Most recordings have been done with the Sony HXR-MC50U compact handycam on an aluminum tripod with a Sennheiser external omnidirectional lavaliere microphone attached to the shirt of the interviewee and with the Zoom H4n recording with its built-in condenser stereo microphone as a backup on default settings. This setup has the advantage of requiring only one microphone for the two participants, but also sometimes has the drawback of capturing unwanted background noise such as boiling water on the fireplace or running water outside the house of recording. It has also proved portable as it is lightweight needing no preamplifiers as the camera provides line-in power and the lavaliere microphone requires no stand.
In the first situation I made the fatal beginners mistake of deciding not to listen to the audio input of the microphone before recording – sadly I had no choice since I had forgot my headphones – this will not happen again! The voice recordings became very low because the sound image was dominated by the wildly boiling water, which by the way served no purpose because the lady of the house had been interrupted in cooking corn as we arrived and thus all that was on that stove the whole time was boiling water and nothing more.
In the second situation I did detect the very loud noise of water flowing from a broken faucet outside the house where we were recording – I went to try and close it as well as I could but when this proved useless we managed to find a slab of discarded roofing which allowed the water to run soundlessly onto the ground.
I have several times found myself in doubt as to where to draw the line between unwanted background noise and acceptable background noise on the on hand, and background noise which can be removed with minimal intrusion in people’s lives and the natural setting of people’s homes and sounds which might be removed but at the cost of imposing on people, their homes and their hospitality.
