Very good points, Thorsten.
First, a confession. My most naive and idiotic recording gig was to the
Helsinki-Vantaa
airport in the 1980's. I just drove there in my own car, parked it and
walked by the
fence to record some jetplanes taxiing on the runway. I needed the whine
of the jet
engines as a sound effect to a radio play I was mixing. I was using two
MKH412
shotgun microphones with foam windshields and a Nagra recorder. What a
stupid
bloke!
I had recorded for about two minutes when I saw two guards standing
behind me. They
were just watching and they seemed to recognize, what I was doing. I kept on
recording and when I thought that I had enough of the whine "for the
first take",
I stopped the tape recorder. The guards came to me and politely, as you
also told, they
said: You surely have some kind of an ID card?" I had of course been
seen on the
surveillance cameras and these two guards were nearby and came to check me.
They adviced me to first contact the Info desk "the next time" at the
airport and to get a
permission from the security, when I come to record sound effects.
- - -
Another time, much later, I was recording with a Soundfield microphone
in a large
shopping centre. I wanted to capture the noise of the people moving,
noise from the
coffee shops and the background music. I had the Soundfield covered with
a furry
windshield, which made it look even bigger than it is. There I
understood to contact
the security first. I just talked to the first guard I met and he
contacted the surveillance
centre and they gave me a permission to record in those certain spots
that I had
suggested.
I guess that one place where you _must_ ask for a permission to record,
are all
schoolyards and kindergartens and similar places. Usually recording
isn't thought to be
legally different from taking photographs or video, even though we
recordists would think
differently. Taking pictures or recording sound is violating people's
intimacy in such
places. The schoolyards are different from streets in this respect.
Using binaural ear microphones and a small recorder in the pocket, I
have been
recording in the underground, trams, buses and museums. For those, I haven't
asked for a permission, because so many other people have earphones in their
ears and nobody really knows if you are recording or listening.
Eero
_______________________________________________
Sursound mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit
account or options, view archives and so on.
