iPod Garbled Piano Recording

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I finally made a dock connector for my third generation iPod that I’ve been making experimental recordings on with Linux and an AT822 stereo mic. Prior to making the dock connector I was only able to make mono recordings via the headphone jack. Since the dock connector only accepts a line level signal, I am pre-amping the AT822 with my ailing Sony PCM-M1 DAT recorder (it eats tapes, so it’s a useful retirement).

With this setup I am able to use the otherwise useless DAT recorder by connecting the stereo mic to the mic input, putting the device in record mode, adjusting the levels, and then taking the line out to the dock connector on the iPod as shown in the photograph. The recordings are relatively clean except for a tiny bit of high frequency interference that I haven’t tracked down yet.

The only other problem is that recording in stereo seems to tax the resources of the iPod. When I try to record at a sampling rate higher than 44.1kHz the audio is likely to suffer from a bizarre digital jitter effect. Here’s an example of a piano recording at 88kHz that I played and edited together to illustrate the jitter problem. I wouldn’t use this rate for anything I want to record well, but I kind of like the stuttering sound it creates as the iPod fails to process the audio quickly enough to store it accurately.

iPod Garbled Piano Recording

There’s Four Chips in that Bag

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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

 

Old Amplifier Abuse

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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

One Hundred Sounds in Eight Seconds

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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

The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives

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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.