Gianpaolo and Sara from sounDesign ran a panel/workshop last weekend at the Enterferenze New Art Festival, and asked some of us around the world to contribute. The topic was “Design o’ the times” based on the concept of time design.

I have been wanting to create a time-lapse phonography piece for some time now, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy lately that I could only dedicate a few hours to this. So what you see is the basic workings without making it sound or look good.

With more time to program, I will use crossfading and FFT to create a morphing over time, which would hopefully make it sound good.

how does it work?

I wrote a program in Max/MSP to automize the whole process. Every 144 seconds, the software capture one frame from the webcam and a 100ms slice of sound, with a 5ms fade in and out to attempt ironing out the non-zero crossing clicks. Each new sound slice gets appended into a buffer containing the other sounds, which then gets exported and combined with the video.

In fairness, the timing is not fully accurate as I had to switch off my computer to work on sound as the sample rate was different. So I would switch off the time lapse to work on sound, and then catch up later with a few manual triggers.

the 24 hours

• Start the time lapse at 12am before going to bed
• Wake up (notice the birds waking up in the time lapse, awesome!)
• Drive to breakfast and do internet stuff
• Go to my usual coffee shop Vida e Caffe to prep for the weekend’s recording session
• Go home and eat lunch
• Go to the studio to edit some sound files and record a VO
• Go home where my friends are playing poker, but I don’t have time to participate
• Prepare all my gear for the weekend, where I’m going to the bush to record animals, ambiences and bush related sounds.
• I see the iPad in real for the first time (yes, it’s still not in South Africa)
• Pack my cloths for the weekend
• 12am (24hrs later) switch time lapse off

Added a bit of compression and EQ to the sound, then I combined the sound to the video. Went off to bed at 1.30am to be up at 4am! I was knackered!

Sound designers, web designers, programmers, writers, googlers, and youtubers sit for hours on end by a computer. As a result, most of us suffer from bad posture!

After getting really fed up with my bad posture, I thought I would write some software to remind me to sit up straight. My application Posture Man Pat started as a joke but actually turned into something really useful, so I thought I’d share it with you.

how does it work?

Very simple, it uses your webcam to track your face on the Y-axis of your screen. If your face drops a certain amount, then it triggers a warning. This software was built in Max/MSP/Jitter. And again, sorry Windows users but it’s a Mac-only software. If there is lots of interest, I will see if I can get someone to compile it for Windows.

getting started

1. Make sure your camera is switched on, you should be able to see yourself in the yellow screen at the bottom.

2. If you can’t, then press [cam settings] to change the input.

3. If you are using an external camera, make sure it is facing you.

4. Make sure there is enough light on your face.

5. Get yourself into a good posture.

6. Press spacebar or the big yellow button.

7. If you adjust camera position, make sure to press space bar again.

warning settings

1. The volume slider affects the volume of the warning bell.

2. The [test] button allows you to test the warning bell and/or flash.

3. With the radio buttons, you can choose whether you want the warning to consist of just a sound, a flash, or both. You can also choose to have it all together off.

4. If you’re having audio issues or it is interfering with other programs, go to settings > audio settings and choose the right settings from there.

tip

The warning sound and/or flash only triggers once per bad posture. If you stay in your bad posture it will not go off again. However, once you correct your posture, Posture Man Pat will arm itself again and be ready to warn you.

credit

Huge thanks to Jean-Marc Pelletier for his incredible work on the cv.jit objects for Max/MSP. Also, thanks to Masayuki Akamatsu for building the aka.objects that allows Max/MSP to interface with the Mac.

feedback

Please let me know if there are problems. Considering how different each system is,  I can’t test everything. I would love to hear some feedback. For instance, on my machine, the Google camera for my G-chat takes over my webcam, so I have to reset it every now and then. I have also kept the settings to a minimum to avoid complicating things, if you think I should allow for more tracking options, please post a comment.

One of my favorite blogs on sound design has just turned one! Happy birthday Designing Sound. Thank you Miguel Isaza and Jake Riehle for all your hard work.  I hope there will be many more to come!

As a little gift, here’s virtual birthday cake I built in Max/MSP, it’s chocolate. All you have to do is turn up your audio, blow out the candle (blow at your microphone) and make a wish. This software is Mac only, sorry Windows users.

If you aren’t subscribed to Designing Sound, I strongly recommend you do as it is one of the top resources for sound designers.

Last week I was on a shoot in a South African township, and there was a chicken coop . It sounded pretty awesome, so I recorded the ambience of it. The recording has unfortunately got traffic sounds, and I had to edit quite a bit around people talking. There is also the sound of the farmer whistling, but I left that in as it was for most of the recording and I kind of like it. I find it amazing how much more horrible this feels when hearing it versus looking at a picture.

Chicken Coop by SoundPlusDesign

The photo below is blurry, but if you look carefully, you’ll see that there is a pile of dead chickens. While recording, I didn’t notice and stepped on them. A mix of crunch, mush, fluff and all round yuk! The smell was vile! Needless to say that it is awful and sad to keep animals locked up like this.

I ran a competition on Social Sound Design (SSD) where the first person to get the Nice Question Badge would win a signed copy of David Sonnenschein’s book Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema. The winner is Fabrice Million (what a cool name), a Frenchman living in Australia. He is a freelance web and flash developer as well as a musician. Congratulations, Fabrice! Hope you love it as much as I did.

Considering how popular this question is, I thought I’d curate a compilation of the best answers. The rest of this entry is an attempt to extract and organise all the good answers from Fabrice’s question: How to capture very low volume sound? I’m not going to quote who said what as that will get too convoluted, just think of it as the voice of SSD.

So… How To Capture Very Soft Sounds?

First off, context is important. Is the sound being recorded for scientific or creative purposes? If it is scientific, then precision and accuracy  is the priority. If it is for a more creative outcome, then the way we capture, edit, process and re-contextualize the sound matters.

They are two principle ways to record soft sounds: the first is through air and the second is through mechanical vibrations.

air – condenser mics

The main problem with recording soft sounds, is that normal microphones and pre-amps on mixers and recorders all add noise to the signal. If it’s more expensive gear, chances are there will be less self-noise. So when recording a soft sound, you will probably have to increase the gain a fair bit and you also will also increase the noise floor. But even if your recording setup is dead quiet, any environmental sound will be amplified.

If the sound isn’t that soft, you can get away with being in a very quiet room such as your bedroom in the dead of night or a studio or even an anechoic chamber. You will need to be using a low self-noise microphone such as a large condenser mic. You can even go ultrasonic with Avisonics.

vibration – contact mics

A contact mic is basically the equivalent of putting your ear directly on something. It picks up mechanical vibrations rather than air. Thus making it a great option for capturing soft sounds.

One of the biggest challenges of recording quiet sounds is the medium transfer. As sounds transfer from medium to medium (such as a gas to a solid, or a liquid to a gas), you loose SPL. Let’s say you’re trying to record a light bulb filament. The sound has to transfer from the filament to the gas in the bulb, then transfers from the gas to the glass bulb, then transfers from the glass to the air around it, then to the microphone element. That’s four transfers between a solid and a gas, hence a lot of lost SPL. If you take two transfers out of the equation by attaching a contact mic directly to the glass, you have a lot more SPL to work with, and therefore can get a much better signal-to-noise ratio.

With a good contact mic, you can even pick up the sound of ants’ footsteps or the heart beat of a snail. Got $3,000 to spare? Check out the “Insect Mic” By Sanken.

So now you want to buy/build a contact mic? Check out the question: Can you suggest a good contact mic for sound design?

sound design

Most of the time, these sounds are being used in a creative context, which means we have carte blanche to re-create the sound by recording louder sources that are probably unrelated (other than sonically) to the desired sound.  There is also the synthesis route, where you can create the sound from noise, oscillators, filters and so-forth, whilst bypassing the process of recording and therefore adding potential noise to a soft source .

Sound design is a mix of capturing, editing, and re-contextualiaation. Making it sound right doesn’t mean making it sound accurate. This also takes the pressure off of trying to record the impossible.

Contributors: Funk patrol, Matt Cavanaugh, tim prebble, Colin Hart, NoiseJockey, Chris K, Andrew Spitz, georgi.m, small budget guru, birdhousesound, Selcuk Can Guven.

My friends over at Pro Sound Effects have just released an insane BBC sound effects library. Imagine the BBC doing show after show, year after year in a ton of different locations and covering millions of topics. Now catagorise them, update the metadata, then package them into a 1TB hard drive and voilà! For example, a bunch of the nature sounds come from and where used in the BBC Planet Earth Series. The historical archive sounds capture “pivotal moments in sonic history and sound effects from all over the world”.

