I commute by bicycle daily and cycle for fun often as well, so I have lots of bike parts lying around that I should probably throw away. About a month ago I was hit by a car in the bike lane, but came out relatively unscathed. A few days later I realized my handlebars were slightly bent in the accident. After replacing them I decided to record some sounds I was making with the old ones. I chopped out the best samples and put them into an instrument so I could play them with a controller. I messed about with that for a little while then, just for fun, ran it through a long reverb. Here are the preliminary results.
Handlebar Wind
To make this 4:15 minutes long recording I found a creaky spot on the wooden floors of my house, rocked back and forth in place and pointed a stereo mic at my feet. I remember doing this years ago, but thought I’d give it another go using a faster sampling rate and bit depth so the quality is not reduced as much when pitched down. Before making the recording I set the sampling rate and bit depth to 96kHz and 24 bit. I pitched it down two octaves and then normalized the results before rendering the final output.
Ever get yelled at by your parents for blowing bubbles through your straw? Well, now it’s my job to blow bubbles through a straw. For this recording I blew bubbles in a glass of water (not Guinness as the photo suggests) while recording the results. I used this sound to create the underwater atmosphere for Aaron Dabelow’s 3D animated short, “Drown”. You can hear the pitched and processed version in the post,
This recording was made with a Shure VP88 stereo condenser mic on a Fostex FR-2LE field recorder as I was leaving work this evening. I usually exit out of a back stairwell with cement steps and brick walls. In other words, loads of natural sound reverberation.
Tonight I shot a video in an alley in Northeast Minneapolis as a thunder storm rolled in. I shot it with my mobile phone and then converted it to a wav file for today’s sound. Rather than inlcude the video I have put the audio here after compressing it as an mp3. I also included a shot of the storm clouds as I saw them. In the beginning of the recording I hear some chimes then the wind overdrives the mic a bit. On the whole, the recording seems to be made of mostly wind noise.