Based in Berlin, Kamp’s interest in sound recording started in early childhood and led him to study electroacoustic music composition and sound engineering at the Folkwang University of the Arts. A few years ago he decided to invest in the best mobile recording equipment available and actively go out hunting for exciting sound effects and ambiences to use in his project work. This newly found interest led him to form Shapingwaves, a company that makes these sounds available to other sound designers as themed collections.
The project started in Kamp’s studio but he was soon recording beehives in Germany and cicadas in remote olive groves in Greece. With the help of a doctor friend at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin he managed to capture mosquito sounds by recording the insects in the Institute’s massive Insectariums.
“Recording flies require the most creativity because I had to get a lot of them in one place at the same time,” he explains. “I bought a small terrarium intended for reptiles and hung two
d:screet™ 4060 Miniature Microphones, plus windscreen, in the centre of the lid. I then put around 100 fly pupae (bought at a reptile food shop) into the terrarium and waited a few days for them to hatch. I soon had a neat fly swarm in a box, buzzing away. I put the mics in place before the flies hatched so that they could be in the centre of the action without me having to deal with hundreds of potentially escaping flies in my studio. Once I had my recordings I set all the flies free in a nearby meadow - no fly was harmed during the making of the collection!”
Kamp’’s collection was recorded at 96 kHz with the microphones running into either a Sound Devices 633 or a Sonosax SX-R4+ recorder.