I would like to wish all subscribers, fellow field recordists and visitors whoever or wherever you are ‘A Very Merry Christmas’, and for those of you who do not celebrate Christmas….. ‘Have a Happy and Healthy New Year for 2012′.
非常に特別な幸せで健康な新年 to my Japanese followers and friends with whom I have enjoyed working with on the collaboration project. I am also indebted to you for the inspiration provided in gaining a much better insight into field recording, its understanding and subsequent use of captured audio. So what sound or noise do you love?
This time of the year always seems to jog my memory, causing me to reflect on past events, occasions and locations visited during my lifetime, and this year is no exception.
‘I often listen to my earlier recordings made several years previous and despite the limitations of the gear I had and the lumps and bumps of inexperience, they still act as a powerful trigger, transporting me back to the original place. Audio field recordings are more powerful than any image captured on camera and even surpass those caught on video – they are quite magical!’
So with field recording in mind I thought about the tremendous difference between some of my earlier recordings and those made nowadays. Apart from the obvious difference between availability and portability of modern digital equipment, there is also its much better audio quality and availability of fault-correction software. However these advantages may to a certain extent be offset by those less obvious differences of lifestyle and family values.
So have a listen to the following recordings made nearly 40 years apart – to be precise 38 years, with the first recording made during Christmas 1973 at Oak Street, Fakenham, Norfolk.
The gear used to record Christmas 1973 was a secondhand Sobell reel-reel tape recorder successfully purchased with some reels of crinkly used tape and crystal microphone at the local auction (no Ebay back then). I wouldn’t wish to torture you with the full hour-long recording of an obviously musically challenged family, so have therefore selected some of the more interesting clips; needless to say the family has more than it’s fair share of storytellers!
Christmas 1973
Although Christmas 1973 was at the dawn of the electronic revolution, family values and lifestyles were much slower to change from previous generations of self-made fun, both indoors and outdoors, despite the harsh weather as seen in the ’1954 Ice Slide’ photo below:
or the ’1954 Impromptu Football’ photo.
Once the electronic revolution changed to the digital age, those last remaining traces of self-made fun and games all but disappeared, having been ousted by personal players and games machines such as the Nintendo DS and Wii, together with commercialised ‘buy an instant party’ – so is it still fun or challenging? Well I cannot judge that, but look at the excitement and interest shown by the youngsters below!!
So next is the recording made this year with an Olympus LS11, some 38 years after the Christmas 1973 recording above.
The differences are striking not only in the size and portability of the gear, but also in audio quality and content. Gone are the sounds of self-made fun and enjoyment from those earlier lifestyles and family values; replaced instead by the incessant electronic sound loops emitted by limited bandwidth personal Nintendo DS game machines, Wii machines and accompanying televisions and computers.
The Nintendo DS Personal Game Machine
So these are the most likely sounds to be heard this Christmas………….
Have fun!
Slideshow
For those of us of a certain age this is a very nostalgic post. Times indeed have changed, for sound recording I think for the better. I acquired my first tape recorder over fifty years ago. Like yours, it was primitive by todays standards but it was huge fun. It was fun watching those reels of tape going round and round and then taking the EMI editing block (I still have mine) and a razor blade and cutting the precious tapes and then splicing them together again. Let’s hope that some of the youngsters today appreciate the technology available to them and use it as we did, to have fun with the sounds around us.
I wish you a very Happy Christmas!
What a fantastic post, both from a technological and a personal perspective. So often we have the weight of the visual world at the forefront of our culture with photos being the preferred medium back into our past, but here you have shown the power of the auditory sense as a means to float into another era. Sound really does elude time in these clips.
I hope you have a great Christmas and I look forward to visiting your post in the New Year.
thanks for your practical pointers, been really enjoying your blog. Have a great festival break and i look forward to your 2012 posts. I hadn’t noticed your collaboration project before, so was great reading about this as i’ve recently been talking about doing something similar with artists in different countries.
Nice post with interesting points and thoughts.
Funny to see the picture ’1954 Impromptu Football’. The boys wear shorts in cold weather. I can not imagine children will do this today.
Hi Magnus,
I remember wearing short trousers until I was 11 years old. The problem wasn’t so much the cold weather, as children tend not to feel the cold, but I do remember having frozen feet through those poorly insulated wellington boots and worst of all badly chapped legs where those boots rubbed at the back of the legs – then just to finish things off we got hot-aches in the fingers afterwards when we went indoors – oh those lovely days with no central heating and frost patterns on the inside of the bedroom windows!