I still have a few things from my last trip to NYC I haven't processed, including this gem I'd completely forgotten about. It's a very simple setup: just me making a circuit of the park with my binaural mics, trying to keep my head movements slow and infrequent. One of the main reasons I use my in-ear mics is so I can record unobtrusively while still enjoying myself. This wasn't my usual milieu, but I had a blast recording. This is an excerpt of a much longer track.

Washington Square Park, September 16, 2007
6m23s 9.23MB binaural mp3 (click above to download)

Drove to Mexico with Denny in April for a big family reunion (hers not mine) in a little village not far from Nuevo Progreso and actually managed to get a few minutes of audio amongst all the partying (I must have drunk a few cases worth of Coronitas while I was there). It was a wild time and I had a blast, even though my Spanish isn't so great and only a few people there spoke English.

Even got to kill one of the pigs. Or try to. I shot the sucker right between the eyes and it still took a knife in the heart to kill it. Wish I'd thought to get audio of that! Then again, considering the strange looks I got in Progreso while wearing my binaural mics (which I thought were pretty well-concealed!) it's probably best I didn't. (the recording from Progreso is perhaps for another post.)

This recording is from the first night we were there, while the pigs were cooking and the women were making fresh gordas. From scratch. The high-pitched tapping sound you'll here is them flattening the masa (made from corn that was ground on the spot) before they go on the fire. You also might hear some bufo valliceps (Gulf Coast toads) in the background. This little village is in the middle of farmland and there are irrigation canals all around; It was quite loud, but what impressed me most about the soundscape there was the underlying silence. There was no traffic drone, no AC compressors, no aircraft, no sirens. What Murray Shafer calls a "high signal-to-noise ratio." I thought it was beautiful.

So, here it is; a binaural recording from Ebanito Nuevo (headphones recommended); people cooking, eating, drinking, playing, toads croaking. Pictures to come....

And oh btw, the food was fantastic.

Ebanito Nuevo, April 20, 2007, 7:11pm

3m5s 3.6MB binaural mp3 (click above to download)