That tiny little hand massager created holy aural hell inside that metal shed.
How could I possibly have guessed that a cute little  hand massager from the impulse-buy bin of our local office supply store would sound like a tool of pure, unmitigated doom?
There’s a motor inside, of course, and its four round, glowing “legs” are for distributing vibrational goodness. Its animal-like appearance made me put it on the floor for my cat’s amusement…and when I turned it on, the entire floor of my dining room groaned. The vibrations went into the long floor planks and just sounded lucious. What else could I put this on for even cooler sounds?
Glowy vibrational awesomeness
I quickly was testing this little bugger out on all sorts of things, and then I put it on the roof of our all-metal outdoor tool shed. It sounded like space/time itself was coming apart, or like a 60′ metal automaton was coming to life after hundreds of years of dormancy…the possible uses were many. I used my modded Oktava MK-012 with its omnidirectional capsule – a first for me, in fact – and stuck the mic into the center of the shed on a boom pole, where I assumed most of the sound waves were meeting. My steel wheelbarrow was whining, every surface was vibrating…it was intense.
The unholy racket you’re about to hear is about three layers of this sound, from different takes, one of which is pitch shifted down just over half an octave as a slight thickener. The lowest bass rumbles, however, are from the raw recording.
Who says subtlety and dynamics are always good things? ;-) Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Photonic, sonic goodness through rainwater diversion? Maybe!
Anyone who’s got an interest in sound has heard the story of Ben Burtt using the sound of struck guy wires to create the Star Wars blaster sound. This changed the sound of science fiction forever; before this, all energy weapons were basically analog synth patches. Part of what makes this sound so unique (and repeated – Burtt himself used struck springs for Wall•E) is how high-frequency sounds travel faster through a metallic medium than low-frequency sounds. This is what gives these sounds their “PEEEWWW!” sound effect. Heck, even I used these principles to synthesize some similar sounds.
Which brings us to my rain gutters on this Halloween.
My house has thin metal rain gutters, from which I ritually hang hard-plastic LED holiday lights, usually right before Halloween, my most important holiday (today!). So when hanging the lights one year, one of the bulbs struck the middle of a 30′ run of solid metal and made this muffled, “block” peewwww sound. Laser-like, but different, loads of low-mid frequency content. I live pretty close to a highway, which was line of sight from my roof, so the only way I could record this sound cleanly was by using a contact microphone. (Recording a length of rain gutter with a small condenser mic in an indoor space would sound less clacky and “square,” but I don’t have a 30′ long recording studio!)
After some EQ, compression, and limiting, the results are below.
The Kodak Brownie. Man, what ever happened to lens turrets, anyway? I
I bought this Kodak Brownie 8mm film camera at a yard sale, way back when I was actually gonna shoot with it. I never did, so it wound up on my desk as a tchotchke, next to my baboon skull, remote control zombie, and tofu skeleton.
This turreted Brownie, as best as I can tell, was manufactured from 1955 to 1963 (the Brownie brand, by the way, is 109 years old this year). Its most prominent feature is a wind-up motor on the side of the case. There’s a small catch that clicks on every seventh rotation, but otherwise it’s a neat, small sound that has a fair amount of character. It has a rhythmic, “breathing” quality to its sound. I wound ‘er up tight and opened the side lid for sonic clarity. The low volume required a large diaphragm mic to capture it in loads of detail with a super-low noise floor.
I thought that it was evocative of clockwork servos on a steampunk robot, or as a smaller loop on top of  footage that’s treated to look like a newsreel or home movie. It’s pretty midrangey, so it holds up well to being sped up or slowed down. You’re guaranteed to hear or see this used in actual media to be posted on Noise Jockey in the future!
As much as I love backpacking, car camping can be pretty cushy. You can bring as many “luxury items” as you want. One such item is a propane-powered gas lantern. It’s such a staple of camping that I never thought to record it until a recent trip, when the forest went almost dead silent one morning. With the significant other still asleep in the tent, out came the battered Zoom H2.
This recording has just a couple of distant bird calls, but otherwise turned out pretty clean. It’s a simple hissy drone, but as a layer for other sound design purposes, I’m sure I’ll find a use for it someday (like shortening a piece of it for wind effects from airlocks, sci-fi helmets, or the like).
This sound is a field recording of a bee captured in a plastic food bin. It was recorded by placing a contact microphone on the side of the bin, which was tracked at 24 bit/192kHz onto my Sound Devices 702 recorder. The bee was hitting the sides of the bin with his body and wings, producing the warbling and percussive hits. I lowered the pitch of the sound by a full three octaves while keeping the duration the same, which still kept a fair amount of dynamics given the high sample and bit rate of the recording. This is dying to be used in conjunction with an actively-automated Doppler plug-in, but a gent has only so many spare cycles in a day.
No bees were harmed in this recording. The little feller had air holes and he was released after 6 minutes, after which he promptly went back to pollinating my backyard.
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.)
