noisybox blog

The northwest's rainy reminder...

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 04:16:02 GMT

It's easy to forget that the first week of June is still squarely in the springtime, not yet summer. As we became increasingly drenched today at a nearby campsite, I was reminded of this fact. The Pacific Northwest won't let you forget.

I didn't bring recording gear, so I just made this field recording with a cellphone, laying on a table, under a pop-up shelter while quietly reading a book.

((download))

Thrilling Grunts

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:59:42 GMT

I started a ridiculous project like 9 years ago: To cut up the entirety of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album into just the grunts and hoots, similar to what I did with Billy Idol all the way back in 2009.

This last weekend I found the project and realized just how close it was to completion, so I went ahead and finished it and published it.

So now I present to you: Thrilling Grunts. Enjoy.

Introducing noise-arch radio

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 03:10:00 GMT

Introducing noise-arch radio. It's a thing I created.

It's a long-form audio stream of the items in the noise-arch cassette archive collection on archive.org.

Not everything in the collection is great, and some of it is obnoxious, but there are some real treasures in there as well! I find it fun to randomly "tune" in now and again to hear what's playing.

I calculated the total runtime from the metadata in the collection -- it's just over 2 weeks. In other words, the playlist will get re-shuffled about every 14 days. It's a lot of content.

I have no idea how many listeners it can support on such a small cloud instance, and I have given zero thought about scaling it. I assume nobody cares or actually wants to listen to this stuff, so whatever.

Building contact mics

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 06:29:13 GMT

Finally starting a process of building a small collection of ACTUALLY USABLE diy contact microphones.

The ones pictured here will have some strain relief before being plasti-dipped.

I've built these over the years, but never of any decent quality. In fact, I think the one I made back in 2005 when I made the
Liar's Rail recording just had some exposed solid-conductor twisted pair wire hanging off it (recycled phone cord or ethernet I think).

So any time in the last couple of years that I've reached for one in the parts bin it seems to always be screwed up and doesn't work right. That frustration plus a small surplus of discs remaining from Wacky Willy's days provoked this process.

It's purely an aesthetic choice, but I now totally love cables with nylon sleeves over them now. This is my first time actually hacking/reusing some cable like that. I think maybe the right thing to do is to buy the sleeving separately, but I got lazy and hurried into buying a longer prefab cable for reuse. It's fine and totally workable, but some cable does get wasted due to fraying. If you look carefully in the photo above, one of the mics has a larger black piece of heat shrink covering some area where the sleeve didn't stretch as much as I had expected. I think it won't matter much once it's dipped, but there's a learning process here for me.

Tonight was also my first attempt at recording directly from the contact mics with the Zoom H2n. The default mic power was enabled, and the sound was very clear and loud. Stoked it worked so well.

I intend to also build some other formats, like:

rigid epoxy puck
dual vocal chord throat mic choker
fidget spinner contact mic box
hydrophone

Final experimental homework...

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 03:00:00 GMT

Last week was the fourth and final week for the experimental music course I've been taking. Due to being busy with other things, I had put off the "homework" for a week and got back to experimentation this weekend.

Last week's lesson was all about synth techniques. What a doozy! I feel like that's a very difficult subject to cram into a 90 minute session. Even if you can be certain that people have some exposure to basic signal theory and techniques, it's really difficult to describe a patch and there's definitely some problems around expecting people to have access to specific modules (are formant and shepherd filters that commonplace? lol). As an exhibition, it was very cool...but as a teaching/learning session, I think it was a bit of a stretch.

I did 3 or 4 different patches, one of which was strongly inspired by one of Jamie Stewart's example patches in the class (although I made a couple small tweaks). I took some of the session audio and arranged it into this rough track:

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Direct links to files here: flac mp3

Honestly, in a pretty dark place while making these. Stoked with how they turned out, but the mix could use a lot of love, something that I'm not going to put time into right now though.

More experimental homework...

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 05:30:00 GMT

This week's "homework" for the experimental music course was pretty deep and had 5 possible assignments. One of these was to compose and record a short piece of music using only percussion (using techniques covered in class).

I'm not really a percussionist, so this seemed like a good challenge. Here is the final recording of what I ended up putting together this afternoon. Give it a listen while you read about the process below.

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direct link

I think I remember my brother telling me that he was in the music program at the University of Oregon with Ches Smith, and that Ches used to gig with a sawblade used as a crash or a bell or something. Since much of our course material involved really nice shiny percussion instruments that I definitely do not own, I figured I would still give it an honest attempt starting with this sawblade as inspiration. I had an old/used skill saw blade around, and started by suspending that from the rafter.

