Field Audio Recording Final Project: Ode to a Turbine Listen to my final edited piece HERE The most notable and obvious challenge concerning the recording of a wind farm is without fail going to be wind noise. Upon my first visit to the Rolling Hills Wind Farm I was not nearly equipped with enough wind protection to gather the recordings necessary to capture my environment. When I returned to the wind farm for a second time I made sure to obtain a more robust and effective way to block wind noise while getting a good clean recording. While my stereo microphone was able to get a wide image of the wind farms ambient environment it was the shotgun mic in a wind blimp that gathered the most successful and powerful recordings. Utilizing the tools and techniques I had learned throughout the semester I gathered as many at length recordings as I could of the various scale, detail and orientations of the wind turbines themselves and the surro...
The sounds of a wind farm can be quite lulling, the slow and steady torque of dozens of turbine blades slicing through the wind. I've asked myself how can I make this environment interesting? A few strategies I'll seek to employ are mystery and scale. If this field recording is to have a beginning, middle, and end then it can't just be 10 minutes of churning turbine blades. I'd like to construct a sonic representation of how I experienced the wind farm. At first, I did not know what to expect, what was this environment going to sound like, how will the sound of these turbines change in relation to my proximity to these gigantic structures. The start of my field recording will be an exercise in exploring the mysteries of the sound of these massive turbine blades. From there I will likely gather as many distant recordings of the Rolling Hills Wind Farm mixed with strong and specific recordings of objects surrounding the area. The sound of the turbines will start to take a...