Magnet + Hydrophone from Noise Jockey on Vimeo. [Did you miss my first video?]
It is what is says, people! ;-) I ducked out some handling noise, but for the most part the audio is unaltered. Enjoy.
Tags: audio equipment, digital audio, field recording, hydrophone, magnet, twang | 9 Comments »
When I released the EP A Vast Unwelcome on March 31, 2023, I said it was my first metal album, a comment that was both cheeky and 100% accurate.
It wasn’t metal in genre, but rather in timbre: Every sound on the album was made from metallic objects, metallic instruments, or a handful of virtual instruments that physically modeled complex metallic instruments. Since the timbres and process were so particular, I thought I’d discuss the album’s origin, recording process, and post-production, as this project represents my happy place of the intersection of sound design and music.
It also is a great example of how projects can start as one thing, and then morph into something quite different, and that the creative process is usually anything but linear and predictable.
This album started as a series of recording sessions for a crowdsourced magic sound effects sound library. I ordered a number of bells, chimes, shakers, and more, and specifically set about recording them at 192 kHz with ultrasonic-capable microphones to preserve their high-frequency content when subjected to extreme pitch shifting. I also used unusual recording techniques, like striking chimes and then dipping them into water, recording the result with a hydrophone (similar to this technique I posted about many years ago).
The objects recorded included a waterphone, a custom Tim-Kaiser-designed instrument known as the Icarus, elephant bells, sleigh bell shakers, ankle bells, tree chimes, and more.
My musical inspiration came during “stress-testing” these recordings by doing extreme pitch and time manipulation. Since ostensibly these objects were instruments, there were tones and intervals I was hearing that led me to start assembling musique concréte sketches, not unlike my process for my previous all-wind-in-wires album, The Quivering Sky. I also started to integrate some field recordings I made aboard the SS Red Oak Victory, a restored WWII ammunition freighter. (More about those recording sessions in future blog posts.)
The first track of the album, “Phase Change,” is an example of where all of the songs started.
But I kept hearing harmonies in these recordings, and they started to turn out to be more musical than expected. In 2022, I got to know the software (and people) of Physical Audio, and it struck me that their virtual instruments would compliment these metallic tones perfectly…I mean, any company that makes a prepared-piano emulator is OK in my book! Derailer and Preparation could be traditionally tonal and melodic, or loaded with loads of inharmonic partials and resonances. These two instruments wound up being good aesthetic fits for this project.
The track “Pruina” (the word for hoarfrost in Latin) is a good example of these virtual instruments integrating with other metallic tones.
Things kept progressing from there. I used techniques lifted from my own sound library, Metallitronic, to re-amp a some synthesized tones through gongs placed on large, powerful transducers. I unboxed some of my own self-made instruments made of springs, and bowed and struck a suspended sheet of steel in my garage. Much fun was had, but that thin plate of steel in the garage, hung from a c-stand, started to give me an idea…
I started to put the stereo spring reverb in my studio to heavy use during the mixing stage, and one day I thought to myself, “Wait a second…I’ve got all this rich reverb from the SS Red Oak Victory sessions…this spring reverb sounds great, non-linear, and chaotic…why am I using virtual reverbs and delays at all?” This led me to give myself the challenge to discard all virtual reverbs in my mixes (despite my undying love for ValhallaDSP for most uses), and only use electro-mechanical reverbs.
That instantly made me think of plate reverbs. I asked around to see if any local studios had any plate units that were functional, and much to my surprise, the Skywalker Sound Scoring Stage had not one, not two, but three functioning EMT 140 plate reverbs. After a few phone calls, I found myself in this world-class facility re-amping stems through six channels of luscious, real-steel reverbs.
While EMT 140 units ostensibly have a 3-5 second maximum decay time, I did the ol’ Walter Murch trick of bringing some stems varispeeded up by an octave, playing back twice as fast. We tracked all the EMT 140 returns at 96 kHz, so back in my own studio I varispeeded those returns back down…now I had 8-10 second reverb tails from real plate reverbs. Most of the final mixes actually have a full six channels of plate reverb on them, and there are no virtual reverbs anywhere on the album.
This felt like a logical conclusion to the album’s all-metal creative constraint.
The recording sessions happened during an unusually brutal and long winter, and the steely tones of the works started to feel like both a paean and a dirge to winter itself. This became the compositional focus of the album, which influenced the songs, their titles, and the cover art (a glacier in Iceland, photographed by me). As friends’ neighborhoods were literally crushed under the weight of snow and local areas flooded from winter rains, the music turned out dark but with a core ray of hope, at least to my ear.
But of course sound and music only has meaning given to it by the listener. My intent is mine alone, and whether that comes across to those experiencing it is out of one’s hands. That’s the essence, terror, and joy of releasing art into the world.
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Rare Waves’ Lite2Sound PX, by Eric Archer: A photonic microphone!
