Sourcing sounds

I started off by recording sounds around the house. At first, I thought we were in need of some Atmos, i.e. some background, ambient noise which can be used to cover up any silences between tracks.

The atmos which we would need for this assignment needs to be mechanical, electronic, spacey sounding. It's quite difficult to properly define the sound we need, and I hope as I continue to blog I'll find more appropriate ways to word what I'm trying to say.

Moving around the house, I found the fridge/freezer to be one fantastic source of such a sound.

I set up one microphone as shown:

Seeing as I was doing these recordings at home, I was limited to the tools which I had brought up to University with me. This included a Samson CO3 Microphone, which I've used for some years. This is connected to an Alesis Mixer, which is connected to a laptop running Adobe Audition. The recording was completely clean, with no effects applied.




Staying in the kitchen, I made several recordings of our gas cooker. It creates fantastically vicious sounds when one ring is turned all the way up. I again, set up the same mic in the same configuration as shown:


Obviously, I couldn't put the mic any closer, as it would burn. The mic was positioned well enough to be able to pick up the sound of the flames on the stove, and I thought with some editing I would be able to make this sound like the jets coming out of a rocket during takeoff.