Field Recording: Tuk Tuk

Last year I visited my good friend Leo in Phnomh Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Phnomh Penh is a vibrant south-east Asian city and I'm glad that I brought audio equipment along to make some recordings.

Recording in Phnomh Penh was challenging because there is a huge amount of ambient noise. As a visitor I wanted to capture the genuine soundscape in a documentary style but as an artist I wanted to focus on the beauty. I came to a compromise by making mid/side recordings with the inbuilt stereo microphones of my Zoom H5 portable recorder and a RODE NTG2 shotgun microphone. The shotgun microphone focused on points of beauty or interest and the stereo microphones captured the noise and movement. The mid and side recordings were processed separately in post, and then mixed according to subject matter. There were times when it was more important to bring the focused object to the fore but in this example the stereo recording is itself an important point of focus.

The following is a small segment of a recording that was taken in a Tuk Tuk, which is a kind of taxi. If you listen in headphones you can experience the commotion of traffic swirling around you from within an open moving vehicle.

A tuk tuk in Phnomh Penh. The tuk tuks were all customised with such things as coloured lights, huge stereo systems and artwork

Tuk Tuk ride

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