release date: 06 july 2021
listen on soundcloud
This episode arose from finding a folder of recordings during a recent lockdown cleanup, forgotten on an old hard drive.
Labelled BINAURAL EXPERIMENTS it’s a suite of recordings I made mostly at my bush hut, but some in my inner-city studio and some in the streets of Sydney.
They were made with a pair of binaural microphones worn in the ears of the recordist to help recreate in playback under headphones a strong sensation of aural presence and spatial location of sound sources.
The effect can be quite uncanny, especially when listening back to sounds in the same space they were originally recorded.
For this episode I’ve composed a half-hour sonic wander amongst a selection of files from that folder of experiments. I think about this as a form of abstract art, sculpting with sound and time to create and explore interesting textures, spaces, correspondences, suggestions, the unusual – the not easily categorised work with sound outside the normative silos of music, audio books, sound effects, film scores, etc.
The piece is definitely best experienced listening with over-ear headphones…