adventures in auto-surveillance
every twelve minutes, a script on my computer recorded a one-second sample from a condenser mic pointed out my window. this is what it heard.
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while i find the idea intriguing, i think it needs a lot of refinement. the idea of auto-surveillance came up as i was working 8 – 10 hour days doing landscaping for my parents’ house in pennsylvania. the original idea, which i still would like to pursue, was to analyze the incoming signal with a filter bank to classify events by their timbre and amplitude. this way, i could build a database of short environmental samples for later use. as i have had very little time to write any code, this experiment proved quick to implement and yields some satisfying results. since i’m about to push off for a long road trip across the country, it feels a bit like how sailors would take handfuls of dirt and put them into jars. i am looking forward to collecting more specimens as we travel.
September 1st, 2009 at 16:07
[...] we stopped and stayed during our trip. The recordings are unique because they are the result of a simple supercollider patch. Every 12 seconds or so (I experimented with the specifics as I went), the patch recorded one [...]
September 4th, 2009 at 00:45
[...] the patch is a bit computationally intensive, especially when analyzing larger soundfiles, so the single-second field recordings i’ve been messing with are pretty ideal [...]