No sound designer can resist sound-making objects, so I did some recent damage at ThinkGeek for some small, inexpensive musical items…but then I noticed the robots.
However, I did get a tiny solar-powered grasshopper kit. An offset actuator in its abdomen makes the whole thing vibrate on tiny wire legs when it’s solar-cell carapace is hit with sunlight or a strong halogen source.
Of course, that would sound tiny and delicate. Which is OK. But how to make that sound bigger? Well, you put it on something that will resonate: Something with air around it that will conduct vibrations easily. (I’ve had loud, racous luck with this before.)
Being a hot, sunny Sunday, I chose the top of my closed Weber grill. I tested the sound with contact mics, but the steel was too thick. Truly, and unusually, where my ears were – close to the top of the grill – was where the best sound was. I switched to a hypercardioid mic in a windscreen, and captured today’s sound.
To accentuate the lovely low-mid resonant tones, I applied a huge -24dB cut at 5.5kHz , where the metallic feet where vibrating against the grill (I still wanted a tiny hint of chatter  in there), tand a +9dB boost at 180Hz. Could make for a nice layer with some other design elements.
The European Starling is a common bird that yammers like a manic street preacher. They have a really varied voice, quite expressive for standard birdsong.
I recorded one in my backyard and found that the frequency content really held up well under creative processing (unlike the raspy, high-mid-peaked calls of crows). Today’s sample is a continuous utterance from a starling that’s been pitched down 800 cents and run through the GRM ToolsPitchAccum filter, which I just adore for thickening sounds in unusual ways.
For me, it’s evocative of an exotic or alien ecosystem, especially with those other weird R2-D2-like tones in the background…but, again, the vast majority of those tones are being made by a single Starling.
Posted: June 8th, 2010 | Author:Nathan | Filed under:theory
Understanding your relationship, or lack thereof, to your body can lead to creative insights.
Denial of the Physical
In 2005, I heard a 1993Â radio interview with Frank Conroy, a now-deceased fiction writer, and he described how he preferred writing in bed. He spoke with another author who did this also. Nelson’s own take on it is that he wrote best when his mind flowed without concern for his surroundings. Staying in bed was a strategy to disconnect his brain from his body to facilitate creative flow. The less he was aware of his body, the more his mind could reel and wander.
While Conroy might have had a self-destructive streak, something about this insight seemed familiar. I started to notice my own patterns and methods for staying creative and generating ideas, and realized that, indeed, the idea of disassociating the body from the mind is something that I also do.
Over the years, I’ve learned to obey these rhythms and how to use them in order to stay creative in a deadline-centered world.
Thanks to SocialSoundDesign.com, I’ve discovered the joys of iZotope RX, an amazing noise reduction tool that has made real one of my hopes: To capture reasonably clean sounds in my own back yard. I live pretty close to a major highway, so getting usable recordings has been impossible up until recently.
A neighbor’s willow tree harbors a very chatty and schizophrenic-sounding European Starling. While recording some of its yammering, a crow flew in, circled over me three or four times not more than 20 feet overhead, and then left, as if to warn me that I was too close to the community tree in Birdsville. I tracked him with my mic as he flew. Well, after that, I packed it in. It wasn’t going to get better than that.
The sounds of the background are still there, of course, but much less prominently than they were. The crow was close enough and I tracked accurately enough that while there’s a volume dropoff, there’s not a lot of apparent Dopplering. The caws are fairly shrill, so don’t turn this up too loud. (Note: From a sound design standpoint, pitch shifting crow vocalizations down doesn’t sound that interesting. They sound like asthmatic dogs coughing up a cat’s hairball, and not in a good way.)
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/noisejockey/crows” params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=dd0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [Sennheiser MKH 50/30 mid-side stereo pair with into Sound Devices 702 recorder]
Posted: May 27th, 2010 | Author:Nathan | Filed under:music
No sound effects or field recordings this time, instead…a short sample of music, improvised on a sweltering fall day that inspired the track’s name.
This piece is entirely played on the guitar, obviously run through effects in places and totally unprocessed in others. Some of the many guitar tracks were also prepared with magnets on the strings, pennies stuck in the fretboard, and I think an elastic band.
You don’t have to ask: Yes, I listen to Klimek and Fennesz. :-)
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/noisejockey/indian-summer” params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=dd0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [Epiphone “Les Paul”-clone guitar into MOTU 828mkII interface, recorded and processed in Apple Logic Pro]
To paraphrase Ned Flanders, "That set my beatbox all the way up to Roomba!"