Initial experiments showed that it sounded pretty good and had a nice ringing bell sound. When a playing it close to the microphone, however, the swinging and spinning made it pretty hard to capture the sound. I ended up adding a second tie to prevent it from rotating, and that helped a lot.

I also suspended a piece of sheet aluminum that have cut up previously for making eurorack faceplates. I didn't want to drill holes in it, so I first tried to compression fit two nuts on a bolt on either side. That failed horribly and quite dangerously. :) I instead used needle-nose vice grips and suspended it via that. The rich gong sound from a simple flat rectangular piece of aluminum was pretty surprising (to me)!

I also had the brass frame from a decorative air plant holder that a friend had gifted me several years ago. That was already hanging in the shop, so I used that as well since it had a nice triangle sound.

I think I recorded like 14 or 15 tracks and ended up using these final 11:

The track breakdown is something like this:

skill saw blade, suspended and played with rubber mallet
aluminum plate gong, played with rubber mallet on main face
aluminum plate gong, played with steel street sweeper tine on side
handsaw, suspended in one hand by handle, played with rubber mallet
drumsticks, tapping on side of guitar amplifier cabinet
child's "first act" hand cymbal toy, played off-time, freeform/improv
toy hand cymbal, played upside down with loose nut+bolt inside bowl
BMX bike handlebars with loose nut+bolt inside, used as shaker
galvanized garden bucket, held in one hand and drummed on the bottom with rubber mallet
small crowbar striking large crowbar suspended from fingertip
bronze pyramid triangle, played with metal street sweeper tine

Aside from some pretty flagrant reverb on the sticks and a couple level adjustments, everything is just as I recorded it -- no edits, all timing mistakes are mine to own. As such, it is raw and could certainly using some mixing/equalizing at the very least, but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Future improvements -- with more time, I hope to do some more experimentation with the sawblade, perhaps figuring out how to mount horizontally more like a cymbal. I will also experiment with adding loose screw/nut combinations to the blade to add some rattle or odd dampening. I think there is a notable lack of low-end bass in this work, and I've long wanted to experiment with tubular bass cannon type drums...so that would be another future experiment.

It was also clear from this experiment that the microphone I've used is wrong for this type of work. It's much much too directional and lots of tone was lost as the instruments changed their position or rotated. Something with a broader direction could have compensated for and possibly maintained some of the interesting tonal changes that were happening as things moved around (this was lost in process).

That's it for now. More homework later this week or next week!

More experimental homework...

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 05:30:00 GMT

As I mentioned in the last blog, I'm taking a zoom course on Composing Experimental Music, we have optional "homework" assigned -- which is really a set of flexible techniques to experiment with and explore timbre.

In class, Jamie demonstrated several means of exploring amp feedback width stringed instruments (including the immediately recognizable autoharp!), and I really don't have any viable stringed instruments right now. I really wanted to make one out of scrap wood and rubber bands, but time didn't afford that this cycle (I hope to revisit sometime soon). It occurred to me that the springs inside the spring reverb tank might behave a little bit like oddly shaped "strings", so I performed some feedback experimentation.

In this experiment, I left the reverb tank input open, so all sound was internally generated through mechanical vibration of the springs -- either through externally tapping with hand or drumstick, or by the speaker vibrations resonating with the coils. This is what I had really hoped to explore.

I absolutely LOVE the industrial echoing machinery sounds of the spring reverb, but I wasn't going for that this time around.

I got some interesting resonances by playing with various effects settings and modulating the position of the tank and riding the effects controls (mostly volume).

From this experiment, I have put together one rushed/stupid video and one clip of excerpts.

I later set the amp on its back and had the tank sitting on the mesh facing down/vertical. This allowed me to adjust positions while being more able to monitor the effects controls with two hands. I worked with several varied effects modes, but mostly used the downward pitch shift in hopes of getting a lower frequency bass response and reducing the high-pitch static feedback tone that everybody can picture in their head right now.

It was a much longer session, but here are several edited excerpts:

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Direct link is here: Homework 02b

I am pleased with the resonant tones/outcome of this experiment, and I believe that additional exploration with a bass cabinet or feeding back through a transducer (possibly through mechanical linkages of odd varieties) could yield even more interesting timbres.

