Hummingbird Morse Code

One of the things I do frequently, either for the sake of experimentation or for inspiration, is to apply multiple levels of processing with the intent of significantly manipulating an otherwise mundane sound. With a myriad of audio effects available to us this is also a good exercise in learning how certain kinds of processing impacts audio.

I started with a loop of hand drums going through Fragulator (Pluggo). Fragulator fragments the input signal into chunks, similar to grain-table synthesis. The chunks are looped at varying speeds to create a broad variety of effects. It was already drastically different from the original, so I chose to add only one more device. Harmonic Filter (Pluggo again) controls twenty-five filters with a cellular automata algorithm. I used its filter sweep mechanism to spread the stereo spectrum and provide tonal variety over the 1:25 minute recording.

Humming Bird Morse Code

Roof Racket

This morning at approximately 7:14 am roofers started removing four layers of asphalt tiles, along with the original cedar shakes, from the roof of my 102 year old house. Not being one to squander such opportunities, I recorded some of their hammering from inside the house. There’s some really nice wooden resonance to it. I hope you like it as much as I still am enjoying it. The photo is a detail from some of the debris that is collecting around the perimeter of my house. At this stage it was about 18″ deep.

Roof Racket

Robot Conspiracy

I can’t seem to get enough robot action these days. Robots have lots of personality. Much more than politicians who convene in St. Paul. I used a similar technique to get this sound as I did for Robot Music. This time, however, I did a bit of processing after the fact, including pitching the recording down thirteen steps. Why thirteen? Because thirteen is a cool number. It’s subversive and pagan and not a floor in lots of buildings. I also added some standard reverberation and automated up some delay at the end to please my sense of aural space.

Robot Conspiracy

Feedback Saturated Radio Static

I looped this section of radio static where I was quickly swapping between two channels of music with the analogue dial. Although cacophonous, it has a strangely attractive rhythmic and musical quality to it. So, of course that led me to experiment with some processing. I did not want to manipulate it too much so I could illustrate the drunken quality to the passage as it repeats, but I added a short, modulated, stereo delay to create some imaging on the mono recording. After that I decided to map a couple of controllers to the left and right feedback of the delay, allowing me to over saturate the output dynamically over the recording’s one minute and six seconds duration.

Feedback Saturated Radio Static

Time Expanded Radio Static

If you had a chance to hear Johannes Kreidler’s piece, Product Placement, made up of 70,200 samples in 0:33 seconds, then you probably thought is sounded a lot like radio static. To me it sounds like parts of it were time compressed and probably up-pitched, but altogether quite an achievement. Although, you might find the style of Akufen’s piece, Deck the House, more musical.

Rather than time compress the radio static I posted yesterday, I had a go at time expanding it. Time expansion works by stretching waveforms without changing the pitch. This can have some odd results when time expanding by a significant amount. You will often hear a repetitive stuttering, or garbled effect, like what’s happening in this example. In the image you can see the garbled sections represented as rectangular patterns that occur throughout the waveform.

Time Expanded Radio Static