The other week I bought this thing called IC Recorder, a very useful gadget for recording sounds and noises in the immediate surroundings. So I recorded some, just outside my building. Now you can listen to three sound extracts off the streets of Kyoto, typical for this time of year. Given they were recorded from the fourth-floor balcony the resulting mp3s are of a very respectable quality.
The first snippet contains a pre-recorded song coming off the truck distributing oil to households which use kerosene stoves, an effective and relatively inexpensive way for heating your home (there is no such thing as central heating system in Japan, and only recently there are radiator-shaped heaters on sale which still work on electricity).
Listen to this lovely sound of a ‘ishiyaki imo’ truck selling hot sweet potatoes for those frozen passers-by willing to pay handsomely for this little delicacy – a single yam will cost you 600 yen, which is about €6! The chant is so resonant that imagination immediately transports me to those times when life used to be slow and simple.
The last sound-bite is of a procession of Shinto monks who occasionally walk the streets in the early morning hours doing their alms-rounds, ‘droning like hornets’ as someone put it. This was my first ever recording done on a very windy day.
