I top and tailed this clip of ambiance from a popular lunch spot in downtown Minneapolis, applying quick fades in the beginning and end of the twenty four second example. I also applied normalization to boost the levels.
One of the employees prompts a customer into ordering his peperoni sandwich. After that I examine a bag of chips and my friend Derrin advises me that “there’s four chips in that bag”.
Four Chips in that Bag
A couple of weeks ago, while working in the studio with Nils Westdal, we decided to experiment with an old amplifier that has a built in spring reverb. We plugged the direct out into a firewire interface and hit the record button in the software. Nothing was plugged into the amp, but by turning up the reverb knob all the way and the volume most of the way up, the spring reverb became very sensitive to vibrations. All that was left to do was to bang the amp around a bit while capturing the output.
Spring Reverb
Last Friday, November 7th, to mark my one hundredth sound posted in the One Sound Every Day category, I sequenced forty two equally sized micro samples extracted from sounds I had posted here on AudioCookbook.org. Due to a trip scheduled out of the country, I ran out of time and did not compile all of the available ninety nine sounds into the piece. As promised in the original post, I have now managed to complete the chronologically sequenced compilation of micro samples into eight seconds of chaotic noise. I extended the one hundredth sample of Caribbean surf as an ending to the staccato sequence.
100 Micro Samples
Slashdot.org has an article about a site that is hosting the sounds of thirty five different hard drives failing. Although the recording quality is generally poor there are some really interesting sounds including a Maxtor drive with a stuck spindle producing a “futuristic cell phone melody”. You can read the article and checkout the sounds here, although it might be a bit busy due to the site being slashdotted.
Also, click the image to see a video of a remix of Nude by Radiohead made entirely out of sounds captured from old computer peripherals including a dot matrix printer, scanner, cassette drive, hard drives, and so on. The remix and video was created by Glasgow based artist James Houston.
I recently recorded the sound of Caribbean surf and the gurgling of the waves as they receded from tide pools on a beach near Playa del Carmen in Quintana Roo, Mexico. I did my best to shield the wind from the mic, but the cheap foam wind screen I brought with me was painfully inadequate.
To try and repair the sound I edited a few instances of clipping, and ran the lot through a a high pass filter to reduce some of the wind noise. Finally I compressed the audio to bring out some of the gurgling and splashy sounds.
Caribbean Surf