Audio Harvested from the Sound Garden

Posted on March 5, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

The Sound Garden project by Norbert Herber was recently installed at the 2009 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts. By good fortune I was in the right place at the right time and had the opportunity to discuss the work with the artist at the event.

The installation includes multiple channels of speakers and a variety of sensors where the installation is installed. It is also linked to a web application where sound files are “planted” and “pruned” by site visitors. Visitors to the physical location for the installation influence the audio processing by interacting with various sensors in the space.

A more thorough explanation of Norbert’s piece is available on his site. Norbert gave me permission to capture a segment from the audio stream for the purpose of this article. Before doing so I planted one of my own files from Audio Cookbook to influence the output.

Segment from Sound Garden

1972 Dialogue Processed with Distort Plaster Photoshop Filter

Posted on March 1, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Testing the newest version of Photosounder gave me an opportunity to apply some Photoshop filters to sound that I had not yet tried. I experimented with halftone patterns, lens blur, pixelated color halftones, the patchwork filter, and the smudge tool.

One of the more interesting filters ended up being the plaster effect under distort. The plaster effect has a relief setting to give the image a 3D look, but also smooths the insides of areas within the image. This eliminated the noise between the speech, but also made the dialogue virtually unintelligible.

1972 Dialogue Through Distort Plaster

Improved Processing of Sound with Photoshop

Posted on February 28, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Michel Rouzic has just released version 1.4 of Photosounder that includes a new “lossless” mode so the output is identical to the input. Previously there was some loss of resolution importing the audio. From Michel:

Basically the lossless mode in question is a sort of 2D time-frequency filtering mode, kind of like some other programs like Audition 3 do by letting you airbrush on a spectrogram, that’s the idea basically. The difference here is that besides the brushes that Photosounder has, you can export the image to Photoshop and do some very precise filtering, for example making a sound feature disappear by hand, enhancing parts of a sound, subtracting to sound as I once did by making the difference between a song’s spectrogram and its instrumental version’s spectrogram to isolate the vocals, experiment with contrast, curves, levels, sharpening, various effects (I’m pretty sure you could for example try the glowing edges again and get a different sounding result).

To illustrate the lossless mode, here’s a segment of dialogue from a 1972 social commentary film in the public domain presented with the lossless mode on and again with it off. The lossless mode sounds exactly like the original waveform, while without the lossless mode the audio lacks resolution.

Photosounder Dialogue with Lossless Mode On

Photosounder Dialogue with Lossless Mode Off

Vocalese Vocoder Technique

Posted on February 27, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Pluggo includes an interesting device called Vocalese. Basically, Vocalese is a virtual instrument made up of a collection of phonetic samples. If you’re clever, and very patient, you can paste these samples together to create words, thereby synthesizing speech. I wasn’t really interested in doing that, nor am I patient enough, but I liked the idea of using the instrument to drive a vocoder. In order to do this I created a MIDI sequence that played each one of the phonetic samples in the instrument. Then I used a plugin to randomize the notes in realtime, so the sequence is never the same. Then I directed the output into a vocoder plugin, followed by delay and reverb for atmosphere.

Vocalese Vocoder

Filthy Rhodes Loop at 110bpm

Posted on February 17, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Love it or hate, the Rhodes is here to stay. Eventually we will have the Rhodes Mark 7, maybe even this year? Perhaps, in the distant future, after the patents expire, the Rhodes mechanics will become part of the public domain, similar to the acoustic piano, and be produced by a variety of companies. There might be a nine foot grand Rhodes, a studio Rhodes, a baby Rhodes, and an upright Rhodes. This chunk of “studio” Rhodes is running through loads of processing including MDAs RezFilter, delay and who knows what else.