Today Jez Riley introduced us to some experimental microphones he uses to create rather interesting recordings. The first mic intoduced wa the contact mic. Used to capture sound through resonance. One of his recordings called Teleferica was recorded on some sort of long wire hanging over a forest. The mic picked up all sorts of different parts of the wire and it you were able to hear insects and flies land on it creating a bouncing effect. Leaving these mics on for at least 20-30 minutes with low gain to reduce compression you are able to pick up all sorts of unpredictable sounds. You are able to use space as your instrument instead of getting the perfect sound. I thought these mics would be very useful to capture interesting atmos to use within my project.
He mentioned Hydrophones and Geophones which were also quite interesting.
Me and a colleague did some recordings ourselves using contact mics at the university and came up with some pretty basic recordings but it gave us an idea as to how they work. It made me realise that we would probably need a louder environment for the mics to work properly as we had to stimulate sounds by hitting and tapping things rather than just listening to the space.