The Wave Organ

Last week I visited San Francisco for a company engineering meet up. I brought along a small recording kit, and while I didn't collect as much sound as I hoped, I did manage to make it to The Wave Organ.The first recording—captured with contact microphones—is one of the docks you encounter while walking to the Organ.The second recording captures two pipes of the Organ and how they interact as waves hit the jetty.https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/wave-organ

For a few Saturdays each year, the NYC DOT shuts down car traffic on several streets across the five boroughs. It's called Summer Streets, and from around midnight until around 2pm you'll find only pedestrians and bikes on these stretches of road. I recorded this from the median of Park Avenue as bike traffic zipped by.https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/summerstreets.shtml

We spent a few days in Montauk at the end of July. This was Violet's first beach trip so I tried to capture as much as I could. These are some of the highlights.

A lot has happened in the last year, and I haven't been able—or necessarily had the drive—to record and publish. Our daughter was born in July 2022, and spent the first month and a half of her life in the NICU. Each morning, we'd get up, pack a bag and hail a cab to go be with her. We spent a lot of money on cab rides that month.I recorded a majority of those cab rides. They were often the only alone time I had during the day. The rumble, bangs and rattles were an oddly comforting break from the predictably constant tones and alarms of the NICU. While this was a happy time in our life it was also scary, because we were also dealing with my wife's cancer diagnosis and impending treatment. These cab rides were a time to sit and not worry—just listen.Times are much happier and hopeful these days. 💜

Took a walk and ate lunch on a park bench near E 87th and 5th (near the Guggenheim museum). After I finished my sandwich I hung out for a while and recorded some of the day. This episode is two separate recordings captured with a MixPre 6 II and two Clippy EM272 omnidirectional microphones.

My wife and I traveled to Palm Beach for a final vacation before our daughter arrives in August. Captured an evening storm and some early morning chatter of frogs, crickets and a boisterous Northern Cardinal near the beach.

I visited my parents in Sumter, SC in January. Apparently, this small town is home to the only public park in the United States to feature all swan species. While I was there I managed to capture quite a few of them including:- Black Swan- Trumpeter Swan- Black-necked Swan- Mute Swan- Bewick's Swan- Whooper Swan There were also a fair number of Canadian Geese, Wood Ducks and Mallards.https://www.sumtersc.gov/community/swanlake

Welcome back. It's been a while. Since we last saw each other I bought a new recorder: a Sound Devices MixPre 6 II. It's a joy to use. Some of the sounds recorded in this episode were captured with this new recorder and some with my old Zoom H5. I've recorded a lot of smaller things over the summer and early fall, but these are some of my favorites.I'm in the process of judging interest in the raw WAV files for recordings published on Phonogrifter. If this is something that would interest you, please let me know at [email protected]. I'm happy to share. If enough people ask about them, I'll work on publishing them somewhere.

Back to some semblance of reality.

Sounds from our week-long vacation in upstate New York.