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.

String Quartet

impulse

Santoor

impulse

Piano

 

I put the microphone inside the instrument (Santoor; Iranian traditional instrument) resonance box to get an amplified signal. Also, I did the same with the piano.

The original sound is Sapokanikan by Joanna Newsom, I only used the first ten seconds because there is not much instrumentation:

 

The first impulse response signal is a recording I did in class on the first floor of Baker Hall, near the entrance:

 

The second IR was recorded on the staircase of Wean Hall:

 

The third IR is a recording of geese honking found on freesound.org:

 

And finally, I tried using Troy and Abed’s Spanish rap on Community for IR:

For this IR, since the entire rap is too long, I experimented with several different shorter segments as inputs for convolution, and figured the outro (as followed) gives the most interesting outcome:

 

OK! And here are the outputs:

Baker Hall:

Wean Hall Staircase:

Geese:

Spanish Rap:

 

Hope you enjoyed it! I certainly had fun 🙂

I decided to convolve one of Kanye’s infamous “bars” in Lift Yourself:

 

Now let’s go down the list of IR’s as well was what they sound like with Kanye convolved through them.

1: Vibraslap 

I produced this IR by recording myself hitting the vibraslap once.

IR:

Convolved:

 

2: VR Alcove

This IR was produced by creating an impulse signal inside of the Fabrication Lab’s VR Alcove. I then reversed the audio and elongated it to take advantage of the strange echo it had.

Original IR:

Edited IR:

Convolved:

 

3: Timpani

This IR was recorded in the percussion studio above a set of 4 timpani. The reverb was enjoyable, but short-lived. I added echo as well to create something more interesting.

Edited IR:

Convolved:

 

4: Boiling Water

This IR was made by recording water boiling in my electric kettle. The original sound was too quiet so I distorted it.

IR:

Convolved:

 

 

Fun: Convolved by itself

The IR here is the same clip that is playing. Enjoy.

Bruce Lee’s said a lot of cool stuff. My favorite quotes of his are not about fighting, but about individuality, inclusivity, and self-improvement. I used a quote of his about developing yourself in a way that is uniquely your own, free from formal doctrine.

The four impulse responses I choses are as follows:

• Balloon pop in a music practice room, which gave a completely dry output.
• Balloon pop in a Gates stairwell, which gave a wetter output.
• A single bell chime, which started to obscure the input signal while giving it the bell’s tone throughout
• A clip of wind chimes – I actually used two different length clips for each of the channels, which made the sound travel a bit in stereo. The input signal was completely lost in the process, but the result sounds pretty relaxing in a lost-in-a-mystical-world sorta way.

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?

The original sound is a lecture about modern electroacoustics. I recorded balloon pops in the back of the Philip Chosky Theater in its Projection Bay and in a 4 story stairwell. I took the second impulse response, added a Wah Wah effect in audacity, and reversed it. Finally, I took a clip from the beginning of Steely Dan’s Babylon Sisters. I really like the flutter from the Projection Bay and I think that Babylon Sisters is interesting because you can hear the song at points clearly, and there are points where you can hear the audio track more clearly — but never perfectly — and I think that back and forth is very interesting.

For my convolution, I recorded a brief statement using my microphone in my dorm.

I then created 4 impulse response recordings.

This impulse response is the sound effect for collecting a ring in the game “Sonic the Hedgehog.” It was obtained by extracting the sound effect from a youtube video using a conversion website. It was then normalized in audacity.

This impulse response is the first three notes to the Song of Storms from the Legend of Zelda series. It was recorded using the audio input of an EasyCap USB capture card, which was connected to a Nintendo Wii. The song was then played in game, in Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask, and normalized in audacity.

This impulse was response was recorded under the UC overhang across from the entrance to entropy. To record it, I determined which spot seemed to have the most interesting acoustics, and placed a zoom in said spot. I then popped a balloon a few yards away, still under UC, and normalized the result in audacity.

This impulse response was recorded in Doherty Hall, outside the first floor elevator. To record it, I set a zoom h4n pro to record and placed it on a desk in the corner of the room. I then popped a balloon in the center of the room and normalized the recording in audacity.

Using these impulse response recordings, I convolved my original signal.

I decided to use an impulse recording from Baker, an impulse recording from West Wing, and then two parts of different songs: Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen and the Theme Song from Schindler’s List. I decided to try to pick different genres to see what kind of result would occur. My initial recording was a part from Thunder by Imagine Dragons. The ending result was very unexpected, but it sounds cool! The order through which I did the different iterations of convolution: Schindler’s List Theme, Bohemian Rhapsody, West Wing, Baker

West Wing:

Baker:

Bohemian Rhapsody:

Schindler’s List:

Thunder (Initial):

Final Result: