This episode arose from finding a folder of recordings during a recent lockdown cleanup, forgotten in a digital folder 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 that are 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 or sound effects.
The piece is definitely best experienced listening with over-ear headphones…
