To make this 4:15 minutes long recording I found a creaky spot on the wooden floors of my house, rocked back and forth in place and pointed a stereo mic at my feet. I remember doing this years ago, but thought I’d give it another go using a faster sampling rate and bit depth so the quality is not reduced as much when pitched down. Before making the recording I set the sampling rate and bit depth to 96kHz and 24 bit. I pitched it down two octaves and then normalized the results before rendering the final output.
I’ve suggested this technique on several occasions to students and sound designers to manufacture a realistic simulation of a creaking ship. It’s sounds as if I added reverb, but it’s just the natural sound of the room itself. I was not particularly careful about recording in a quiet environment. I heard a car go by outdoors at one point, but it’s not too noticeable after the down pitching.
Down Pitched Wood Floor Creaks
This is only my second post on Audio Cookbook as I’ve been busy getting married in the last couple of months. Anyway, I’ve had more time to work on sounds and music (the organization of sound) and so I thought I would share a short segue tune that I’ve decided to include in my upcoming ten72 release Bicycle Family. The song sounds a bit like two other shorts that I’ve produced and helped produce. One is Baby Teeth from the ten72 release Flavour Country and Aerosol Eighty from the Keston and Westdal release One Day to Save All Life. This Short track has a working tittle of Teity which is my own alternate spelling of tidy. The programing is a mix of shorty little tidy samples mixed in with slick classic TR808 drum sounds. I played a really far out jazzy guitar melody over the top and it seemed out of place so I destroyed it with loads of filtering, dubby delay, and other fun tricks. The result is a nice contrast to the tidy bits. It flows in and out of the tiny sound particles like an electric stream.
To create this sound I took the bubbles sound from yesterday and programmed it into a simple sampling VST. I built a pattern of chords in a MIDI clip that covered a wide range of frequencies for the sample simultaneously. This created a sort of spectrum of pitches. The next step was to spread that spectrum of pitches by resampling the output in a processor called Fragulator that effectively chops up the sample into fragments that can then be automatically looped at different frequencies. 
Ever get yelled at by your parents for blowing bubbles through your straw? Well, now it’s my job to blow bubbles through a straw. For this recording I blew bubbles in a glass of water (not Guinness as the photo suggests) while recording the results. I used this sound to create the underwater atmosphere for Aaron Dabelow’s 3D animated short, “Drown”. You can hear the pitched and processed version in the post, 
I have yet to use this recording for anything. I made it about a year ago when I was working on the sound design for a 3D animated short. It was one of many sounds that didn’t make the cut, but still has an interesting characteristic or two. We’re all familiar with the sheet metal wobble. The plastic mat wobble is similar, but with less racket and a sort of low frequency rubbery quality. I must have been holding my breath during the recording because you can hear me breathe in deeply at the end.