sound documentation

**** the pic of the little sony recorder didn't turn out,
so here is a pic of my dog Gus instead. Gus did see the
little sony with his own eyes.

project #1: the hawthorne street tour, sat. nov. 15th 2008


It’s Friday night Nov 14th. I just opened the package containing the Sony stereo recorder (icd-ux70) that I bought at Office Depot day before last. I read the directions and goofed around with the recorder while sitting in the café, Fresh Pot, on hawthorne street. Wanting to get myself used to having the recorder with me on hawthorne and maybe wanting to get the recorder familiar with hawthorne street where it will be taking it’s virgin recording voyage tomorrow, Nov. 15th at 10am.

The little sony, which is close to the word sonny if you don’t think about it much, and means I could call it the little sonny. Cute. The little sonny comes with needed battery so it jumped up and went live right away. Cool. There’s also an earplug and usb attachment included. I feel rich in tiny tech things.

The little sonny will hide out while we are dancing in stores and other business environments and hear what it can hear. I’ll set it on it’s standard settings and trust it’s recording judgment, not manipulate it for clarity or to pick up specific sounds. I want the little sonny to trust me back. The packaging says little sonny has a max recording time of 290 minutes, no wait, I misread that, it’s 290 hours. Wow. Little sonny and I will have plenty of time to befriend each other: 290 hours divided-by 24 hours = 12.0833333 to infinity. Twelve plus days, another impressive passage of time.

There will be no failure on the recording front of Dance Anywhere project. Whatever shows up will be the soundtrack from the tour. Of course, I am borrowing from improvisational movement ideas. My friend and performance artist Susan Banyas sent me a quote that I will misquote here that says something like: these are times when we cannot depend on traditions and rules and what we did yesterday to guide us. We must think on our feet, we must think with our bodies, we must think collaboratively. We must learn, practice, and live by improvising.

So, the spirit of the sound memories of Dance Anywhere will follow the path of improvisation, and the little sonny will be our collaborator.