My First Drift: A Retrospective

After going out on my first drift, I had a felt decent experience and it was an overall interesting sound walk. That being said, I certainly had my fair share of difficulties. First and foremost, my drift strategy was simply to go east as far as I could. This is a problem since I was unfamiliar with the area and started my drift on Downer Ave and you can only go east for four blocks before you hit Lake Dr and can’t go any further. I was also irritated that my two attempts at trying to record in a unique way didn’t really work out so well. The first try was by putting one microphone in each side of a stop sign in hopes each mic would pick up a very different sound. What ended up happening was one mic picked up a bunch of activity and the other didn’t pick up anything other than white noise. The other attempt was by putting the microphones in a hole in a stone sculpture. The recording didn’t come out as anything interesting and was kind of disheartening.

I found myself at some point taking a recording on a path by Lake Michigan by a bunch of shrubbery to capture audio of some of the bugs in the area. While I was making the recording I felt strangely at piece just listening to the surrounding ambient noise. The mix of wind, waves, birds, and bugs was very pleasant. I just closed my eyes and breathed for a few moments of piece. I’d like to say that I had more than just that one moment of serenity, but I can’t honestly say that I did. I was very focused on what I was doing and was overall just irritated by my lack of planning in my drift strategy. I was always walking somewhere or thinking about how the recording was going or what I was going to do next. My mind was too busy to relax.

I had a few unexpected things happen to me over the course of my project, too. Only one unexpected thing happened during the drift itself. While I was recording a mix of a sprinkler to my left and a man hedging bushes straight ahead of me, a fairly large dragonfly zipped right past my microphones and I captured the audio of it. I was pretty excited about that. Once I’d gotten back inside and in front on a computer I was surprised to find that none of my recordings were particularly terrible. All of them were pretty balanced and didn’t get so loud that they were distorted. My biggest surprise though was once I had finished my editing I discovered through peer reviews that two of my recordings that I hadn’t really thought too much of turned out to be my best ones for various reasons (good sense of space, relaxing, etc.)

I can’t pinpoint one particular part of my drift experience that really affected me. What really gets to me is that through the experience of doing a drift I can see the places where I made mistakes and how to fix them next time around. My drift strategy for example, I will make a point to put myself in a more interesting situation as well as a more random method of choosing a destination (I’m currently thinking of rolling dice). I have a much better idea of how to use my microphones effectively, as well as what to listen for in the editing room. This is frequently how I react to anything I do artistically, I’m never satisfied with the work I put out when I care about what it is I’m doing