Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Sound Design project


cameron and wickett
Originally uploaded by J_matis.
I've had the good fortune of being hired for a unique sound design project. I'm developing recorded work for a choral piece by Don McCullough. The work is called "Let My People Go" and it's an arrangement of spirituals for choir and percussion, with two narrators. The narrators deliver text about the underground railroad and related stories. My recordings will provide a sound environment for the narrators.

Since most of the stories told by the narrators take place at night (since this is when travellers could be active on the underground railroad), I'm using sounds of crickets and nighttime bugs as a foundational element. Towards this end, Cameron and I were able to turn our weekend getaway to a cabin in West Virginia into that lovely thing known to us self-employed folks as a business expense. Our cabin turned out to be an ideal spot to record those little nocturnal forest dwellers in full swing - with little interference from traffic, and other people noises.

Making those field recordings only took about 30 minutes, so we also had time to enjoy the hot tub on our large screened porch (nice "cabin" eh?) and a day of hiking in various parks nearby. This photo is from our morning hike in New River Gorge National Park. Wickett came along for that one...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There MUST be a btter picture of me on the tip, no? please say so!!!! :-)

Anonymous said...

sorry about the spelling, I really need to read over what I write!