Experimental compositions homework

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 08:30:00 GMT

I'm taking Jamie Stewart's course on Composing Experimental Music, and it's already halfway through and I'm enjoying it tremendously. It's blazingly fast paced and is covering a TON of ground on so many varied topics really quickly.

All of the "homework" is optional and this course is just not for credit or anything, but one of the reasons I wanted to take it was to be exposed to some new possibilities and to nudge myself to do some more experimentation.

For the first assignment, I decided to dust off a synthesizer I built 20 years ago, the triwave picoswash. I ran it through a modeling amplifier that was scrounged from a dumpster that I later repaired (tho it's still fucked up, only one of the digits on the display is working). Jamie covered a little about frequency beating (not a new concept, but one I haven't explored much recently), so I decided to spend some time de/tuning the two sides of the triwave into giving some interesting beat patterns.

Of course, the triwave always sounds better when patched through the noise swash, and then I ran the amp in a reverb/delay mode with the parameters up basically all the way (tho it's hard to be sure with the broken display, heh).

So here's a brief clip from that session, just recorded on a phone:

The second class gave several assignments, and one of them involved capturing a field recording and then turning it into a composition using the DAW. It was a rather slow and mostly quiet Friday afternoon in my neighborhood, but I managed to get some sounds recorded and turned them into this piece here:

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Here is the direct link to mp3 here: Homework 02a

I'm pleased with the way it turned out! I wanted to make some musique concrète while keeping some aspects of the source material clearly audible. I wanted it to sound like a field recording, but with some enhanced editing/mixing/structure/interest.

There are several more parts to the "homework" (all of it is optional, for fun/learning/experimentation), I have a bit more to finish up and share. More to come in a following blog entry.

World Listening Day 2020-07-18 in Portland, OR

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 23:00:00 GMT

This year, World Listening Day was on Saturday, July 18th, 2020. The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and civil unrest (caused by social injustice) have dramatically altered the world. I thought it would be interesting to try and recreate the soundwalk I did last year in hopes of making a recording that could demonstrate a sonic contrast.

In order to be more faithful to the previous recording, I took the liberty of doing the soundwalk on Friday, one day before the actual official World Listening Day. I met up with my colleague Wes downtown at noon, and we wore masks and stayed outdoors and socially distant. There were a few surprises along the way.

First, the wind was considerably stronger than prior years. I decided to try the windscreens that came with my in-ear binaural microphones, but I wasn't sure how they might be impacting the recording volume (plus, it was just really quiet downtown). Once we were walking for a few minutes, the wind really wasn't that bad and I'm not entirely sure how necessary the windscreens were (although they probably helped). The recording did end up being quite quiet, so I applied a constant 15dB amplification, which I think sounds pretty good but maybe calls up the background hiss/noise floor a bit more than I'd have preferred.

Second, the route I chose last year winds along the Willamette river via a stretch of private greenway (shared use path). Sadly, this year the path was closed due to construction in parts and covid-19 concerns. We ended up with more sidewalk time than I had hoped, which probably makes contrasting with the prior year more difficult. The upside, however, is that we got to find and explore some interesting new spaces, like a parking lot under the Broadway bridge. Ultimately, this detour caused us to be out recording longer, and we captured closer to an hour (compared to 50 minutes last year)

During our walk, I found it harder than usual to concentrate on my intentional listening. The sights and sounds of the city seemed more alien than they normally would, and so my mind was easily distracted and my focus drifted. While this is normal for me (and probably for most) during soundwalks, I found the sense of distraction elevated from previous times (especially visual distraction). Every new bit of graffiti seen brought me back to thinking about our current crises. I tried a new technique of purposefully "softening my gaze", and I think it helped fair amount. Before today, I genuinely didn't know that this was an actual thing, let alone that it's leveraged in Buddhism, anxiety therapy, and yoga (drishti...which I have unknowingly used both in eagle pose and while track-standing on a bicycle).

This is a binaural recording, so good stereo headphones work best. Click here to visit the archive.org page for this recording or just listen to it here:

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See you next year for WLD.

Little Richard Spider

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 04:00:00 GMT

I learned last night that Little Richard recorded a horrifying rendition of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" in 1991 on Disney CD to support a pediatric AIDS foundation. Thanks Nate! While the cause is honorable, the content is certainly questionable. It almost kinda includes Debbie Gibson, but aside from a brief flop on the piano and some childish dancing, the contribution remains unclear.

In any case, Little Richard is one of the masters of the grunt/whoop/wat style of singing/moaning...so I tried a very low-effort cutup. The rap in the middle got some special attention. Enjoy!

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