Wake Up Calls is an acousmatic Spacial piece made up of a collection of bird calls recorded from my own neighbourhood. The concept cam to me when I worked as a paper boy (girl) and noticed a bird call with a sweet tune. As I walked around the area I noted how the tune was echoing around from different locations and began to pick up on all the other bird calls as well. This spacial piece allowed me to recreate the wonderful sounds of the landscape that had me in awe and hopefully share it with other people.

 

I wanted my piece to as accurately portray my real time perspective of the landscape but knew it would be impossible to to get simultaneous recordings so I instead settled for recordings within a timeframe. I went out over several mornings at 5am and recorded the bird calls with a H4 and Shotgun Microphone. The initial aim of the H4 and Shotgun microphone were to get a clear audio map of the area while still getting clear recordings of individual calls. Due to the large area of my field recording the H4 recordings provided little insight into the location of the calls so I instead began basing the location of the calls on my own memory in walking around my neighbourhood and simply stating the location before each recording. From there I sketched out various different maps to display the calls and how I would spacialise them. I began by making a general map of the area, marking in all the points where I focused my recordings and heard the most calls. I then placed these points on a circular plot and related each plot to the Spacial setup. After mapping out the location if each call I then went out and rerecorded the calls that were near impossible to use. These recordings were much clearer in quality as I stood directly under or next to the bird for all the calls I could find. 

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As mentioned earlier I decided on placing the recordings not in real time order but a randomised order. This order was based upon the type of bird tune be it short chirps or long tunes, and what I believed would flow best, for example having the kookaburras begin, almost like a wakeup call. A greater hinderance I had to take into consideration was the quality of each recording as some had heavy noise pollution. For these recordings I simply had to use the EQ to remove the noise as best I could and layer the heavily polluted tracks over each other, very slowly fading each recording in and out as not to draw attention to them. While I tried my best to rerecord many of the calls, some birds appeared only once or twice and would be too far away for me to get a clear recording, it is because of this that the quality of the recordings vastly differs.