle construction/roundabout
This was where I first recorded the sound for this project, I started by taking a Zoom H5 to the construction site across the street from LCC and I started recording the construction. I did not want to look too obvious when recording, so I recorded primally from behind the walls they had covering up the site. I figured out they had metal grates at the bottom of the wall that had a clearer sound of the site so I kneeled down to capture these sounds. I did a couple long recordings from around the construction site, to gather as much sound as I could.
On the way to and from LCC I was also recording the sounds of the roundabout with my field recorder, which provided me with some great sounds of cars racing by, and an ambulance siren which you can hear early on in the piece. I managed to capture the sound of someone whistling, and people talking far in the distance.
The London Underground
My first recordings were captured on my phone from a journey I had from London Bridge to Paddington Station. I did have my field recorder with me but it was out of charge, so I had to use my phone. The phone recording came in handy, as they are heard a lot throughout the piece. I EQ’d the sounds, and ran them through reverb and MISHBY (a broken tape machine plug in). Some of these tube recordings were also transposed down, to add more variety in sound and frequency.
I did end up being able to record with the Zoom H5 on the way back on the tube a few days later, I gathered some really good recordings on this which have also been used in the final piece alongside the phone recordings. I did not have enough space to attach the holder for the field recorder so I had to hold it in my hands due to the tube being full of people. Hearing the difference these recording formats have was a really fun experiment which happened purely by accident. The lofi, raw recordings from the iPhone made for a nice quality which worked in the piece’s favour. Meanwhile, the clarity of the field recorder added some much-needed clearness to the piece. This is something I will continue to experiment with in the future. In my blog ‘Creating The Audio Paper’ you can hear what the raw iPhone recording sounds like, and then what it sounds like processed through effects.