The Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing (2020)
This track is an excerpt of recordings made at the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing Bridge in Vancouver, BC. The recording was made under the bridge on the south side. Location: 49°17'31.4"N 123°01'34.4"W
The track has been processed for binaural listening so headphones are recommended.
There's the constant rumble and thrum of the traffic overhead, and a few people and birds. Mid-way through a train arrives and comes to a stop.
This was redorded on a Sound Devices MixPre6 with a Røde NT-SF1 ambisonic mic (pictured below). The Røde has 4 microphone capsules and was recorded in ambisonics A format, which just means that the four capsules were recorded each onto their own track with no further processing. This allows for conversion into other ambisonic formats via software later. I chose a section of the recording and converted it into ambisonics B format (1st order) with the Røde SoundField plugin. B format encodes the spatial information into the audio. 1st order is still 4 channels of audio and requires special software/decoding to listen to. Next I encoded the audio into binaural format with a binaural encoder plugin from the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz so that it sounds spatialized when listened to with headphones.
More information about the name and the tragedy HERE. Follow the links through to historical images.
Another article about the bridge and the collapse is HERE.
As well as the recordings with the ambisonic microphone had some suceess with contact mics afixed directly to the bridge. I will continue that exploration as well. More to come then I hope!
The earlier post about recording at this location is HERE.
Røde NT-SF1 in a windscreen muff connected to a Sound Devices MixPre 6
Guitar capo method of affixing a contact mic to the bridge
Old desktop lamp method of affixing a contact mic to the bridge
The Zoom recording some stereo while the MixPre records the contact mics
I had the Zoom inside a girder for one test.