record sound in a room

by Alessandro
(Italy)

a difficult question - I'm totally inexpert on audio devices...

I'm setting up an art project - a sculpture with hidden inside a small PC, which should be able to continuously record the sounds around it. If possible, the application would record just when sound is above a given threshold. Then the sculpture would replay the sounds randomly, mixed with music etc... I've many ideas about that. Everything should run on Linux, by the way.

So: what kind of microphone should I buy? I heard about "conference microphones", are they the correct choice? Can you suggest something which would not bankrupt me?

thanks for any hint!


alessandro