I took my walk around the biomes this morning, and I decided to leave the camera behind. I wanted to be able to focus a little more on listening, and allow myself to just observe. I went with the zoom recorder again, and I am glad I did. I think I could have gotten away with a different mic, but it was nice to just be able to focus on the terrain and not on recording.
There wasn’t as much wind today as yesterday, and the birds were quite active. I think that I need to spend some time today identifying the birds and insects I see, as I have been quite passive in my engagement up to this point.
The ground is drying out, and so the ants are surfacing. Tomorrow I’ll go out mid-day some time and try to see if I can pick up any ant sounds.
Since it’s supposed to be quite hot for much of this week, I’m switching gears a little bit and getting ready for some work that I can do indoors. I’ll be working on two different projects.
One is a sound sculpture that is inspired by a rainstick. I will be filling it with insect carcasses, so I will be scouring the property here to find as many as I can. If anyone has some around, and you are willing to gather them up for me, I would gladly take them off your hands. They need to be dry, and preferably not swept up but picked up to bring to me. I don’t have a good way to clean them, so the least dirt possible is preferred.
The other project I will be working on is a system that will attempt to simulate behavior of katydids I have experienced in Colorado in late July/early August. In the summers, the insects sort of create the experience of an entourage following people around. The clicking sounds they make seem to happen everywhere but where you are. So, I’ll be trying to create a system that mimics that using motion tracking. I’ll start with a simple version, using video cameras to monitor where people are in the space, mapping their location to a grid system using Max/MSP, and eventually I want to make it a little more sophisticated using either a skeleton type method similar to how a Kinect works, but might stretch it out into other methods of working. Eventually I want the system to be able to learn the most common routes people take through space to hear these sounds which will use a different programming language, but I’ll start with something easier this week, and I am hoping have a proof-of-concept system next week for people to check out in person.
I’ll continue to post here, and will talk about my process, and how things change, over the next week. I will continue my walks, and I will keep talking about them. One of the things I’m noticing is that the populations I’m seeing are already shifting. Not sure if that is heat, or the lack of moisture in the ground, but it is interesting.
To wrap up today, here is a great recording of a bird from this evening. Sure, there is a bunch of car noise but when isn’t there?
