TAYLOR DEUPREE : ONE SOUND EACH DAY, 2009

On january 1st, 2008 I began a project where I would take one polaroid picture every day of 2008. It was a fun, challenging, and sometimes frustrating endeavor, but I now have 365 polaroids portraying the ups and downs and travels of a year in my life. And 2009 is upon us...

The most rewarding aspect of this project has been the fact that every day I have been forced to look. Oftentimes, though, I'd pass over what turned out to be a great photographic opportunity in the hope a better one would be around the corner, resulting in a mediocre photo for the day. However, the project was not about the “best” photography but rather simply of a diary of seeing for a year.

As 2008 drew to a close I set my sights to 2009. A picture-a-day was very challenging, do Igive myself a break, freedom from carrying the Polaroid with me every day, freedom from having to constantly be on the lookout? Or, was the forcing of this creative project on me every day a priceless exercise? Never one to rest, I have decided that in 2009, starting on January 1st, of course, I will carry a small digital audio recorder with me every day of the year and record one sound per day.

As a musician I rarely work with “field recordings” although I am familiar with them enough as a sound source and have used them in my compositions from time to time. However, I am always listening and find beauty and serenity in many of the everyday sounds that surround me. This exercise will not only force me to listen more carefully every day, but expand my own sound palette. Like my polaroids, it will not be about capturing a "perfect" sound, but be a simple audio diary of each day. Undoubtedly, there will be many wonderful sounds that I capture, but that is not the primary focus of the project.

I will not set a time limit on each day’s recordings, but rather make each recording as long as it needs to be to capture whatever it is i’ll be recording. Along with the recorder I will carry a small notebook and make a note of date and time as well as location and “subject.” These recordings will be featured on my blog (12kblog.wordpress.com) and, of course, this web page.

If 2008 was a year of seeing every day, 2009 will be a year of listening. The death of Polaroid's instant film market has made the Polaroid-a-day difficult to continue... My project was timely. Needless to say, as a photographer, I will never stop looking, nor will I rarely be caught without a camera, but to form a year’s worth of living and travelling with an audio diary will be a new way for me to experience each day.

- Taylor Deupree



JAN | FEB | MAR | APR | MAY | JUN | JUL | AUG | SEP | OCT | NOV | DEC

MARCH 31
New York, NY, around 9pm
JFK Airport, gate 4... waiting to board flight to Paris.

 

MARCH 30
Pound Ridge, NY, 11:56am
microphones hanging in a budding forsythia bush, recording leaves skittering around.

 

MARCH 29
Pound Ridge, NY, 8:20pm
i had recorded earlier today in a parking garage... but around 8pm a thunder and lightning storm rolled in... and by around 8:15 heavy hail was falling, beating heavily on the house. i grabbed my recorded and ran outside and caught the tail end of the hailstorm.

 

MARCH 28
Pound Ridge, NY, 11pm
a dirty recording of delay feedback from an Access Virus TI synth.

 

MARCH 27
Pound Ridge, NY, 7pm
one of my favorite days of the year is the first day the tree frogs come out and start chirping. across the street from the house is a huge nature preserve and this is where they start. recording them in the distant trees. one of my favorite sounds.

 

MARCH 26
Pound Ridge, NY, 6:20pm
rain hitting a small metal watering can.

 

MARCH 25
Pound Ridge, NY, 3:34pm
walking up my driveway. i liked the popping sounds of the microphones (on wires) bouncing around. reminds me of vinyl record noise.

 

MARCH 24
Pound Ridge, NY, 11:22pm
scratching the strings of an acoustic guitar and sending it through a reverb bank on an Eventide H3000. recorded with microphone sitting on desk below speakers.

 

MARCH 23
Pound Ridge, NY, some time in the afternoon
a really rough tape loop made on my Fostex reel-to-reel tape recorder. the source was of some ambient guitar tones, but after repeated handlings, and general experimentation with how to make tape loops on this machine, the final product bears little resemblance to the input sound.

 

MARCH 22
Pound Ridge, NY, ???
another close-up recording with clipped-on binaurals.. but i have totally forgotten what it is... but i find it's closeness-of-sound to be fascinating.. textural.

 

MARCH 21
Pound Ridge, NY, around 2pm
outdoors, i believe just on the driveway... recording birds.

 

MARCH 20
Pound Ridge, NY, around 9pm
binaural microphones inside a half-empty margarita. <a href="http://12kblog.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/how-a-sound-geek-enjoys-a-margarita/">(see post for pictures)</a>

 

MARCH 19
Pound Ridge, NY, 5pm
my son playing in a gym.

 

MARCH 18
Pound Ridge, NY, afternoon
the runout groove on the latest (and correct) test pressing of the "Weather &amp; Worn" 7"

 

MARCH 17
Pound Ridge, NY, 10:52pm
one of the bells from yesterday resting on a guitar string which is being vibrated by an E-Bow.

 

MARCH 16
Pound Ridge, NY, around 9pm
just playing around with two ball/bells from Japan. one i bought in Kyoto, another given to me by a friend.

 

MARCH 15
Pound Ridge, NY, 3:33pm
a far-too-simple test of my new handheld recorder. walking outside, picking up some cans that a raccoon had a go with last night and stopping to feel the breeze.

 

MARCH 14
Peekskill, NY, around 5pm
a stop-off on the side of the Hudson River across from the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. water lapping on the small rocks... likely the last recording this digital recorder will ever make.

 

MARCH 13
Pound Ridge, NY, 10:51pm
finally getting my flakey Waldorf Microwave synth to work. a problem with the fuse. here, a held note... just happy to have it back. sound near the end is one of my cats sniffing the recorder.

 

MARCH 12
Bedford Hills, NY, around 11am
walking Leatherman's Circuit on a geocaching trip. leaves crunching and distant traffic.

 

MARCH 11
Pound Ridge, NY, 10am
outside on a beautiful day.

 

MARCH 10
-
asleep. no sound.

MARCH 9
Brewster, NY, around noo
inside Home Depot shopping for door parts. pushing shopping cart with recorder, and then putting recorder into a bucket that's in the shopping cart.

 

MARCH 8
Pound Ridge, NY, 8:55pm
a waldorf microwave synthesizer through the eventide H3000, holding a delay loop.

 

MARCH 7
-
no sound. i fell asleep.

MARCH 6
Brooklyn, NY, 5:10pm
a sound all-too-familiar for NYC'ers... in a car service from Park Slope to Pier 92 in manhattan for Sawako's limo concert. this is the sound of the CB/relay system that the drivers use to communicate with their home base. i assume they know what it all means...


 

MARCH 5
Brooklyn, NY, around 6pm(?)
the beloved pinball machine, called The Cyclone, @ kenneth + wendy's house. a true classic with amazing game play and sounds.

 

MARCH 4
Pound Ridge, NY, sometime before 10pm
one of my favorite sounds... running a finger around a wine glass. amazing that it makes such a sound.. and the way it fills a room.. not at all captured in this recording. what we've got here is pretty much a sine wave somewhere between 500 and 600hz. my finger was moving very slowly around the rim of the wine glass. it was mostly empty... a sip of chardonnay left.

 

MARCH 3
Pound Ridge, NY, 11pm

OK, back on track here. this is a locked groove that i had cut when i was re-cutting the "weather &amp; worn" 7" today. i had Dietrich, my friend doing the lacquer cuts, test out a lock groove. this lock groove exists only on a single test lacquer that i have and will not be on the final record.

 

MARCH 2
somewhere in Connecticut, ?

day two of nothing's noise.