Microsoft hired Stimulant to help convey the breadth and depth of their corporate social responsibility efforts; we designed an interactive online map that was cool, but we followed that up with a version for Microsoft Surface. I led the interaction design effort for both projects. This Local Impact Map, as it was called, was intended to show the positive human and economic impacts of Microsft’s global citizenship efforts.
When we created the Surface version, the interface’s lack of sound became glaringly apparent. As with any project, even for an outspoken advocate of sound like myself, audio often comes last when things get super busy. Surface is a highly sonified platform, though, with outstanding sound design. “A silent Surface app is a dead Surface app,” says fellow Surface developer Infusion. Too true – in fact, our first Surface application was a music sequencer. So, I set about trying to think about what sonic palette would be appropriate.
That was the wrong thing to do, actually. I stared, thought, listened, sketched. No single set of sounds came to mind.
Instead, I finally had a conceptual breakthrough: Rather than figure out how the application should sound, I decided to focus instead on how those sounds would be made. Given the message and brand, I decided that all the sounds had to originate with simple objects and instruments that are manipulated by human hands. This seemed to get closer to the organic and directly-human heart of the project’s message.
I arrived at an odd set of objects that human hands could make cool sounds with. I whittled these down to only two objects: a kalimba and a one liter water bottle. The kalimba, of course, was played somewhat normally, but the one liter water bottle was tied to a string and swung by a microphone dozens of times, clapped, crunched, and blown upon. From all of these samples came a fairly small and concentrated set of sounds for positive feedback, errors, and transitions. I altered the volume envelopes on most of these sounds to make them either more pronounced or less percussive, and then applied some equalization and compression to make them all fit together, especially when played together…this is a multi-user application, after all.
Since the video above shows the map being used but doesn’t feature the interface’s audio, here’s a compilation of the actual sounds for your listening pleasure.
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]
All my posts to date have featured what’s newest to me: sound gathering in the field and only slight manipulations to said sounds. But synthesis is a longtime love of mine. In my studio, hundreds of small snippets of synthesized sounds exist scattered across terabytes of hard disk space. I usually have no clue what the source material was, or how I created them.
Luckily, I (re)discovered several unusually well-documented synthesized sounds for this post: a collection of samples that were oriented towards making impactful, short sci fi sounds, but created using virtual synthesizers in software rather than real recordings. These sounds all wound up evoking lasers, blasters, and other sci-fi energy weapons, or discrete layer elements for the same.
Ben Burtt defined this sound for generations with his struck-guy-wire laser blasts in Star Wars, and I (like most) tend to agree that these real sound sources make a big difference in the complexity and character of the final sound. But synthesizing these sounds from scratch is a fun exercise, as well: deconstructing what works about that classic sound (amplitudes of high and low frequencies offset in time), figuring out how to execute it, and then modifying the sound for different emotional effects.
(I’ve found other real-world objects that also make Burtt-style blaster sounds, which will be featured in an upcoming post!)
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/5764060″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [EFM1 and ES2 virtual synths, Apple Logic Pro 8]
The Remo Thunder Tube: Fun and hackneyed, but aggressive and unusual when played with an eBow!
My girlfriend bought be a Remo Thunder Tube as a gift, just as I was getting more comfortable with live microphone techniques and collecting acoustic noisemakers. It’s a spring going into a stretched material, like a drum head, which is surrounded by a high-density fiberboard tube. You shake it, the spring vibrates, and is amplified by the tube. And those lightning graphics? Sweet.
But then, as discussed earlier, the EBow came into my life. Â I took one look at that spring and figured there might be EBow possibilities: it looked like a gigantic, loosely-wound guitar string. The results were pretty wild! The position of the microphone relative to the tube itself had a huge impact on the end result, but I wound up preferring the tone of the mic capsule being right at the lip of the open tube.
Listen below to the unprocessed original. (I did pitch shift this down 2 octaves, having tracked it at 192kHz, and it was wicked. Maybe more on that in a future post…)
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/5764033″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [OktavaMod MK012 mic w/ omni capsule into a Sound Devices 702 recorder]
The humble Crash Box: From cookies to crashes in 1,500 calories, and tasty either way.
A “crash box” is a device to simulate the sound of, well…a crashing something. Originating in theater and radio productions, it’s a container with debris in it. You drop it, it crashes. You roll it, you get a slow trickling of debris. Simple enough.
It’s something that an aspiring sound designer sees mentioned a lot in books and articles, but which “serious” sound designers might not use much. Why use a crash box when you have the budget to go to a junkyard and drop real cars on one another? Well, with no car-crash scenes or budget in sight, it still sounded like destructive fun, so I just had to make one.
