Do You Hear What I Hear?
I was looking for the lyrics to a Red Clay Ramblers tune called "Hiawatha's Lullaby" when I ran across Baby's Blow Dryer CD (and also the ever-popular Baby's Vacuum Cleaner and Electric Fan CD's). I thought at first it was a joke. But apparently these folks are making money on this, and I should be off to create these new CD's of ambient noise from Goose Creek:
1. Rain on a Tin Roof CD
2. Kettle of Water Hissing on the Woodstove CD
3. Dog Snoring in the Next Room CD
I've used the white noise serendity perservation concept myself, back when I was managing a PT clinic that served a large pediatric population. The hallway outside my office door was used for all sorts of (frequently unpopular and vociferously resisted) motor activities as the therapists worked with our young patients.
I resorted to using SereneSounds so I could hear myself think. It's a nifty piece of freeware that allows you to mix a number of ambient noises... a blizzard, a hurricane, waves, wind, a waterfall. You can mix them in any combination and control the volume of each independently. I got clever and substituted some of my digital recordings from around here-- a whippoorwill, a toad, the creek, a barred owl, the wind on the ridge... that sort of thing-- and had a Goose Creek White Noise Sanity Saver!
What sounds would your ambient noise mixer contain?
Comments
Rain on the roof, hens clucking (with chicks peeping and roosters crowing), cows mooing, frogs galumping, and once-in-a-while-for excitement, a veery's fluting.
Posted by: Cop Car | December 27, 2003 7:09 AM
I have an ambient noice machine on the nightsound. I go to sleep at night to the digitally reproduced sound of ocean surf. Or when that gets boring I change to a crackling fire or windstorm.
Posted by: Chris | December 27, 2003 9:11 AM
a pebbly creek
Posted by: jessica | December 27, 2003 12:33 PM
Fred: I've just added a bunch of new topics to the Ecotone wiki; one of them is sound and place. Looks like you're way ahead of the rest of us, here, as usual.
Ambient sounds here are the courting great-horned owls, the killdeer that take off panicking from the field, the yellow-billed magpies that talk raucously, the geese overhead. And the train whistle that gets the coyotes howling in the night, howls that get picked up by the landlord's dogs.
Posted by: Pica | December 27, 2003 12:58 PM
Pica--Those yellow-billed magpies certainly narrow the area one would search for your native habitat (even had your previous writings not done so.) Did you take your blog name from them?
Posted by: Cop Car | December 28, 2003 9:53 AM