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 Words on Water - Thoughts on Recording Waterfalls This exchange began at Full Moon Audio Art Camp in 2000 as a discussion about the proper techniques for recording a waterfall. The ideas continued to develop via email. An edited selection appears here. Doug Samuel: I went for a walk in Gatineau park (just outside of Ottawa) yesterday. As I walked along the path, I came to a stream, and thought I would spend a few minutes recording that. It ceases to amaze me what surprises are in store for the recording artist who is willing to put their mic a few inches from the subject! Just as with the steam train, which reveals new and unusual sounds just inches away from each other around the piston, so too did the stream have its own secrets. When I say close-mic, in this case, I mean really close mic! I had the cable dragging in the water and the mic almost in the water too - it certainly got splashed - and by a tiny little brook about a foot wide with just a gentle trickle running through it. But put the mic one centimetre from a tiny waterfall (tiny = 3 cm high) and I was deafened by a whole range of amazing sounds I had never heard before! Ear splitting high frequencies, and gurgling which reverberated off the rocks to produce some fantastic sound effects! I ended up spending over 20 minutes recording all the varied and fascinating sounds of that brook! Dave Solursh: This question has stuck with me all day, driving me crazy. You mentioned the technicalities of recording a waterfall, which brings up a super important aspect of sonic art that I would love to discuss and learn more about. The topic is CONTEXT! Earlier you mentioned that when you record a waterfall it always sounds like white noise. Well that is basically all that it is, if you experience this sound removed from its source. It sounds like a water fall when you see it, feel its spray, smell the damp algae frothing at the bottom, hear the birds around, hear the people at the top, the people at the bottom, hear the water floating by close to you. Your recording will not sound like a waterfall unless it is in a context of a waterfall, otherwise it is just what you said it is, "white noise", a signal of electricity, recorded by a microphone and stored to be played back later OUT OF CONTEXT. Putting a sound into context without the use of any other senses is one that takes great creativity and I think is the talent of the sound artist. I know that if you have the creativity to brainstorm and experiment, you will figure it out! Victoria Fenner: I am working on a piece using waterfall sounds. It is part of a suite which I am doing - Capital Resoundings - a collection of five soundwalks and five accompanying artist interpretations of what those sounds tell me about the place. One of my locations is Hogs Back Falls, a beautiful location in the middle of Ottawa. Here's what I discovered: The sound of a waterfall can sound like many other things - an appropriately pitched car going by, snow on a TV set, a kettle boiling. So I had all these recordings of waterfalls that I wasn't sure sounded like waterfalls by themselves. What I ended up doing was going down to a small tributary of the river, downstream from the falls. I close-miked (REALLY close-miked) the sound of water trickling over some small rocks. I recorded several different water streams - amazing how different one sounds from another, depending on the size of the rock, the distance the water had to fall, the velocity of the water. One of the highlights of the recording was a couple of little water bubbles that made some amazing little waterpops. To hear how it would sound against the roar of the falls, I took my mini disc and listened to the recording of the small falls against the larger ones (my headphones didn't block out the real-time sound). What I discovered was that I could bring out the waterfall-ness of the location by emphasizing these individual streams. I also varied the intensity of the larger falls, fading the smaller falls in and out of the recording. It was a real exercise in sound texture as well, modifying the density of the sound as I mixed. I also played with the sound spatially, both in my computer and on location. At one point, I slowly turned around in a circle (several times). Since the microphone was stereo, I got this amazing "whoosh" sound moving from one channel to the other and back again. Andra McCartney: I forgot to mention in the previous message, if you want to get really close to small streams, cover the mic with a non-lubricated condom. Then you don't have to worry about the mic getting wet when you immerse it. It's quite safe! Copyright CSIRP 2001 Copyright for materials on this website is the property of the content creators and the Canadian Society for Independent Radio Production, unless otherwise noted. Materials may be freely used by non-profit organizations and educational institutions for non-commercial purposes only. For evaluation purposes, CSIRP would appreciate it if you would let us know how you have used these materials, and in what context. Material reproduced from this website must include the CSIRP logo, website address and this message. |
