An earlier post spurred a couple of commenters to wonder about hearing some sounds from my shovel-in-wheelbarrow recording session pitched down by an octave. I recorded that session at 96kHz, so the sounds could easily manage to be stretched and pitched down.
So, here are the results, as requested. Definitely leans towards a cinematic feel, and I find that sounds like these have 1,001 uses! Enjoy, and happy Pitchshiftember!
The humble Roomba: Only a mistake could make it sound cool.
We own two Roombas. When they’re not battling to the death like robotic Mexican cocks, they clean our floors.
I recorded one and, well, it wasn’t that interesting. A bit whiny. Not at all what one would expect from a 21st century robot: A lot of wide-spectrum noise without a lot of character.
But then I taped a contact microphone on the top of the Roomba…taped rather poorly, in fact. I followed it around all hunched over with a too-short cable, causing the contact mic to occasionally lift up from the Roomba’s chassis. (I could have turned it off to rig it properly, but y’know. Guy thing.) This sloppiness caused a pretty weird warbling as the flat piezo element wobbled around and slightly lifted off the robot’s chassis as it changed directions and the cable to the recorder alternated between taut and slack.
It sounded weird enough to post here, completely unedited other than trimming and normalizing, in all it’s lazy-man’s happy-accident glory.
Wicker’s very worst trait, however – the loud sound of it straining under pressure – finally, and sonically, piqued my interest. I picked up up a small wicker basket at the local Thrift Town. Such fibrous, cracking, and straining sounds have many uses in sound design, from metaphoric strains and stresses to emulating the deep creaks and groans of a pirate vessel at sea. A small basket won’t make loud and deeply resonant sounds “out of the box,” but hey, that’s what computers are for. After half an hour of coaxing sound out of one of these things, by the way, they do break. But there are a bunch more for $1.99 at the thrift store!
Here’s a sample of the wicker basket being manipulated with two hands, then pitch-shifted a couple of octaves for some wickery gravitas. It serves as great reminder of why sample rates as high as 192kHz are your friend, and that Oktava mics – even the OktavaMods – have too high of a noise floor for quiet sounds. :-(
I live near miles and miles of public open space trails, and there’s a ruined hulk of a blue pickup truck a couple of miles from my house. I see it whenever I hike, run, or bike by. It’s been there for years; someone drove it up incredibly steep fire roads and left it.
Some time ago I dragged a field recorder and a windscreen-protected shotgun microphone up those hills and spent an hour milking the rusting chassis for sound. As you can tell by the picture, it doesn’t look like there was much left, but I did get some pretty cool sounds out of it. Like the cigarette machine percussion loop from an earlier post, I’ve assembled the raw sounds into a drum kit. Here’s a quick sample for your  funky, semi-industrial percussion pleasure. No processing other than pitching 2 samples down a bit in the sampler and some compression and EQ in the final mix; it’s rendered as a usable loop, hence the sudden start and stop.
I'm pretty sure this paddleboat was not intended for wilderness exploration.
Before embarking on mountainous backpacking trips, I like to acclimate to the altitude for a day with some light activity. On a recent, trip, my girlfriend and I wanted to do some lake kayaking. Sadly, the sole outfitter in the region didn’t bring their kayaks that season…when offered a paddleboat instead, we shrugged, thought it was incredibly silly, and said, “Sure!”
The next thing we knew, we were out for four hours in this damn thing. We paddled halfway across an alpine lake, and fought 10-knot wind on the return trip in a craft with the hydrodynamics of a brick. The only way we survived was to sustain ourselves by playing Ghost and Twenty Questions like we were eight years old. From those plastic bucket seats, my ass was complaining for days afterwards.
It was a silly, weird, and fun…and oddly mechanical-sounding. There was this constant thrumming that sounded really regular and sustained for a muscle-powered vehicle. Early in the day there was no wind or chop, so I managed to get several minutes’ worth of clean recordings from this thing. It could easily be processed just a little and recontextualized as a mechanical texture for some device or ambience.
I almost didn’t bring my Zoom H2 on this trip, but I’m sure glad I did. I’ll have more examples from this trip in future posts. (Technical note: Dropping six rechargeable batteries at once into a cold mountain stream does not improve battery life.)
