It has been far too long since I have written a post. I am totally absorbed in designing a new programme continuing with the theme of social sound design. It is no doubt keeping me very busy! I will give more details a bit later.

Max/MSP/Jitter Course
Last week I was in London attending an advanced course on Max/MSP/Jitter run by Sebastian Lexer. He knows Max/MSP inside out and has got a real knack for explaining things very well! The course was absolutely fantastic, I highly recommend it.

Tweet A Sound Concert
A while back, Scott Hewitt emailed me about a concert he and his team did using Tweet A Sound. People sent #tas tweets that got diffused through a 26-channel speaker array as an electroacoustic improvisation. You can download it here or listen to it below.

Here is a video of it:

Now back to work…

meet composer –> and sound designer –>

Two weeks ago I attended a talk by Darren Aronofsky (director of Pi, Requiem For A Dream, The Wrestler, etc.) during the Edinburgh Film Festival. I recorded the 90-minute talk, and thought I’d share a little 1m43s section where he speaks about how he met his composer Clint Mansel and his sound designer Brian Emrich. Quite entertaining trivia.

Sorry the quality is appalling. I just put the recorder in the drink holder on the seat. And the accoustics were very bad, the noisy pre-amps didn’t help nor did the people around me.

I’m busy setting up a little podcast, so when it is ready I will post the whole 90 minutes.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Sound Designer’s Telephone Game. It was great fun and in the spirit of Social Sound Design.

The Sound Designer’s Telephone Game started with a field recording of mine which was passed onto thirty people who had volunteered to participate. Each person was permitted to add only one effect. No one knew what the sound was like before they received it and what it would mold into later on. The point of the game was to see how the sound would evolve as it was processed.

what happens to a sound digitally whispered 30 times?

So what was the original sound? Any guesses? The sound is nothing special, just someone packing huge beer kegs into a truck. I thought it would work well as a starting point because it is percussive and has some good resonance, but right from the get-go the sound went in an unexpected direction.

The sound has traveled to all corners of the world (well I’m assuming) and even been taken out of the digital realm and through a Moogerfooger, and re-recorded under water with a homemade hydrophone.

Here is the original sound, recorded on a Zoom H4n and the on-board mics:

You can download all thirty-one sounds plus a track listing [mp3; 11.2MB]

The playlist below is all the sounds in chronological order with the name of the participant and the effect used:

Participants in order + effect used

01. Brian Green:
“I reversed the sample”

02. Edu Comelles:
“I used an effect from ableton live called “chorus”, took away some feedback and left what you can hear, almost like a convolved thing.”

03. Joel Corriveau:
“I used Logic’s Ringshifter. I automated parameters, but didn’t use it’s built in delay.”

04. Hadrien Bourely:
“Pan automation”

05. David McSherry:
“I subtly mashed it through a Moogerfooger MF-101 low pass filter (hardware)”

06. Flemming:
“Audacity’s reverse”

07. Tom:
“500ms cross-channel echo”

08. @Watterberg:
“This uses a custom panning and frequency shifting plugin I’ve concocted myself”"

09. Dan Mackinlay:
“Ableton live’s “Corpus” – which is some AAS physical modelling doohickey”

10. @Joshliebe:
“I used SSL X-Orcism on the sample -
turned down the howling and tombverb, and then adjusted the other
parameters.”

11. Glenn:
“I ran it through a vocoder of a synthesized tone.”

12. Robert Newman:
“I used the Sweeping Phaser in Adobe Audition.”

13. Josh:
“Plugin: Audio Damage: Ratshack Reverb v 2.0
Made a macro where one knob controls mic level, delay, repeats and depth. Then automated that macro to give the audio a groove. Then while playing back the automation I am manually adjusting the min/max values for the delay parameter in the macro so the range changes over time.”

14. Hugo:
“I used Reaktor with the GrainStatesFX ensemble. Officially it’s not just one effect, but it’s one plugin”

15. Mike:
“CrossFilter_Short (Kyma)”

16. Marcio:
“Basically, I put an Autofilter in an aux bus, and during the 1st half we only hear the effect. Then, the automation gradually closes the pre-fader send, the volume rises and we have the “original” sound again.”

17. Martin:
“I used the “Resampling” effect from DtBlkFx VST (http://rekkerd.org/dtblkfx/) to apply pitch shifting on a spectral level. I automated the shifting, so it goes up and down again.”

18. @ivsound:
“I went with a simple reverse quad delay (applied to the beginning of the sound in reverse.) then gliding pitch-bend”

19. Joe Still:
“Monstercrunch from the Pluggo pack”

20. tj milian:
“one effect: grain delay in ableton live.”

21. Rob:
“Ableton Live: added Corpus 17% wet”

22. Laurence:
“all I did was change the pitch on one of the tracks so that the difference ( when played through head phones and looped) you would get a binaural effect, a carrier wave would be produced in your head of about 10 hertz, I think this is in the lower theta or borderline delta wave. ”

23. @misterinterrupt:
“Steve Harris L/C/R Delay”

24. Erik:
“Its a reverb with variable size and width”

25. Toby:
“Re-recorded underwater”

26. Nathan:
“Audiomulch’s (http://www.audiomulch.com) “5Combs” filter to the right channel, leaving the left as I received it.”

27. Miguel:
“Just process the sound in Reaktor with a Delay ensemble. This one has a delay unit modulated by 2 LFOs . The main effect works in the frequency that is modulated by LFO 1 and the LFO 2 works in the stereo field, placing the sound from left to right and conversely.”

28. Stuart Smith:
“I used a custom Max/Msp patch using only 1 effect – FFT Fast Fourier Transform.”

29. Jason Job:
“I used Camel Audio’s Camel Space plugin.”

30. @themelissard:
“Soundhack’s Varispeed”

[photo by Marcia_Salviato; artist David Mach]

Across from my flat a bungee jumping crane set up shop, so I did too.

I brought my tripod for the mic and recording equipment, and recorded the screams of people when they jumped. Very entertaining indeed.

Here is a quick montage of a few of the screams. Because of the crane and the traffic, the recording is very noisy, but still worth a listen. The first scream is my favourite (it might have been a turkey now that I listen to it again)!

Recorded on Fostex FR-2 & Sennheiser MKH 418s

Living in Scotland, you’re bound to hear bagpipes. In fact I hear them most days because I live next to a park where bagpipers like to rehearse. So every now and then you’ll get an entry on bagpipes like this one or “This is Not a Bagpipe”. Today, I recorded two bagpipe players who were standing opposite each other, their positions gave for a nice stereo recording.

I love the idea of a grain of sound. In Max/MSP I used the simple granular synthesiser Gabor example [gabor.granular] from the FTM library by IRCAM. For the sound, I loaded a short segment of the recording where different sounds were happening (such as a breath, an attack and a sustained note) and used grain lengths ranging from 1 millisecond to 1 second while changing various settings that you see in the image. I didn’t process it further, other than a bit of compression and EQ.

(recorded on Zoom H4n with on board mics)

Download High Quality [44.1kHz; 16bit]

[photo by Robert Scoble but processed in Max/MSP/Jitter]