Assignment 3 – Sarika Bajaj

For my assignment 3, I convolved a series of impulse recordings with the quintessential audio clip of Dobby (the house elf from the Harry Potter series) being freed from his master (which I obtained a twenty second clip of from SoundBoard.com).

Original Audio Clip (Dobby is Free):

My two acoustic space IR recordings were taken by recording the audio of a balloon popping (with its accompanying reverb). The locations I chose to record were the women’s bathroom in the basement of Baker hall and the overlook present on the second floor of Baker Hall.

IR from Women’s Bathroom in Baker Basement:

Convolution of Dobby and Women’s Bathroom IR:

IR from Overlook in Baker:

Convolution of Dobby and Overlook in Baker:

I then explored a little bit of what the Dobby recording would sound like when convolved with common soundtrack noises that might be present in a bad movie. Specifically, I chose gurgling water, seagulls cawing, applause, and crickets soundtracks that I downloaded from SoundBible.com.

Gurgling Water IR:

Convolution of Dobby and Gurgling Water:

Seagulls IR:

Convolution of Dobby and Seagulls:

Applause IR:

Convolution of Dobby and Applause:

Crickets IR:

Convolution of Dobby and Crickets:

After making these samples, I started exploring some of the built-in Max examples and ran into one named “convolution workshop.” A bit curious about what it would do, I merged our original convolution reverb patch this patch. Specifically, I pushed the “Dobby is free” audio and the “applause” IR through the original convolution and then pushed the result into a source filter convolution with the “Dobby is free” audio again. The result sounds significantly more noisey than the previous results.

Further convoluted Dobby and Applause:

The final Max patched used to create the last audio piece can be found here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/37367ee3fca07b4a057610ee7ff6630d