Investigation Tips
Welcome to Anomalous Phenomena Investigations International (API)
Recording Audio
Recording audio footage may at first appear straight forward, but we have found this is not necessarily the case. We hope the following tips will help you avoid the disappointment you could face otherwise.
1. Set Up - Try to place your recorder/s out of plain sight in a
location unknown to any others and fairly high, preferably above
head height, the last thing you need is someone to sit down right
next to it and start eating their crisps! A very good tip,
especially if your recorder is powerful, is to place it first, then
start recording as opposed to hitting record then fumbling around
for ten minutes while you position it. Reviewing the recording
requires a bit of volume to pick out almost inaudible sounds and
there's nothing worse than ten minutes of very loud scratching,
rustling, tapping and banging etc. Finally, don't place it next to
anything that could produce a magnetic or electrical field. And
obviously, don't place it anywhere near anything making a constant
or intermittent sounds which could disguise EVP such as fridges,
ventilation, PC's, mobile phones, discothèques etc. In some cases
you can record a lot of extraneous sound picked up through vibration
in the surface you've placed the recorder upon. A bit of carpet
doubled over or a bunch of cotton wool will minimise this, or you
could suspend it on a string. If you're clever with your hands you
might want to try constructing a rubber band cage to suspend the
recorder/mic.
2. Digital/Analogue Dictaphones - Both have their pro's and con's.
We recommend using both, and if available, a laptop PC, but
primarily a fairly decent digital, such as Olympus. That said, Aldi
recently put out a very nice little number for only £30 that gave
surprising performance for the money. I primarily digital for two
reasons. 1) You don't suffering from 'ghosting' or 'bleedthrough' of
previous recordings. 2) You have many hours of recording time
available without swapping tapes every 30 minutes or so, in other
words you can set it up at the beginning of the nights investigation
and forget about it till home time.
3. Mics - It's your choice and depends very much on how much you
want to spend and how important clarity and sensitivity are to you.
The modern digital dictaphones have pretty good built in condenser
mics and this obviously cuts down the need for aditional equipment
and limits messy wires hanging all over the place. Electret mics are
a cheapish alternative, but if you're looking to record sound from
the neighbouring village then you're talking big bucks and recording
standard mic starting at around £100 which will require an almost as
expensive pre-amp. There's not much point in going to this expense
unless you're determined to capture a frequency range beyond that of
your digital dictaphones. If this is that case then you had better
do some research into whether a more expensive digital dictaphone
will do the job, which it most likely will considering the hearing
range of the human ear (12Hz-20KHz) which varies depending on the
age of the subject and your source of information. A point to note
before you hike off to buy something that fits neatly in the human
hearing spectrum, while you may not be able to hear sound outside of
the human range, you may still 'see' it depending upon the software
you use to review it.
4. Software - There's a wealth of it available and what works for me
may not, and generally doesn't, work for you. Again, what you opt
for depends on what results you want. If you just want to hear it
and save it, then any one of a multitude of free audio players will
do just fine. If you want to analyse it fully, cut, crop, amplify,
filter or vary speed, then you're looking for something that's going
to cost you a few bob most likely. There are a plethora of freebies
on Sourcefourge.com such as players, recorders, editors and analysis
software and I can vouch for some but not all. Other than that you
might get lucky and find a relatively cheap piece of software that
will suffice, or perhaps it's time to sell that ugly old vase in the
loft. My best advice is do a bit of research, download a few
freebie, get to know what you're dealing with then make an educated
decision.
5. Recording conduct - One of the biggest nightmares I have is
reviewing the audio through headphones with the volume way up high
then having my ears blown off by the guy who suddenly stomps into
the room, belching, coughing and sighing with his keys rattling like
a jailer as he walks. Ok, I admit, that guy is me! But this is one
area you may find frustrating after a while and it's difficult to
strike a fine balance between no extraneous noise and the team being
able to communicate at a level audible on the recordings and being
able to 'do their thing'. You'll most likely have to learn to watch
for it coming and get ready to knock the volume down before your ear
drums go south for the winter. This is where it is handy to use an
audio editing suite that renders the recording as a real-time
waveform. This is also useful to spot little blips during quiet
spots in the recording that you may not necessarily notice with the
ear alone.
6. Long or Short play? - Again there are arguments for both. If you
want clarity with analogue, then keep it on short play. This means
that more tape rolls over the recording head per second and thus you
record more signal. Digital long play will minimise the quality a
shade, but not much and hardly worth writing home about.
7. Buy extra batteries and always make sure your cells are fully
charged prior to investigation. It has been our common experience to
find many fully charged batteries suddenly drained for no apparent
reason during investigations. You have been warned!
Article written by Colin Nunn
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