Equipment Experiment: Canadian Thanksgiving

After purchasing my own recording equipment, I started thinking of all the ways I could (should, since it cost so much) use it—including all the projects I had imagined doing over the last few years. In college, I was a DJ at Barnard’s radio station, which is a free-form station that’s very low-key, so it was always possible to design a show, or choose who to interview, what to talk about, or what music to play on my weekly show—and to know that, theoretically, someone was listening. But that was before digital recording and digital editing software was so prolific, and so everything was always live. That had its advantages, though, because the content of the show could adapt to who was around and how they responded. Since then, I’ve been thinking about creating shows without the feedback of an audience and with the help of sound editing programs.

That whole thought process was the impetus for recording a celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving at my friend Veronica’s house. Because Veronica’s birthday always falls near (or on) Canadian Thanksgiving, it’s always been a very big gathering day for her family, and since she’s lived in New York, it’s become a yearly event for her family from Canada and from throughout the U.S. to get together at her apartment in Washington Heights with her friends. Veronica also runs a community radio station from her apartment and produces a show that she broadcasts that feature her own documentaries. My hope was (and still is) to use what I recorded—while she was busy basting the turkey, chopping celery, and catching up with her family—to make a documentary of her holiday, for her.

I started by talking to her roommates about the yearly tradition. I was a little surprised to find that Joe, who is generally rather anxious about performances of any sort, was very open about narrating the event history and sharing what he thought was important—I guess this is an interesting example of understanding how significant it can be to communicate my interest in hearing someone’s ideas and observations (the interest is especially apparent when I’m holding a recorder and wearing ridiculous headphones). The narration became performative in a very particular kind of way, and I noticed some things that it shared with regular conversation and also how it differed.

At other points of the evening I tried to document what was happening by representing it in sound, so this meant recording a lot of chopping and sizzling and running water, or responses to items that came out of the oven. Since I haven’t begun editing, I don’t know how well this strategy worked. I’m mostly concerned that there won’t be enough narration to explain the sounds; on the other hand, the sounds might speak for themselves and the narration might be about things other than food or Canadian Thanksgiving.

I realized that whenever I stopped recording, something would happen that I painfully wished I had recorded, and so for a large portion of the evening I left the recorder on in the middle of the living room with the hope that later I would listen to it and harvest what was useable. This also means that I’ll have hours of listening to do in order to hear what I’ve collected and to listen to themes and imagine how to organize those themes. This is not so totally different from oral history interviews, in this sense; the end product will be edited, in some ways, like a written interpretation of an interview. Given that I don’t have any experience producing audio documentaries, I’m sure that my strategies barely qualified as such. The most problematic issue is that when I asked people to talk about Canadian Thanksgiving, their response usually turned to the sort of equipment I was using or why I was recording everything or how it related to my classes, which is not terribly useful for what I want to do.

In technical terms, I learned that the Tascam makes a lot of internal noise when it’s handled, so it might be a good idea to invest in a little tripod. On the other hand, the internal mics are, I think, pretty good for recording in this kind of environment if it’s not conducive to mic individual people. The weirdest thing about the whole experience is that in listening to what I recorded, I can’t always pick out my own voice from other women’s!