This lecture was an interesting one in terms of sound art. Jez is a microphone master, he works with contact and hydrophone microphones in particular. A contact microphone is something that goes is used on the surface of what is being recorded, it picks up a lot of the sounds around it and more importantly in the recordings you can hear some sort of vibration from the microphone. This is very interesting. All of his work has no post production sound on it, all the sounds are landscape sounds. We listened to a few pieces of his work, starting with a metal staircase.
Metal Staircase:
This was recorded at an Architecture building in a University in Sheffield, the sound was quite thin and tinny – but Jez told us this was normal for a contact microphone to give these qualities in recordings. There was a musical tone in this piece of work which we were told is quite unusual for this work and was really a massive fluke.
“Teleferik”:
This recording was of a transportation system called a Teleferik. The contact microphones were placed on the metal wires of the Telefrik. The sound given from these wires sounded exactly like a sound effect from Star Wars! We were informed that this was the same technique, just on a smaller scale. As weather was a massive factor in how the sound of the wires changed the microphones were left recording for five days, this gave enough time to show how the sound of the wires changed.
Inside the beehive:
This was a particularly interesting piece, there was two contact microphones placed inside a beehive, what we could hear was everything, you could hear the bee’s crawling around, making their hive. It was quite a weird experience. This sound has been used in nature programmes.
All of his sounds are used throughout the media. Although his main role is a sound artist the pieces have been used in film, television and even games. This is because they extremely atmospheric.