A personal journey through sound.

Metal Manipulations & Rusty Resonance

Posted: August 16th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: field recording, sound design
Crusty things make tastier sounds!

Crusty things make tastier sounds!

The sound of metal resonating, scraping, straining…doggone it, I just cannot get enough of this stuff.

Doing yardwork one weekend, I noticed my shovel made a great sound as I was scraping soil out of our wheelbarrow. So, naturally, I dragged my wheelbarrow inside our shed, put a large-condenser microphone over it, grabbed the shovel, and pushed its flat blade around the wheelbarrow in various shapes, with and without dirt, for about 20 minutes.

To me, the sounds were evocative of ancient portals, rusted ship doors opening and closing, or the hull of a ship groaning under pressure. What does it make you think of?

Highlights from this session are below!

Resonant Metal: Shovel scraping inside of wheelbarrow by noisejockey
[Røde NT1a mic into Fostex FR2-LE recorder]

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Thrift Store Sounds: Shoe Stretcher

Posted: August 12th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: found sound objects, sound design
Shoe stretchers are vocal little artifacts.

Shoe stretchers are vocal little artifacts.

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…

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[OktavaMod MK012 mic with cardioid capsule into Sound Devices 702 recorder]

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Crash-in-the-Box

Posted: July 28th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: sound design
The humble Crash Box: from cookies to crashes in 1,500 calories.

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.

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[Røde NTG-2, Røde NT1a, and Oktavamod MK012 mics, Fostex FR2-LE recorder (various sessions)]

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