For location recordists wanting for proof of reliability in their equipment, the SoundField SPS200 has emerged a worthy asset after being used to capture audio for a unique sound installation at a Zurich cultural museum.
NONAM, Switzerland’s North American Native Museum, is constructing a permanent audio installation representing five of the main geographical regions of North American Native culture.
The engineer responsible for capturing the sounds was Hein Schoer, a German researcher working at the Fontys School of Arts in the Netherlands.
Schoer recorded the sounds and textures during a three-week trip to Canada’s west coast last autumn, in collaboration with the U’Mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, British Columbia.
Schoer needed a recording solution that didn’t involve cumbersome multi-microphone arrays.
“My original idea was to use a couple of stereo mics to make simultaneous recordings on separate stereo recorders and sync them in post-production to create quad soundscapes. However, this idea fell through.”
“I contacted [German SoundField Distributor] SEA and they suggested that I think about taking the SoundField SPS200 instead. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. Synchronizing two stereo recordings made on separate recorders could have been very hit and miss and time-consuming, but the SPS200 allowed me to capture the audio independently of the output format with one microphone.”
The audio captured by the SPS200 can be decoded later in post-production using the SPS200 Surround Zone plug-in, which is supplied free of charge with the microphone.
As with SoundField’s other multi-capsule microphones, the output from the SPS200 may be converted to a variety of output formats including phase-coherent mono, stereo, quad, or 5.1 surround, without any phase artifacts.
“The sound installation for NONAM is in quadraphonic, but this is also my PhD project, and I intend to make radio presentations in stereo from the recordings,” explains Schoer. “So the ability of the SPS200 to output audio in different formats is very useful to me. All I have to do is change some settings in the SoundField decoding software on my laptop.”
Schoer recorded over 17 hours with the SPS200 in its custom-made Zephyx windshield kit, including the sounds of the wildlife, birds and lakes of the region, and wind passing through the trees over a nature reserve.
