Gurgling Water in Glass with Straw

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Today while tapping (no pun intended) the archives I came across this example of a recording I made of gurgling water in a glass by blowing through a straw. I posted a similar albeit higher pitched example a while ago in the entry Bubbles, and one of my first entries on ACB was pitched down and reverberated Water Atmosphere I produced for Aaron Dablow’s animated short, Drown. This thirty second recording required a long steady exhalation of the breath in my lungs as you can tell from my reaction at the end of the segment.

Deep Bubbles

Audio Cookbook on Make: Blog

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Yesterday afternoon the popular and renowned Make: Blog posted an article about my recent ACB entry, Processing Sound Using Photoshop. From the article:

Over at Audio Cookbook, John Keston has been running a few experiments with using image filters in Photoshop to process sound. Running the audio data through a Gaussian blur or Spherize filter, he was able to create some incredibly diverse effects from a simple electric piano input.

Thanks to Make: Blog author Jason Striegel for the good words. Checkout the full article over on the Make: Blog website. In addition to Make: the article has been written about on many other blogs in English and German including Synthtopia and Media Synesthesia. Who knew it would create such a stir?

Obliterating Audio with Photoshop

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So far my examples of Processing Sound Using Photoshop have been recognizable in comparison to the original versions. In my initial experiments my intent was to apply subtle changes as a reference. However, it’s interesting to hear what happens without restraint. Here I applied the Wave filter, which in many respects is analogous to sound. For example, you can assign a sine, square, or triangle wave to process the image. This filter changes the sound so dramatically that you might very well get similar results from altogether different sound sources. Imagine an ensemble of people wobbling sheets of flexible material in sync with each other.

Wave Electric Piano Pattern

Gaussian Blur

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Gaussian blur was the first Photoshop filter I tried applying to sound. I was not sure what to expect. I imagined the signal might be distorted or over-driven in some way. A Gaussian blur is created by applying a Gaussian function, which is also used in statistics for normal distribution. Instead of hearing distortion, the audio, to my ears, actually sounds blurred. The effect is like a chorus, but the envelope is less clear. The attack of each note seems slower or spread out while the frequency is blended or even slightly warbled. All in all a pleasantly surprising experiment.

Gaussian Blurred Electric Piano Pattern

Liquefied

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Once again, here’s the same electric piano from Processing Sound Using Photoshop. This time is has been liquefied by the Photoshop filter of the same name. Liquefy is nice because is relies on the human element of dragging through the image to warp it in the direction the mouse pointer is moved. I purposefully did not liquefy short sections of the waveform so I could compare the original signal and the manipulated one.

Liquified Electric Piano Pattern