Sound-A-Day 10.02.2011

Well ok, so it's not really the 10th. Still playing catch up from earlier this week. Probably will have to break my golden rule of not posting on the weekends. Ah well, my bed, I'll lay in it!

Well, here's a new sound for the 10th anyway. I'll be honest, I had no real goal when I started out on this, just a few things I wanted to try.

First off, Lucy bought herself a very swanky new lens while we where in London. It's a macro lens which is designed for very close up detailed shots. It looks absolutely stunning. I don't think she was best pleased with my first response when she demonstrated it though. The motors in it are really noisy, so straight away I asked if I could record it.

The next thing I wanted to try is also based on a photography idea. You may have noticed from the pics I upload that I'm really into HDR stuff. For those who aren't familiar with the technique, essentially it involves taking several shots of the same thing with different exposure settings. When you combine them together the result is an image with an exaggerated dynamic quality, hence HDR (High Dynamic Range) I thought it might be interesting to try the same thing with audio.

I used a clip-on contact microphone, and recorded the lens doing a failed focus. I did about 20 different recordings, each time with the mic on a different part of the lens and camera body, hoping that the amount of stuff between the mic and motor would create a nice range of filtering.

Then I spent quite a while trimming all the different samples exactly to size, before opening them into Logic for Merging together. The result was actually better than I expected, because the recordings gave such a wide frequency spectrum, you can get really aggressive with filtering and EQ. The only downside of course is the exaggeration of line hum etc.

Still, I didn't really want to just upload a nice recording of a servo, that's a bit dull. So next up I decided to just go to town on the sound inside Soundforge, making particular use of the Plugin Chainer. Something I've been getting into more and more since starting this blog.

TWISTING MOTORS by Noisy Neighbour Sound

There is a lot of editing done to this, more that is worth going into detail over. Most notable however is probably the time stretch, can never have enough time stretch!