If this kind of stuff interests you, then go check out the BBC Sound Effects Library.

When I started using SoundHack, I saw one could add an .aiff header to a non-sound file thus turning any piece of digital information into a sound file. So I tried once, got very excited and proceeded to quickly forgetting about it. In the Cycling ‘74 forum someone posted a question about just that and so I thought I’d try it again.

I recently bought myself a Sound Devices 702, which I very much love! I added an .aiff header to the instruction manual PDF.

This is what 74 pages of crucial info sound like:
sound of 702 manual

I didn’t do anything to it apart from bringing down the insanely high volume. The six seconds of sound is exactly the length of the converted 74 pages.

This is what the waveform looks like:

And here’s a closer look:

Sorry I haven’t posted anything in a long time. I’ve been very busy and internet is a definite luxury here in South Africa.

I recently was interviewed by sounDesign, a great Italian sound design blog run by Sara and Gianpaolo. Thanks for the opportunity, guys! From what I understand, they are starting an English version of their blog, so go check it out! Add their feed to your reader or follow them on Twitter @soundesignblog.

They asked me four questions:

1. Is sound design an up and coming issue among the creative industry? What do you think, what do you see around you?
2. Why did you start Social Sound Design? Do you think that creating an organized worldwide community would be useful for sound designers?
3. What do you think is the most important need for sound designers now?
4. What would you suggest to young people wishing to become a sound designer? Which one is the never-without tool?

Check out the interview here

They also have really good interviews with Tim Prebble from Music of Sound, who talks about his new (and awesome) project HISS and a ROAR, and with sound designer and composer Diego Stocco, who always does amazing projects such as Music from a Tree.

I’m finally done putting together a Q&A site for us sound designers. I’m very, very excited about this project! Come visit Social Sound Design. It’s 100% free. SSD is brand new and freshly unwrapped, so let’s get the ball rolling with lots of questions, answers and knowledge exchange.

about the project

Sound design has many facets. As sound designers, we may step into the shoes of an artist, programmer, editor, storyteller or engineer. Because we play so many roles, we may not have all the expertise we need to carry out a project. The purpose of this site is to provide a community-driven knowledge exchange on all disciplines of sound design.

Whenever I’m busy with a project, I have to navigate through a countless number of forums and websites to find information. On the flip side, I often receive emails from people who have questions. It takes me a lot of time to respond and the information only goes to that one person instead of the community.

If we share our knowledge, we can spend less time reinventing the wheel and more time creating.

competition

The first user to receive the Nice Question badge (question voted up 10 times)
will win a signed copy of David Sonnenschein’s book Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema. He was kind enough to donate it for Social Sound Design. Thank you, David!

here’s the deal

It’s totally free for you to use, but I will soon have to pay for the service and it’s not cheap. However, I really believe it’s worth every penny! We all will benefit hugely from having a place to share our knowledge of sound design. Right now, the site is in beta. But, on the next release, the 45 day free trial will start, then they will charge for the service. To keep Social Sound Design going, I need lots of us to be involved in it. This way, I can get advertising to help buffer the cost (I will happily pay the difference).

need more information?

Read the FAQ page.
Read the Help page (how to embed media).
Read the Info page.

get connected

SSD on twitter:
@SocialSD where all the latest questions and news are posted.

recent questions RSS feed:
RSS where you can sign up to receive  the latest questions in your rss reader.

email
forum [at] soundplusdesign [dot] com

…Frightening me! Galileo, Galileo Figaro…

In summer, Johannesburg gets the craziest thunder showers. They don’t last long, but they are very vicious and sound like no other storms I’ve ever heard.

The other night I recorded a thunder storm. I just love how the thunder keeps on rolling and crackling. You can just picture the sound decaying slowly as it reflects through the whole city. Have a listen:

Thunder 01
Thunder 02
Thunder 03

It’s a pity it was raining, as it spoiled a little bit the sound of the thunder. I hope I will be able to catch some clean thunder before the rain or wind picks up.

Interested in building your own thunder generator using synthesis in Pure Data? Check out this great tutorial by Andy Farnell

[photo by Flickr user petervj]