Domus Mixtape #9: The Sound of Las Vegas
A binaural immersion into the environments of winning, and losing, in the gambling-as-spectacle capital of the world.
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- Noah Sheldon
- 10 October 2011
- Las Vegas
Mixtape series curated by Daniel Perlin.
Check out all the Domus Mixtapes.
Photo by Pedro Meyer.
We hear a room full of hundreds of slot machines
making their appeal. Occasionally we hear the
machines paying out in the clinking of coins.
My path was guided by the sounds of winning.
In this recording I would get as close as possible
to the people and machines that were paying out.
I recorded this piece with a pair of tiny homemade
microphones hidden in a hat while walking
around the casinos in Las Vegas. One microphone
on each side of my head in front of my ears.
The technique is called binaural recording.
My head becomes an obstacle for the sound so
that a sound coming from the right has to travel
a greater distance to the left ear, creating a slight
time delay which our brains use to locate the
source of the sound. The shape of our ears allows
our brains to figure out if a sound is coming from
the front or behind of us. With this recording
technique—which is ideal for reproducing the
"live" sensation of a concert hall or any type
of ambient or naturalistic recording—my ears
become reflectors and obstacles for the sound
before it hits the microphone, which creates
a very detailed and immersive stereo field.
Noah Sheldon
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Noah Sheldon is a photographer and artist based in Shanghai,
China, and Brooklyn, New York.