breathing buildings and inanimate witnesses
Few things get me as excited as discovering something that exists-that has always existed-but remains hidden. The first time I head about radioactive half-lifes and exponential decay as applied to light and sound, it really blew me away. What are the implications of things never really going away? What if you could hear something someone said 100 years ago in the very spot you are sitting right now by simply amplifying it a whole lot? Well, while the technology for that to happen may not exist yet, the always-excellent BLDGBLOG has made me aware of sound artist Stephen Vitiello and his experiments from the 91st floor the World Trade Center in 1999 doing the next best thing. You can listen to a brief NPR piece here about how he used contact microphones to pick up and isolate different frequencies of sound that you normally wouldn't hear; buzzing lights several blocks away and post-hurricane creaking concrete, for example.
I just looked up prices of these mini stethoscope microphones, and they're surprisingly affordable, so I think some experimentation is in order. Several sound artists have made recordings of snowflakes hitting window panes, so I'll avoid that, but pretty much anything that can be recorded I want to record! Because I want to know what the oven sounds like when it's cooking, or what a piano sounds like when the microphone is attached to the floor of the room beside it.