This past winter I got just the perfect container: a cookie tin from an appreciative design-industry acquaintance. The goal is to fill the container with glass, ceramics, rocks, busted-up bricks, sticks…pretty much whatever you’d want to have make noise. I picked debris that would best simulate a car crash: glass, plastic, ball bearings, metal bits, and rubber. The cost was US$0.00, unless you count the 4 cents of gaffer’s tape I used to hold the lid on.
I recorded breaking those glasses separately before adding the debris to the crash box…which I also, of course, recorded as I poured it in. To get a bright sound with a low noise floor for the subtler tinkles and debris sounds, I used a large condenser microphone for these individual bits. I just had to break a coffee mug too, to see how that sounded. OK, fine: Two coffee mugs.
Test time had arrived! I often record quiet sounds in a wool-carpeted dressing room in my house, since it’s the most acoustically dead free space I’ve got. I didn’t want the impact sound to pick up concrete or wood on impact, so the carpet was a good choice (sound blankets would have done in a different environment) I held the crash box above my head, right up against the ceiling and dropped it, tracking the loud crashes with a both a large condenser mic (farther away) and a small condenser mic up close.
Such sweet mayhem! The raw recording it doesn’t quite get there in terms of realism, but mixed, shifted, and layered, crash boxes do make fantastic elements for any sort of destructive needs. Today’s sound is an example of several crash box clips and a few other “sweeteners:” the aforementioned breaking glasses, one low-frequency effect, and the sound of me kicking the door of a ruined pickup truck. To me, it sounds like a sonic illustration: maybe not perfectly photo-real, but evocative and expressive.
eBowing a tensioned cable on a fence gate. I mean, doesn't everyone spend their Sundays doing this?
The eBow has been around for decades, and it does one thing only, albeit very well: It excites metal objects with a magnetic field. It’s meant to be used to get synth tones out of guitars, and used right, it can be beautiful.
“Used right” usually doesn’t apply when I get my hands on such things.
Having purchased an eBow this year, I didn’t sit and play my guitar with it. Instead, I switched it on and walked around the neighborhood looking for guitar-string-like objects that might make even more interesting noises.
I came upon a fence gate that had a tensioned cable secured with a turnbuckle (to keep the large door from warping). While I could barely hear the cable resonate, I could also hear the wood of the door vibrating. To my mind, that meant only one thing: contact microphones.
As you can see from the photo, I taped one contact mic to the turnbuckle, and another to the door. I didn’t want one on the cable to decrease its oscillation. I tracked each contact mic to a separate channel on my field recorder.
I recorded about 16 minutes of pretty interesting tones, but the audio levels were quite low. The hums and drones were nice, but I liked it even better when the cable would strike and vibrate against the eBow itself, adding a sound like metal being stretched and warped. It sounded like a much more aggressive Alan Lamb recording. Perhaps someday I can use it expressively as a layer in some transformative or warping sequence, and certainly chopping it up to microsample it will yield untold button sounds, clicks, wonks, vrrrmmms, and other sonic sweetness.
I layered some of the more dynamic, expressive parts into a short clip that you can check out below.
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]
My friend and designer extraordinaire Jules has a dog named Sidney. Sid’s problem is that he has no idea that he’s a 100-pound pitbull-rottweiler mix. He’s a thick, massive canine with a chest  twice the diameter of mine, yet he has the self-image of a happy-go-lucky, teensy lap dog.
Jules was nice enough to let me do a recording session with Sid to get some elements for some creature sounds. I was after something low and menacing, but that didn’t require too much downward pitch-shifting, the du rigeur method of processing deep creature effects that often muddies up the sound by eliminating higher frequencies critical for realism.
This was my first planned recording session with animals of any sort, and I learned a lot. The biggest lesson of the day? Put dogs on carpet or sound blankets to silence those claws!
All we did was give Sid a rope toy. This rather intense collection of audio samples, unprocessed besides normalization, was the result. (Portrait by Peter König.)
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]
The ultimate rule of gathering, be it audio, photography, video, or butterflies, is this: The best tool in the world is the one you have with you. (Not sure who came up with this first, but I heard it initally from Chase Jarvis.)
The humble Zoom H2; even with higher-tech alternatives, still a viable tool.
My first dedicated audio recorder was the Samson Zoom H2, a cheap plastic box packed with four microphone capsules and a teensy screen. Its quirks and dull sound, however, are secondary to its pocket-sized form factor that lets you record stereo (or even semi-surround, using all four mics at once) literally anywhere. I’ve captured tons of sounds with the H2 that I’ve had missed if I carried more “serious” audio equipment with me (which I’ve since upgraded to, and you’ll read more about in the coming weeks).
One such example is this slice of urban ambience, replete with a heated street argument, shot out of a third-story window in San Francisco’s Mission District.
has been around for decades, and it does one thing only, albeit very well: It excites metal objects with a magnetic field. It’s meant to be used to get synth tones out of guitars, and used right, it can be beautiful.
