Soundscapes: baseball, a walk to work, and trains

Last December I bought my self a Zoom H4n, a portable recording device. I primarily wanted it so that I could record podcast episodes on the go. What I've found, though, is that it's great for collecting sound for soundscapes.

I made this while I was at Spring Training in March.

I have several more minutes of sound than what is presented hear. I wanted to keep the track relatively short while still getting in all the interesting sounds I wanted, so it is an edited soundscape, though, I would be very impressed if you could tell where all the cuts are.

A few weeks ago I made another soundscape as part of a project for my sound design class.

That's my walk into work. This is unedited.

Finally, this is one from my MART 110 class at the University of South Carolina a few semesters ago.

We were supposed to create a soundscape that attempted to elicit some emotion from the listener. The basis for this was from the movie The Shining which has some pretty killer sound work. The one scene that kept sticking in my head while working on this project was when Wendy was pushing the cart through the hotel. That scene reminded me of trains, so I decided to find some train sounds that I could edit together.

Subway sounds are some of the most unsettling eerie sounds and those are the sounds i eventually settled on.

I have audio for two more soundscapes that I plan to release. One is from a class final and the other is from a baseball game that had a heckler.

Twitter: Star Wars, bugs called bash, and cartoons

Tweets worth mentioning September 8, 2014

Studying for Spanish Quiz 1

Spanish is turning out to be one of the tougher classes I've taken at USC. At this point I would rank it second behind the histology course (500 level biology) I decided to take several semesters back. The good news is that I got through histology and I think I can get through Spanish, but it's going to take a lot of hard work.

One of the things I would like to do is blog about and in Spanish to help me better understand the language. If you speak español I would love your feedback on anything I put up on the site. For this post, I will be going through some of the material that will be on the quiz tomorrow. Hopefully this can be a reference point for others as well as give me an opportunity to better understand and learn the material.

La ropa habla - The clothes speak

Me visto para el trabajo - I dress for work

Me gusta llevar ropa profesional - I like to wear professional clothing

Me gusta usar camisas azules - I like to wear blue shirts

de cuadros - is a pattern that uses a lot of perpendicular lines

con lunares - is a dotted pattern

de rayas - is a pattern that uses a slanted lines with alternating colores

estampado - is a pattern with many different shapes

Los Astros llevar jerseys blancos, pantalones blancos y gorras de béisbol naranjas - The Astros wear white jerseys, white pants and orange baseball caps.

In Spanish the color of something goes after the object. While we say white pants in Spanish it's pantalones blancos.

Los numeros ordinales - The ordinal numbers

Primero - first

Segundo - second

Tercero - third

Los adjectivos demostrativos - The demonstrative adjectives

Este/esta - this

Estos/estas - these

Ese/esa - that

Esos/esas - those

The first word there is the masculine version and the second word is the feminine version. In Spanish words can have the same meaning but depending on the word and gender it can be spelled slightly different. As a general rule (a) is considered feminine, (o) and (e) are masculine.

Palabras difícil - Difficult words

For some reason I'm struggling a little bit to remember words such as encantar or to love and parecer or to seem/appear. Quedar is also another tricking one but it means to stay or remain or even to fit. If it's to fit then words like bien (well) or mal (poorly) will follow it. Both parecer (to seem) and quedar (to fit) can have the subject placed in front of them instead of at the end of a sentence.

That's about all I've got for now. I'll try to update on how the quiz went and hopefully I'll have something more constructive next time.