Original Recordings/Sounds

My two impulse responses were recorded in a racquetball court and in the locker room showers in the UC. I had a friend pop the balloon from the corner of the room and I pointed the Zoom recorder toward the center of the room. The racquetball court’s impulse response had a much longer reverb tail but the locker room showers produced a much deeper ring, which I found interesting.

Racquetball Court:

 

Locker room shower:

 

My two non-IR recordings were water from a shower hitting a shower curtain and a recording from freesound.org of glass breaking. For the water recording, I pushed the shower curtain in toward the water stream and recorded it from outside the shower.

Water:

 

Glass:

 

As my source sound, I used the theme from Phantom of the Opera:

Convolution Results

Racquetball Court:

 

Locker room shower:

The Racquetball Court reverb muddles the voices and sounds a bit “thin” compared to the reverb with the locker room shower IR.

Water:

I thought the ending of the piece sounded interesting too, so I threw that in there.

Glass:

The instrumental in the second verse sounded pretty interesting, so I kept that in here.

Other interesting discovery 1

While looking for interesting sounds, I also found that this recording of a crackling fire from freesound produces interesting results with speaking voices and single instruments:

 

Convolved with Alvin Lucier:

Sounds pretty creepy!

 

Convolved with the beginning of Liszt’s La Campanella:

(original audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Dvg2MxQn8)
This piece does get pretty crazy toward the end, but never this crazy

Other interesting discovery 2

I thought that the convolution with the glass breaking would produce interesting results on other sounds, so I tried convolving that with speaking voice, piano, and percussion.

Convolved with Alvin Lucier:

Sibilants like s’s seem much more pronounced.

Convolved with piano:

The high notes really stand out here.

Convolved with castanets (from https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/411457/)

The castanets almost sound…metallic?