Throat Singing

I have been wanting to post an example of my talented friend Chris Huff throat singing for some time, so here it is in all its unprocessed monophonic glory. Throat singing or overtone singing is a technique that vocalists use to sing multiple pitches at the same time with a single voice and is often used in various religious chants in central Asia.

I refrained from dousing it with a Taj Mahal style reverberation setting in case anyone wants to use it, since I am placing in it in the Share Remix Adapt sample pool. See if you can identify how many pitches he is producing simultaneously. It’s a little difficult to discern because of the dissonant intervals.

Chris Huff Throat Singing

 

 

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

 

Forgotten Complex

Now that I have a title for the piece in my last entry, I may as well post a segment from a different layer. This is the main melody. It’s a section of Rhodes Electric Piano that I recorded back in 2005 while testing a live looping technique in Ableton. Today my plan was to find a random clip and run it through some complicated filtering delay and then post the results. Later that same day I completed Forgotten Complex. Currently I have about fourteen different pieces in various states of completion, all as a side effect of my contributions to the One Sound Every Day project.

Forgotten Complex