For this Assignment I was very interested in the aspect of using the “room” as a system. (I understand that it isn’t that original but i am an architect and building my thesis around acoustics and this was really fascinating to me). I looked for the most reverberant room I could get my hands on. It turned out to be my bathroom, which has a reverberance time close to that of a concert hall. (which is why people love to sing in showers). I then recorded and re-recorded the sounds of a human voice, a guitar, a synthesizer, and a trumpet to see how the different frequencies, amplitudes, and harmonics would change within the space. The feedback loop ran for 20 cycles.  After a few feedback loops, speech became unintelligible, but what was surprising was that the difference between the 3 instruments and the human voice also became unintelligible. The trumpet lasted the longest and was easiest to pick out, the guitar and human voice changed drastically within 3 feedback loops, while the synthesizer also gained more feedback, it almost seemed like a natural progression. Another interesting thing that happened was the elongation of notes due to the high reverberance time. A half second click from my laptop became 5 seconds, the small shuffling of me in the background grew to have the same amplitude as the guitar. If I were to do this project again I would want to do it in a larger room. I think the natural frequency of the reverberation was too high for my recorder on my laptop. I also want to use a better recorder than just my laptop to make sure the fan on my hard drive doesn’t interrupt my recordings. I think that is what lead to the “ssssshhhh-ing” gurgle effect of the feedback, instead of one steady stream of frequency. Here is the result to listen for yourself:

Cheers!

Kayla Quinn