Here’s a field recording from my first visit to Lively, Google’s Second Life style virtual environment. I picked a random room and ended up at the island pictured above.

Sounds can be streamed to objects in the environment from elsewhere on the ‘Net. I’m not sure if this audio comprises a single stream or sound from a number of sources (or if the Lively client was functioning correctly, for that matter):

Download: lively_wtf.mp3 (3.82 MB)

Here’s a selection of photos I took recently at the Henry Moore Foundation’s Perry Green site.

I don’t know a great deal about Henry Moore, or art in general for that matter, but it was cool to see and touch the sculptures first hand.

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A little while ago I acquired a Yamaha PortaSound PSS-560. I bought it mainly for nostalgic reasons - it was the first keyboard I owned (actually the second if you include the Casio PT-1) and also my first introduction to FM synthesis.

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Peacock is the pattern generator in the Aviary suite of online creative tools. Compositions in Peacock are created by connecting together various nodes.

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These people were making some noise in Crewe’s town centre a couple of days ago. Here’s some audio:

Download: r09_percussion.mp3 (4.35 MB)

En route I also recorded some sound on board a train pulling out of a station and getting up to speed. At the start of the recording is the sound of another train on an adjacent track:

Download: r09_train.mp3 (4.57 MB)

I updated Riesling: The gameplay has changed considerably, so hopefully it’s a bit more fun to play, plus it’s now got optional analog game controller support in addition to the standard mouse control.

Also I added some background music. The tune is in xm format - it’s my first time creating a tune with MODPlug Tracker, but I’m fairly pleased with the result.

Get the game here.

I recently did some work on the soundtrack for “Memories 2074″, a short film directed by Ant Campbell (which will be screened on August 16 at TV21 in Manchester).

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The other day I happened to be awake as the Sun was rising so I took the opportunity to record the sound of the local wildlife from my window.

I guess bird sounds are kind of a cliché with regard to field recordings, but maybe it’s still a useful sample to someone.

Download: r09_birdsong.mp3 (6.86 MB)

Here’s some more audio and pictures from my time in Akihabara, featuring some short clips of a few performers that happened to be singing in the street at the time, along with a few related YouTube links.

The Akiba music scene is kind of interesting - although at the moment it’s not particularly accessible to someone who speaks no Japanese and lives on the other side of the planet, such as myself.

I was meandering through the bystanders whilst recording, so the stereo image in some parts of my audio is a bit random.

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I saw I Was a Cub Scout earlier this week in Liverpool, thanks to a friend having a spare ticket. Tight performance, good songs and plenty of tech…a winning formula as far as I’m concerned and they sounded pretty good. I guess time will tell if they go on to become a “next big thing” but all the ingredients are there.

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