sounds.interbug.com

CNN.com - Lawmakers move to extend daylight-saving time - Jul 22, 2005

CNN reports that lawmakers in Washington have reached an agreement to extend Daylight-Saving Time in an effort to conserve energy. However, the decision wasn’t made without some argument.

Quoting the article:

According to some senators, farmers complained that a two-month extension could adversely affect livestock, and airline officials said it would have complicated scheduling of international flights.

I can understand the complication of scheduling flights, but the comment about affecting livestock seems like a joke. Certainly the cows of the US don’t carry watches or live by a clock? Any adverse effects must certainly be that of the schedules kept by the farmers.

From the News-Sentinel, Ft. Wayne, Indiana: KRT Wire | 07/20/2005 | `Godcasts’ booming across the Internet

This article explores a new twist on the recent phenomena of podcasting. Regardless of your religious or spiritual views, or lack thereof, you may find it interesting to sample a godcast or two.

I’ll take this moment to plug the weekly podcast for my church, Second Unitarian Church of Omaha. There you’ll find an audio excerpt of the weekly service featuring a sermon or lecture by the minister or guest speaker. The recordings usually run about 30 minutes.

The Magical World of Dragons and Fairies

My daughter, Emily, has started writing in her own blog. Go Emily!

You might ask, “How do you make your field recordings?” Then again, you probably don’t care.

I use an iRiver IFP-799 1 gigabyte flash-memory MP3 player that can do direct encoding to MP3. It has an input which can be switched to either microphone or line-in input voltage.

I connect a handmade Visivox Hammerhead to the recorder to make nice quality stereo recordings.

A nice thing about this configuration is that I can record for many hours at a high bitrate and hardly lose a tick on the battery meter.

Even without the stereo microphone, the iRiver itself has a sensitive microphone built in, though I notice a lot of handling noise when trying to record in this manner.

Last week I took my family to the 2005 Nebraska Renaissance Faire in Omaha, Nebraska to enjoy a day filled with medieval kings, queens, knights and a bustling open air market. While there I got a chance to try out my new microphone and digital recorder and make some real field recordings.

My mic cable malfunctioned and my recordings were merely monophonic, however, the fidelity and sensitivity of the microphone remained impressive.

Of the recordings I made, I will include some of the more interesting excerpts as separate blog entries.

• Funnel Cake Tax
• The Lotus Dancers - Belly Dancing
• Hammered Dulcimer - Reggie Greenlaw

Welcome to my blog, sounds.interbug.com. The purpose of this podcast/blog is to store and share audio recordings I’ve made of interesting or unique sounds. I enjoy the aural universe around me and hope that I can capture some of its more interesting moments and present this in this podcast/blog.

I’m interested in language, radio shows (”old time” dramas, mysteries, adventure, science fiction), long-format talk radio (not political), audiobooks, music, and sound in general.

I never thought I’d blog. I’m a private person and don’t often share my words or thoughts with other people. However, I love the idea of blogs and I enjoy the printed word, but never fancied myself a writer, so I hope to be able to use my microphone to capture a slice of the aural world and present it here.

I’m by no means an audio expert, so don’t expect to be dazzled by the technical quality of these recordings, however, the use of a nice stereo microphone and quality digital recorder should help me make some decent field recordings.

If you have any comments or suggestions for sounds I should try to capture, please leave a note on the blog or send me an email.

Regards,

Scott