my wife and i went out to dinner at a really busy place, and i got her to sit quietly in the mayhem as i recorded several takes using my handheld recorder that i placed on the table. that was 15 or 20 minutes tops.

then it was several hours on the headphones picking out phrases and interesting little acoustic things. the more you listen to this kind of thing, the more stuff you hear. don't know how much is really there vs. perception. it's like reliving reality in a strange expanded manner. there was much much more stuff recorded than i recall hearing while we were actually there.

i tried using Gleetchlab to visit the recordings, although i ended up using GarageBand to do the actual region looping.

just snippets of conversations, especially if you loop on small regions - although i think some of it is illusory. the mind tries real hard to make sense of a noisy signal - so much so that i suspect you end up hearing words that aren't really there.

but, i wonder if the recording treads too close to privacy issues. no, i didn't hand out any release forms to anyone there.

(my wonderful wife is willing to put up with my obsessions)

i really enjoy recording the sounds that we hear around us every day. lots of times several sounds are all mixed together, so it doesn't work out very well. in this case, the mixing of sounds in the restaurant was the main aspect of the sample.