Lavalier microphones (“lavs”) are used with wireless transmitters and receivers all the time in the world of film and video production because, well, actors move. Sometimes it’s the best way to mic someone if you can’t keep up with their movement or a boom can’t get close enough, as with a wide shot. They’re not usually the first choice for miking talent, but they’re a common one and a good tool for certain conditions.
Wireless lavs are also handy in sound design for the same reason: Some things move. When they move, you need to pan your mic with it, or accept off-axis sound falloff, or be trying to get a Doppler effect. If you want your mic point-of-view to stay on something moving, and a cable’s going to get in the way, then a wireless mic system is just the ticket.
Last month, an international group of eight members the online sound community (myself included) attended a “beta test” webinar with Sonnenschein, and it was excellent. The format will be about half lecture and half discussion of attendees’ work, submitted beforehand. I think that the opportunity to learn more about how the human brain interprets audio is essential learning for anyone involved in music or sound, just as the study of visual perception is paramount to visual and interaction design. This class will focus on taking theory and making it practical in one’s work.
Here’s David’s own description of this webinar.
SEMINAR TOPIC:Â PSYCHOACOUSTIC TOOLS FOR CREATIVITY
Do you desire to produce really effective soundtracks that reach your audience through neurobiological resonance, tapping into how they subconsciously perceive the world through sound? Would you like more access to your own brain power for finding innovative approaches and solutions? Every professional sound designer can benefit from understanding and experiencing the science of sonic storytelling. In this seminar we will explore the neurobiology and psychology of hearing and how these underlying principles can support creative sound design.
WHAT WE’LL DO
In the second half of each unique 2-hour seminar, David will screen, analyze and discuss video clips pre-selected from submissions by the participants (max. 5 min., 100mb file size). If you have something ready or a work-in-progress, send info on the genre, length and any particular area of sound that you’d like to discuss, to dsonn22@gmail.com.
It’s a steal, too: You get access to one of the best minds on sound design for US$40. It’s limited to 25 people, so definitely sign up soon. If you’re active on socialsounddesign.com (see my earlier post about this awesome community), you’ll probably recognize a lot of peeps in the class.
To paraphrase our state’s governor in Predator: DOOO EET! GET TO DA CHOPPAH!
You spend an average of 3 minutes on NoiseJockey.net. This suggests you actually listen to the sounds. :-)
60% of you are directed here from other sites; of that, over 20% of you are arriving from DesigningSound.org.( I thank everyone who runs sites in this increasingly vibrant sound recording/design community who read and support Noise Jockey! You rock!)
60% of you use MacOS, and 35% of you use some flavor of Windows. I’m gonna assume the 2% of you who visit Noise Jockey on the iPod, iPhone, or iPad are lamenting Apple’s refusal to support Flash.
42% of you use Firefox, 36% of you use Safari, and and less than 7% of you use Internet Explorer. There’s a word for that: Progress.
Almost half of you use laptops to view this site, but at least a quarter of you have big-ass monitors, too.
Noise Jockey’s visitors are quite international. A hearty “merci beaucoup” goes out to the 10% of you that parlez Français, possibly visiting from SoundDesigners.org. (A personal thanks to Benoit is appropriate here, and apologies for not having taken French since middle school!)
Numbers only tell so much. How many of you are female vs. male? How many of you are professionals vs. hobbyists? What else do you do for fun? That’s what’s most meaningful, and the statistics above only paint part of the picture.
If you want to share more, do so in the comments below. But more importantly, visit each other’s sites and blogs. Join an online sound community. (Some of my favorite blogs and communities are listed in the “Aural Linkage” sidebar.) Record something and start your own blog!
Or, at the very least, just listen. To where you are, every day. Your life will be richer for it.
[Today’s post is a cross-country collaboration of field recordists, myself  (Mr. Noise Jockey) and Michael Raphael of Sepulchra.com. We’re simultaneously posting recordings from our respective museums of modern art. I visited SFMOMA in San Francisco, and Michael visited the MoMA in New York City. Please read both posts to compare and contrast the recordings and our observations.]
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was pretty dead when I got there. The bright, sunny day drove most people outside, and it was a bit early in the day. What I recorded, therefore, was as much the sound of the building as the people within it.
SFMOMA is built around a 6-story-tall cylindrical atrium. topped by a suspended interior footbridge. I recorded on each landing of each floor, all the way up to the bridge. I also recorded in a few galleries with varying amounts of people in them. The reverb was astounding, with long decays and high-frequency absorption that made any sound almost a drone. With light attendance, the building channels sound in such a way as to render it calming and enveloping.
Museums tend to be genuflective, introspective places. They have a reputation as being places to whisper, hold your chin and nod as you look upon the works. With this in mind, I found that SFMOMA’s art galleries and its public spaces have related but different acoustic properties.
