Lyn Goeringers Blog

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?

Today I spent a lot of time inspecting the three biomes at the Soil Factory, making a lot of field recordings and taking a lot of photographs and videos of the plants, birds, and insects.

This morning I started with field recording, and didn’t take any cameras with me. I wanted to try and figure out what was the best setup for recording, as yesterday my plans to use a shotgun mic turned out to be not what was needed. I decided to go minimalist and just use the mic on my Zoom H6N, and I think it gave an accurate representation of what I was trying to capture. In the audio below, you can hear the sound from the three different zones. The picture in the soundcloud embed shows the area I am recording in. Field 1 is the tall grass area on the right, field 2 is behind that int the back center of the image, and on the bottom left is the marshy field.

It was a very windy day, so audio recording was pretty tricky. I tried again around noon, using a Audio Technica AT 4041s, hoping that their less expansive pickup would help, and it did not. I decided to switch to video and photography for a bit after that, and had some fun taking some footage I need to process a bit, and getting a few choice shots of bees and other insects.

It’s not perfect, but it was fun to capture this little bee landing on the white daisy. If you look closely you can see the blur of the wing! I admit I’m not normally a nature photographer, so I was pretty excited about getting such a chance moment.

As the day wrapped up, I did my final round of field recordings around 7pm. It was approximately 7 when I first went out recording last night, and I was excited to get to see many of the same kinds, if not the same exact, birds and animals as I walked around. It will be interesting to see how many repeat themselves over the next few days! You can hear a few excerpts from tonights recordings here:

Today I arrived at the Soil Factory in Ithaca, NY. It’s already filling me with inspiration and ideas, while providing much food for thought on soil sustainability, local plants, and so much more.

Much of my current internal focus is on human and insect interactions, in particular the ways that trophic levels are interdependent. There are a few things that were quite pronounced about my drive up to Ithaca today, though the thing that stands out the most is the lack of insect splatter on my windshield. This is a well documented and discussed phenomena now, and like many I was introduced to the concept by Oliver Milman in his book The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World , where he discusses the Windscreen Phenomenon as studied by Anders Pape Møller (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.5236) . Though my own experience is anecdotal, I have definitely noticed that I no longer need to clean my windshield at every gas stop as I drive long distances now, and it is definitely a loss.

As I walk around this new to me location, I am very much looking forward to getting to know the local critters, and of course, insects. I am hopeful that I can get some decent field recordings, and though I would LOVE to get some good insect sounds, I can already tell there will be a lot of fantastic birds to listen to while here. I will also be taking a lot of photos and video, and, as always, will keep an open mind as to what the outcome of this trip will be.

And, most of all, I am looking forward to see how my relationship with this land changes over my time here.