I am a sound professional and I have spent my working years recording and editing sounds for film and television. Most days I don’t have a microphone and a magnetic analogue or digital sound recording device with me, but I always have my ears and my brain. Everyday I hear real life sounds that others don’t, and I often think “If I put that sound in a movie, nobody would accept it as ‘real'”.
We are now used to thinking of sound recording as a process of converting and storing acoustic energy as an electrical analogue or a digital code, for later reproduction in acoustic form. The distortions introduced in this process are significant — any such recording and reproduction results in something that is a mere shadow of the original acoustic event.
This is a site for text-based recordings of sounds. A faithful reproduction of these recordings depends not on the quality of the technology at your disposal, but on the quality of your mind.
Unlike inferior technology-bound recordings which could sound “unreal”, I hope that the acoustic snapshots you find here will play with fidelity in the soundstage of your mind.
In 1983 I made my first trek across the world from Australia to the USA to find that US supermarkets sounded different — they were full of beeps. The frequent recurring beeps that result from checkout staff waving products through a barcode scanner. The sound of beeps as keys were pressed and totals “rung-up” on […]