(listen/download here)
as promised, here is a sound sample of something that i started working on using recordings that i have collected from the ceramic bird feeder that we have hanging from our front porch. you can really hear the bird’s beaks tapping and pushing the bird seed around inside the feeder. i had set my digital recorder to automatically begin recording when the contact mic picked something up. after two days i had about a hundred samples ranging from 5 to 25 seconds. i have only gone through about thirty of them at this point (the recording above uses 12).
for anyone in portland that is interested, sometime soon i will be teaching a small workshop on contact mics at the mallory home school. i will cover construction methods along with their practical and experimental usage. the details still need to be ironed out but i think that with i will try and provide enough materials for everyone to build their own contact mic (piezo element, wires and 1/4″ jacks) and perhaps invite people to improvise in small groups using their new pickups and some small objects.
i will post more information when we have a date.