I’ve previously written about the heavily-built, wickedly cool Grendel Drone Commander synth from Eric Archer. I check his site, Rare Waves, from time to time for new handmade electronic toys, and I was really intrigued by his newer Lite2Sound PX unit. This small device, in Eric’s words, “extracts audio from ambient light.” It’s a photodiode amplifier. Or a photosensitive microphone. Point it at light, it makes sound. It runs off a 9-volt battery, has a volume control, and a headphone jack. Simple, exciting, and a whole new world of sonic insanity. You can buy them as kits or, as I did, fully assembled.
Sounds pretty straightforward. If you just point it at bright, broad light sources, it’s kind of disappointing. It’s when you start listening to artificial lights in otherwise dim environments that some serious magic starts to happen. My experiments were conducted in and around high tech computer equipment, running an 1/8″ mini jack from the headphone output into my Sony PCM -D50 recorder.
Lights inside of PCs, modulated by fans…and further modulated by speaker grills as I passed the Lite2Sound from side to side. Ethernet network activity lights. Server disk access indicator lights. A close up of the power button of an XBox 360 while booting up. Pulsing lights of devices in standby mode. Halogen lamps behind spinning desk fans.
Lightly armored for future fieldwork!
The resulting sounds were astounding in their range: Static, glitches, distorted synth pads, pure sinewave tones, sawtooth-like tones, and much more. You can’t control it, really. It’s a tool of discovery, and its very nature encourages constant experimentation. It was so small and so perfectly complemented a handheld field recorder, I just wanted to take it everywhere and point it at everything! It imparted the same joy as when you start recording with contact microphones, or hydrophones: A new way to listen to the world around you. The more I used the Lite2Sound, I put it in a small plastic container (hacked with an XActo knife for access to controls and the headphone jack) in order to keep the components better protected.
Lite2Sound is a pretty narrowly-focused device and how useful it is to you depends on your taste for the unpredictable. Me, I adore this thing. Hell, I bought two (for future stereo photo-phonic insanity). It encourages constant experimentation, weighs nothing, and I can see using its output in both sound design and musical contexts. Eric Archer nails it again with an odd concept and a rock-solid, focused execution that results in a toy that just begs to be played with.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/139812053″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Tags: audio equipment, digital audio, field recording, sound design, sound effects | 3 Comments »
This thing was given to me as a Christmas gift. I immediately wanted to not froth milk with it, but to record it. With a hydrophone.
It was initially disappointing…until I put it into a metal pan and realized that its interaction with the pan, not the water, was far more interesting. The hydrophone was still in the water, but the frother was used in the water, inside the pan, and outside the pan as well, at varying speeds.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/73914784″ params=”auto_play=false&show_artwork=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
[Aquarian Audio H2a-XLR hydrophone into Sound Devices 702 recorder]
Yes, the Noise Jockey Corporate Yacht follows the Noise Jockey Online Branding and Color Usage Guidelines.
Kayaking on the Whiskeytown Reservoir in Northern California, I was surrounded by motorboats pulling wakeboarders. I wanted to see what all those speedboats sounded like underwater, so I dropped my hydrophone over the side and took a listen (with my field recorder safely under the deck of my kayak, in a dry bag). The inboard engines emitted a clean, high-tech whine with none of the chunky, air-gulping combustion engine sounds we typically hear in the air. “Spaceship,” I instantly thought.
I merged two recordings of these motorboats, each about half a kilometer away, futzed with them just a tad (sorry, my effects chain is lost to the dim mists of time!), and turned it into a loopable drone.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/8232669″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]
[Aquarian Audio H2a-XLR hydrophone into a Sound Devices 702 recorder]
Beer, toiletries, ice chest, field recorders. Yep, that's a well-stocked camping trip!
The metal bearproof food locker is a common sight in the developed campgrounds of the Sierra Nevada mountains. They’re infamously noisy to open, close, and move things around in, and are usually the first sounds you hear in the morning. They do their job, though…provided you have them closed. I once had a close encounter with a bear whose head was stuck right into my slightly open bear locker (in my defense, it was in the midst of dinner preparation), but that’s another story for another blog.
I finally decided to record one on a trip this summer. It was a kayaking trip, so I had both my Zoom H2 [yeah, this is an older sound] and a hydrophone, so I decided to use both: The Zoom would get the stereo effects and the hydrophone would pick up the raw vibrations. I placed the H2 horizontally centered in the locker, and placed the hydrophone on the single shelf inside. Holy resonance, Batman!
Today’s sound is a collection of hits from this outdoors session, made with hands, metal objects, and a rubber mallet, first at normal pitch and then an octave lower. It wound up mixing rather well with my collection of shovel-in-wheelbarrow sounds from a while back. Get those subwoofers ready for the second half…
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/6510828″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]
[Zoom H2 (120° capsule spread), Aquarian Audio H2a-XLR hydrophone into Sound Devices 702 recorder]
Use gear made by those who make gear they themselves use, and make gear for other users. That's prosumerism.
[Gigantic über-thanks to Tim Prebble and Richard Devine for their contributions to this article.]
The title of this article isn’t what you think it is.
You can’t shop for electronics or technology without hearing “prosumer.” People assume this portmanteau is a contraction of “professional-consumer.” Only marketing wonks have made it so.
