Field Recording, Crystal Cove State Beach

Last fall, I took the students in my Trends in Modern Sound Design class (all six MFA designers, and a few music PhD students) to Crystal Cove State Beach to do some field recording.  We divided the class into three groups: one group made b-format and spaced pair recordings, one group made co-incident pair stereo recordings, and one group made close-up mono and other recordings.  We talked about how to plan for a field recording trip, but each group of students had to plan, prep, pack, and carry their own gear.

We started out at the central section of the beach, where there are few cafes and lots of people. Some groups chose to wander far from the people to get some isolated sounds, but others chose to embrace the public and get some 'folks at the seaside' recordings.

After that, we packed up and drove the north edge of the park, which was virtually deserted except for a few seagulls.  We hoped to get some sounds of sea spray on rocks, but the surf was decidedly down that day.  Oh well.  At least we got a great sunset!

The student are now madly editing the sound effects and editing metadata.  Once that post-production process is complete, the sounds and metadata will be uploaded to our sound effects server so that the UCI Sound Design community can have access to it in perpetuity.  Once all that is done, I'll share some examples here!