Halloween_Street02.wav

Hamilton Park is an old neighborhood just beyond the city limits of a mid-sized Pennsylvania town. It feels suburban but the houses are close together, which makes it ideal for trick-or-treaters.

This recording is a portion of the street sounds of Halloween night. I slung a small stereo mic out of the third story window on the street side of my house. With the stereo field oriented up and down the street it's possible to hear groups of children (and cars) traveling for several blocks.

There are people handing out treats at the house I'm in, the house directly across the street, and several nearby houses, but talking and other sounds from the people directly below are greatly attenuated by porch roofs. The loudest voices are heard from people in the street just in front of the house.

I used an M-Audio Microtrack portable recorder set to 96K at 24 bits to make the recording. I used the supplied "T" stereo mic on a three-foot long boom propped out the window. There was very little wind, fortunately, as the gain was just about full up. Even so, there is a lot of low frequency background noise due to some nearby main streets. In Goldwave I rolled off this noise using a high pass filter at 40 Hz at 5 (dB/octave). This greatly reduced the energy content of the sample and allowed me to boost the gain considerably.