This is for all you out there who want to hear George W Bush messing up a common saying in a bunch of different rooms/soundscapes.

For those of you who haven’t heard the original, it’s already pretty hilarious:

 

As for convolving this impressively un-presidential soundbyte, I decided to use recordings from one wildly reverberant room (a racquetball court) and a room with almost no reverberations at all (a sound isolation booth). I did this to try to see how drastically the soundbyte could be layered and filled with reverb from the racquetball court and how thin sounding it could be from stopping almost all reverberations using the iso-booth. For your reference, here are the two impulse response recordings I took:

The racquetball court recording was taken from popping a balloon in a corner of the room and recording from the center so we could capture any weird reflections that would result from popping the balloon in a corner. It almost sounds like an explosion, and it provides an extremely long decay that would be more than interesting to hear through Bush’s soundbyte.

 

The sound isolation booth recording was taken from popping a balloon in the center of the room and recording from very close to the center as well. We really wanted to see how the impulse response sounded from the perspective of the object or person making the sound, as the normal usage of that booth is for people who want to practice singing. Capturing how much the sound of the voice would be altered was our main interest.

 

Here are the respective convolution engine results:

The racquetball convolution made an output very similar to what I expected. It had an obnoxious amount of reverb and took a very long time to settle back down to a state of silence even after the original clip stopped playing. I could imagine that if George W Bush had recited that line again, this time in a racquetball court, he’d be even more confused than he already was, since he would hear his own words flying back at him left and right constantly.

The practice room (iso-booth) convolution was a little underwhelming. Though you can definitely tell that the soundbyte got thinner, with much less room presence and ambiance, I was hoping to hear an even more brassy sound. Regardless, you can clearly hear that it almost sounds like Bush is in a vacuum when giving his speech.

For the next two impulse responses, I decided to explore one with a musical component and one with a component of repetition. For the musical component, I used a recording of a hangpan, which is a little-known steel drum instrument that looks like a huge turtle shell and is made out of metal. It creates very tropical sounds with lots of reverb. For the component of repetition, I actually reused the same exact clip that I was convoluting as the impulse response too. Yep, you guessed it, I used Bush to make Bush sound like he was Bush in Bush but not in a bush. Bush in a bush might not be as interesting as Bush in Bush. Anyhow, here are the impulse response recordings:

The hangpan, as mentioned earlier, has a very reverberant quality, but it can also have a more percussive usage, so I found a clip that demonstrates both techniques. It’s also worth noting that these are two hang drums being played at the same time by one performer in total.

 

And for your repeated entertainment, here’s George W Bush messing up again:

 

Here we have the hangpan convolution. This gave the soundbyte a very calming presence actually, as it sounded like Bush was speaking very softly in a dream about a vacation to Jamaica or any tropical island of your choice really. I found it to be quite beautiful and much less funny than the original.

Finally, we have the convolution of Bush by using the exact same clip as the impulse response. Note: I had to lower the gain drastically to get anything that didn’t sound like I was just holding a mic in front of its speaker for no reason. But when I did lower the gain, the convolution engine created this weird, nearly cyclic pattern of Bush delivering his wisdom with his peers in very small portions. Particularly after the original clip is done playing, leaving us with only the sounds of the reverb, you can hear very specific phrases repeated over and over. I’d like to point out that the last “fool me can’t get fooled again” playing several times in a row at the end was really an accident but its hilarious to me so I wanted to highlight it!

There you have it, George W Bush in several different soundscapes, including one of himself delivering an absolutely iconic piece of wisdom.