That is neither its original meaning, nor the topic of this post.
The term was coined in Alvin Toffler’s seminal book Future Shock as a contraction of “producer” and “consumer,” predicting the merging of the roles of consumption and production into the life of one individual, primarily due to customization of mass-produced objects and the creation of highly specialized products. That is, person A makes widget X, who sells X to person B who makes widget Y, which person A, in turn, buys…it’s a massively networked set of cottage industries. This trend has exploded in the last decade. When Wired writes about micro-manufacturing and “no more factories,” we’ve probably arrived at a prosumer tipping point.
That, dear friends, is what this post is about. And yes, this is audio-related. Chances are, this article is probably about you, too.
Tags: alvin toffler, audio equipment, consumer, cottage industry, future shock, hydrophone, micro-manufacturing, microphone, prosumer, recorder | 11 Comments »
"Sump pump." I mean, ewww. What is "sump," anyway? Sure sounds like it's something in need of pumping!
Our house is very poorly placed on its lot. Since our place is downslope from the street, water runs down the driveway towards the house. Â Thankfully, someone long ago put a pretty good drainage system with an electric pump that pumps the water back to the curb, where it can run to a drainage grate in the street.
In the midst of a week of spring rain, I decided to toss the ol’ hydrophone into the drain box and record the pump, which is activated when a bobber reaches a certain height. The drain box is poured concrete, so it’s acoustically reflective. The pump kicking in is my favorite part, sure to be used for something later on. The big dropoff in volume is where the hydrophone was left high and dry when the water level dropped. Notice how the sound of air bubbles become more pronounced as the water level meets the capsule, and then passes by it. Water turbulence right on the capsule tends to be very loud, as it imparts direct mechanical vibrations to the mic element itself.
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/noisejockey/sump-pump” params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=dd0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]
[Aquarian Audio H2a-XLR hydrophone into Sound Devices 702 field recorder]
Horse hair, water, mic, and wok lid. Now we're cookin'!
My last post featured teensy finger cymbals being dipped in water while resonating, recorded with a submerged hydrophone. This time we go a bit bigger.
Bowed cymbals are one of the classic clichéd horror movie sounds…clichéd because they’re awesome! (coincidentally, just yesterday, Chuck Russom posted some great examples on his blog.) I recorded some a while back, borrowing some cymbals from a friend at work who keeps his drum kit at work. During that session I also realized that the wok lid from my kitchen made similar sounds, but with a different timbre: More groany, throaty, less musical, but with a quality I liked.
So, I played the wok lid with a violin bow as I moved it into and out of a tub of water, again with the trusty Aquarian H2a-XLR hydrophone tracking to a Sound Devices 702.  The H2a can be overly bright on some material, but for this stuff it was pretty good! (Next time I should record the above-water sound to a second channel with a small condenser mic for more mixing flexibility.)
The recording below is 100% unedited except for some slight compression and normalization.
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/noisejockey/bowed-wok-lid-underwater” params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=dd0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]
[Aquarian H2a-XLR hydrophone into Sound Devices 702 recorder]
Dipping struck finger cymbals into water creates some great filtering effects.
[Credit where credit’s due: This is a technique I’ve always wanted to try, and I first heard of it in a great video by Roger Gregg, at around 02:45. The entire series is worth watching.]
So a fellow gets a hydrophone. He’s excited, and starts recording all sorts of crap. But then he has a free hour to himself and realizes that he’s got a box full of sound-making toys and objects that could sound pretty interesting underwater.
Let’s say I’m that fellow.
Before work one day, I sifted through said toybox and decided to give this a whirl. In search for a large container to fill with water, I decided to record in the executive washroom of Noise Jockey World Headquarters, and the photos in this post will give you a glimpse of the sumptuous luxury in which we conduct our noisy business.
Since our high-tech executive spa didn’t have a stopper handy, I grabbed a plastic tub and filled it with lukewarm water. I put the hydrophone halfway between the surface of the water and the bottom of the tub, suspended from a boom arm so the cable would be isolated from noise and the mic element wouldn’t sit on the bottom.
An Aquarian H2-XLR hydrophone set into a tub of water.
The Aquarian H2a-XLR hydrophone is pretty heavy and holds quite still. One gotcha is that a high-frequency hiss can occur from air bubbles forming on the microphone casing. This can be a challenge if the water coming out of your spigot is highly aerated. I’m still working on solving that one.
I donned a pair of finger cymbals (truly something every sound recordist should own!) and dipped one or both of them in the water after striking them together. They went into the water at a 60°-90° angle, so that they’d not create entry splashes or secondary water drips. This created a really neat tone that combined a pitch bend with a very resonant filter cutoff.
I’ve attached an edit of the raw recordings to this post. Pitch-bent down or up, obviously, there’s a lot of sonic possibilities for sound design. As with all such experiments I do, I tracked at 192kHz to ensure enough latitude for further sonic malfeasance.
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/noisejockey/finger-cymbals-in-water” params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=dd0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]
[Aquarian H2a-XLR hydrophone into Sound Devices 702 recorder]