Virtual Travel

I may have mentioned before my desire for live feeds, live camera and microphone broadcasts, from other places in the world.  Especially in these COVID times it would be nice to be able to tune into different parts of the world and see & hear them.  Kinda like Google Streetview in real time.

There are a few bits and pieces of something like this set up.  

Here are lots of mostly short recordings, rather than live open mics, but they're all over the world.
https://aporee.org/maps/

Here are some cool 360 degree videos of places, the footage is static but you can control where you look.
New York: https://youtu.be/2Lq86MKesG4
Iceland: https://youtu.be/um0tarRuRY0
Paris: https://youtu.be/Cnvi6oI3Eno
Petra, Jordan: https://youtu.be/M_SwIYj9YW0
Driving toward a tornado: https://youtu.be/G9nc14PJdOU

Okay, this story's gonna take a few minutes to tell so bear with me.

In poking around on the Radio Aporee website (listed above) I found many cool recordings, some of which I can use for an upcoming project of mine.  They are literally from all over the world, which leads to some interesting contrasts... but also reveals that most places sound an awful lot like everyplace else(!)

Now, I have been making soundscape recordings for over twenty years:
https://anode1.bandcamp.com/music

I decided it would be fun to post some of my recordings to the Radio Aporee website.  This requires that you locate the recording in time & space, and convert it to a 320mbps MP3, but those were trivial.

Got the ones worth listing listed.
https://aporee.org/maps/work/user.php?u=2701

Afterward I was poking around the Puget Sound area and ran across a recording, from Tacoma, of a thunderstorm on May 30, 2020:
https://aporee.org/maps/work/user.php?u=2632

This was THE SAME STORM I captured for my AUSS series:
https://anode1.bandcamp.com/album/auss25-thunderstorm

Two recordings of the same storm, taken 40 miles apart.  What could I do with this?

I opened up the other recording in my digital editor, and placed my recording side-by-side.  My thought was, maybe I could synchronize some of the bigger thunderclaps and we could hear the thunder rumbling north or rumbling south.  Time out the differences between local claps and shared claps.  The storm was very high up in the atmosphere so it seems like there ought to be a lot of shared landmarks.

But there aren't.


I have slid both recordings back and forth, and NOTHING lines up.  The period-of-time between any two events that look similar, is vastly different.  His recording is longer than mine, but for both of us there was a definite beginning, middle, and tapering off.  It OUGHT to dovetail together.

It doesn't. 

Weird.  At the speed of sound (~767 mph, or 12.78 mpm) our 40 mile difference should show a lag time of no more than three minutes.  But nothing on the recording is anywhere close to that. 

I don't get it.

Hmmm. His recording says he started recording at 7:50am.

My recording started at 8:45am, fifty-five minutes later.

If the storm was moving north, it could’ve traveled 40 miles in 55 minutes, or about 40 mph, which sounds about right. And the highlights HE caught would not be the same highlights I caught. There MAY have been some overlap — his recording is an hour twenty minutes, so the last 25 minutes of his recording might be the same as the first 25 minutes of mine.

I’ll have to try lining them up that way.

Tried it.  There was one thunderclap that COULD be the same on both our recordings, but none of the others line up.  Inconclusive at best.

But he caught one MASSIVE (but distant) thunderclap that very well could've been the one that scared the shit out of me and made me start recording the rest of the storm.

Nice. The Radio Aporee website has a random access feature, where it bops you all over the planet at random.

Fascinating, Captain.