Phone Recording of Car Park Reverberation

The scene is a huge and deserted underground car park around 3am. You shut the door to your vehicle. the sound reverberates for almost a minute. What do you do? Do it again! I found myself in this position after a late evening out with my wife recently. Unfortunately all I had available to make a recording was my mobile phone. So, I set it to record and started opening and closing the door to my wife’s pickup truck, listening to the results. I knew the recording would suck, but I had to take a crack at it. As you may have heard, my wife thinks I’m crazy. As long as she doesn’t find out it’s true, I think I’m ok.

Car Park Reverb

Phone Recording of Drum Jam in Mexico

You may have thought that I have posted some random clips of audio on this site in the past. That is a fair statement, but tonight I have converted seventeen recordings I have made with my Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone to .wav format. They are more nostalgic than useful so I won’t be posting all of them, but they do have a certain charm in an ultra lofi way.

The phone records sound at 16 bit. The sampling rate, on the other hand, is only 8 kHz – nowhere near the fidelity of standard audio CDs (44.1 kHz). So here is something on a pretty high magnitude of randomness: a drum jam I recorded at a little open air club in Playa del Carmen, Mexico back in March, 2007. The music was good. The tequila was better. The recording is awful. If you brave this one out, then you know what an 8 kHz phone recording sounds like.

Phone Recording of Drum Jam in Mexico

 

Living Room Ambiance

This sound was captured accidentally in my living room as I fiddled about getting ready to record my piano. The hardwood floors created some serious low frequencies up the mic stand as I was moving around.

If you listen carefully, you can really hear the shape and temperature or the room. I added a significant amount of gain to get this into an audible range. Otherwise, it’s really just an example of a recording that I never intended to make.

Living Room Ambiance

 

Hummingbird Morse Code

One of the things I do frequently, either for the sake of experimentation or for inspiration, is to apply multiple levels of processing with the intent of significantly manipulating an otherwise mundane sound. With a myriad of audio effects available to us this is also a good exercise in learning how certain kinds of processing impacts audio.

I started with a loop of hand drums going through Fragulator (Pluggo). Fragulator fragments the input signal into chunks, similar to grain-table synthesis. The chunks are looped at varying speeds to create a broad variety of effects. It was already drastically different from the original, so I chose to add only one more device. Harmonic Filter (Pluggo again) controls twenty-five filters with a cellular automata algorithm. I used its filter sweep mechanism to spread the stereo spectrum and provide tonal variety over the 1:25 minute recording.

Humming Bird Morse Code

Mississippi (Founders Mix)

AudioCookbook.org has been featured today on ccMixter, “ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.” Along with the announcement, the ccMixter artist, Victor (aka fourstones) posted a remix called Mississippi (Founders Mix) using several recordings from AudioCookbook.org. Samples used include, Roof Racket, Piano Mallet Loop, Pro-One Dub, AM Radio Static, Time Expanded Radio Static, vocals by Kristin Hersh and several others. Checkout the mix on ccMixter for more information. Since the track uses several samples from AudioCookbook.org I am posting it here as today’s entry into the “One Sound Every Day” project. This marks the first time that I have not directly produced the daily sound, however, I feel this is an excellent example. If you like the track, head over to ccMixter and give some love to Victor for this tasty mashup.

Mississippi (Founders Mix)