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Sound Clip: Florida Wind by Michael Raphael
Raphael writes, “In December, I was traveling in Florida for a few days. It was a week of unusually chilly weather and overcast skies. I had hoped to do a decent amount of recording that week, but I didn’t have much luck at the time. However, one nice feature of overcast skies and rain is the sound of wind passing through the palm trees. In this recording, I held the recorder directly between two palm trees whose fronds were overlapping and banging against each other in the wind. If you listen closely a bit towards the end of the recording, you will hear small drops of rain beginning to fall.”
Love this. I have been doing a version of Alvin Lucier’s Gentle Fire where sounds are processed to sound like other sounds. One of the sounds I tried to make was ‘swaying palms.’ Amazing to hear how they *really* sound and beautiful to hear wind without distortion.
[...] was also great to find this recording of Florida Palm Trees over on Margaret Noble’s Sound is Art blog. ‘Swaying Palms’ is one of the Gentle [...]
There’s an aspect to this that triggers one of my principal fascinations concerning microphone recordings. On the face of it, we are hearing a continuous fluctuating white-noise, but really, it is hundreds, perhaps thousands of percussive sound sources (the leaves striking each other) combining to produce the sonic fabric.
Felix refers to how something “really” sounds (and I do realise that the quotation marks indicate irony). Binaural recordings, especially those that attempt to simulate the human hearing condition, contain all sorts of phase anomalies and other quirks that conspire to give a recording an inherent character. The subversion of these recording medium phenomena is the subject matter behind a great deal of Lucier’s work.
I guarantee that if one listens to this recording under the same palms, and then the “real” sound, there would be a notable difference that is not just simply related to the microphones and media used, not the technique. Also, If you and I both stood in the same place and listened, we would be hearing different things. The subtleties are minute and intricate, and indescribable by language. This is one of the true personalised experiences of life, in which we are really alone with ourselves…
Another “wind” piece. Great stuff…