– Thursday 8th December
Experimenting with Hydrophones
Rob and I had a spare couple of hours between Sound Theatre bookings, so decided to rent out the new hydrophones Media Loans had recently purchased. Neither of us have had any experience using hydrophones before, so we just jumped straight in.
First of all, we took the hydrophone to the canteen in the MHT and experimented with filling a plastic cup with water and placing it inside, as well as doing the same with the sink. We turned the tap on, allowed the sink to drain and waded the hydrophone around in circles.
After this, we went to the Brayford just opposite the Minerva building to see how it sounded in more free flowing water. The resulting sound was perhaps not as exciting as we had hoped for, as the clip sounds very noisey. We were also interrputed by some ducks and an angry swan, who swam over and started hissing at us! We took this as our cue to leave…
Finally, we thought it would sound interesting to have a tablet or such like dissolve into water while the hydrophone was suspended within. Therefore, we took a short trip to Spar, bought some dissolving denture tablets and went back to the MHT canteen to experiment. Unfortunately, the tablets were not as violent and ferocious as we hoped they would be when reacting with the water. We tried both inside a plastic cup and in the sink but the reaction was not so exciting.
It was a fun way to spend some time, but I don’t think we’ll be using any of the recordings for Cognition. It would be good to do some more research into hydrophones, and contact mics as well, to learn proper techniques, allowing us to use them creatively in the future. My favourite sound of the day was probably when we squeezed a dense sponge above the sink, while the hydrophone was submerged within:
With some processing it could sound like an old-school calculating robot or high-tech device used in a sci-fi film perhaps!
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