Recording Disney Park Audio

My Mother and Father went to Walt Disney World on their Honeymoon (a few years before I was born). From that trip, and from subsequent business trips to Orlando thanks to Westinghouse, my Dad's employer, he came to love the music that plays in every nook and cranny of WDW. For example, Main Street plays old Victorian tunes, the Tom Sawyer Island docks play what sounds like someone plucking a banjo for the first time, Frontierland plays old Western tunes like "Deep in the Heart of Texas". Once I was born, my Dad started carrying this huge Pioneer boom box into the park to start recording the various aforementioned tunes throughout the park. This thing was the size of suitcase, but wow, it made fantastic recordings for cassette tape. And, they were in stereo, so when he recorded a parade, you can hear the parade come from the right side and move across to the left. I remember when he used to play these tapes in the car when I was about 10, and we'd have a little contest to try to remember where he recorded the song at. Just in the past few years, I took all of those recordings and transferred them to MP3.

As I got older, started going to the park at least once a year, and the technology improved, I started taking a MiniDisc player through the park. I also stepped up the level of the recording to just about every single attraction, environment music, and show that we saw. At this point, I was probably recording about an hour and a half of material a day in the parks.

Over the years, I've recorded probably about 60 or so minidiscs of live Disney park audio, and with the Internet music downloading craze, I've made a few contacts from the web and I've given out a select few recordings to these people that I took the time to transfer to MP3. I've also discovered two websites that stream Disney park music 24/7: Subsonic radio and Utiladors Audio Broadcasting. What's fascinating is that I've heard my own recordings on these radio stations. Just this past week I was listening to Subsonic and I heard a track that sounded very familiar to me. It was the Pirates of the Caribbean music that plays in the area where the two chess playing skeletons are deadlocked in a stalemate. About a minute from the end of the recording, I heard a familar voice. It was my father, whose voice was captured in the background. Yep, it was my track alright. Somehow it had made it full circle and the person whose voice identified the track as uniquely mine was the person that started this whole park recording thing.