These razors were locked in a battle to the death for the sake of sound!
I think it was Ben Burtt who described coming up with a sound effect by putting an electric razor in a trashcan and letting it vibrate while recording it…sadly, I’ve forgotten where I saw or read this… (if you do, note it in the comments!)
This naturally made me wonder what would happen if you put multiple electric razors in a resonant space like a trash can. I have both a small beard trimmer and a larger hair razor, so I knew they’d create two very distinct sets of harmonics.
What else is there to say, really? I put those two razors in a trash can, turned them both on, and then let the ol’ 702 rip with a large condenser mic. I tried it with the trash can lid open and closed. It was when I placed both of them on the lid of the metal trash can that the magic started to happen. The trash can acted as a resonator, like the body of a guitar.
Here’s the bizarrely awesome moment (unprocessed) when they started harmonizing and turning into a rich, thick chorus of motorized drone-y goodness!
As an avid photographer and aficionado of the Strobist school of lighting, I’ve got a mixture of modern, high-tech flashguns and some older ones I’ve picked up for cheap on Craigslist. Their age discrepancies don’t have any impact on how well they work…but my aging flash units sure sound strange.
After taking a shot with any flash, you hear almost always hear the flashgun’s capacitors recharging for the next shot. But my Nikon SB-26 (about 15 years old now) makes this warbling, incredibly”digital” sound. They sound like a 2400 baud modem that’s half asleep and dreaming, or a sweeping sample-start effect heard in glitch-centric music. The sound is incredibly soft and high-pitched, so only my large condenser mic has the sufficiently low noise floor to capture the sound without a lot of hiss.
Possibly useful for other recharging or power-up effects, some grimy and gritty digital process, or as part of a data-transmission sound effect..?
I’m always looking for weird things that make noise. Some artists dig in crates for rare vinyl, but I dig for fresh sounds at the thrift store.
If I have one primary skill in life, it’s not being afraid to look or act like an idiot in public. This pays off big time as I go into a thrift store, start handling the merchandise, putting it up to my ear, and then handling an item like I intend to break it. Rinse, repeat. I must be a bundle of fun to watch.
Today’s Thrift Store Sound – the first in an occasional series! – come from the humble shoe stretcher. At the local Thrift Town in San Francisco’s Mission District, there’s a whole box full of them. As soon as I handled one, I looked at its components and realized the possibilities: Multiple springs under tension, a metal joint/ratchet, and several wooden parts, all put together loosely. This curio had a whole language it could speak, if only someone would record it…
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/5764080″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [OktavaMod MK012 mic with cardioid capsule into Sound Devices 702 recorder]
This nicotine-dispensing hulk is as playable as a drum kit.
When we moved into our new office, there was this huge cigarette vending machine from the late 60’s or early 70’s left in our foyer. It went from monstrosity to curiosity, and now we’re happy it’s around as an ironic objet d’arte. It went from curosity to obsession once I realized that it could open and its metallic guts could be struck, strummed, and otherwise played like an instrument.
This is one of those sessions I’ll redo someday with better gear, and with sound blankets to dampen the super-bright room (it’s far too heavy to move anywhere else!), but these clips still evoke how expressive this machine is. Here’s a 30-second drum loop made from the raw sounds; the only processing is some EQ and compression.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/5763956″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [Zoom H2, collapsed to mono, made into EXS24 drum kit in Logic Pro]
Of course, the first thing a budding content gatherer does is to collect sounds and images around them, usually found in the home. Me, I went through power tools, my cats, rain outside, the toilet flushing…you name it, that day, it got committed to disk on my first recorder, the Zoom H2.
The thing that I discovered that made a great sound, that perhaps not everyone has lying around, is an immersion blender. Its variable speed dial made a nice sound even cooler once some speeds started resonating the plastic grip in a pretty insane way. Its tiny blades spun fast enough that they pushed a lot of air around, making for overly rumbly recordings near the business end. Ultimately, the best sound was where the shaft met the grip, mic perpendicular to the axis of the shaft.
Could it be used as a high-tech servo sound? Alien force field? A Mark V anti-gravity fargschnottle? Only further DSP can decide…
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/5763710″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [Zoom H2, 90°-spread front mic pair]
