A discussion with a friend yesterday about portable audio recorders had me thinking about something fun to do while travelling that I only really recently realised I should try doing more of.
That is: Recording short audio clips (in addition to any video clips I'm already capturing, though again... more random clips from different places are again something fun to have) from various places during my travels - and in particular, doing it for any public transit route you end up spending a lot of your time during the trip using.
One of the cool things I realised while riding the Skytrain in Vancouver recently with my eyes closed / head down taking a rest from a long multi-block trek we'd just done is that it's actually quite fun listening to the raw sounds that way - in a very zen / meditative way.
That's when I was reminded that I do somewhat regret having never made such recordings for both the HK MTR (which I don't think I'll get to ride again), or the Bus 32 in Amsterdam I'd use to commute downtown to/from where I was staying near the office (which I did several times a week, but never more than once a day... you'd be crazy to IMO at 30 minutes in each direction!).
Granted, on the MTR it's quite highly difficult as it's usually standing room only (so hanging onto a phone is hard), while I had a serious storage-space crunch while in Amsterdam (with my phone running out of space on both the internal AND SD card, and my laptop dying 2 weeks into my stay, making reliably getting stuff off my camera + phone then backing it all up so I could get at it back home a very real challenge).
Nevertheless, I do think it's a real shame that I don't have any short recordings of the services I used a lot in those places that I can play from time to time - either to:
A) Jog my memory about how some of those familiar sequences of announcements + sounds would go
(e.g. those "tag on, tag off" announcements on the Amsterdam Busses, especially around that bit where the bus would pass through a little village area)
B) To just soak in that atmosphere again, while sitting at home during a particularly busy period or something like that
Anyway, back to Vancouver: I ultimately did manage to make a recording, which I had at the time been wanting to maybe edit into a video with a fixed image coupled only with those sounds blaring away in deafening stereo goodness (best appreciated using headphones) - to best capture what that felt like riding the train with your eyes closed.
Alas, when I did get home and got a chance to listen to it, I realised that it's best I do NOT upload the recording as doh... my phone had picked up the conversation of the group of teens nearby way too clearly, and not enough of all that defending rail-grinding + shunting + overhead speaker blaring that I thought were much louder. Gah! (I shall have to keep that one for my own listening pleasure... but unfortunately, no-one else will ever get to listen to it :P)
Instead, I have been able to find a relatively recent replacement, recorded on much nicer equipment, and dare I say, probably done during a much more sensible time of day to make such recordings (i.e. not during the peak travel hours that tourists getting around town end up running into locals going about their business - so things like late at night, when there may be fewer folks around).
So, without further ado, here's "Jerry Berumen"'s recording dated 20241204 of Vancouver's Skytrain, as uploaded on Freesound:
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