After gathering an impulse response inside of a local church, a stairwell, some thunder, and glass breaking, I uploaded all of those as impulse responses into Waves’ IR Reverb Plugin. The stairwell IR was actually really disappointing to me, but I recorded that one using an omnidirectional microphone, as an experiment, which might’ve resulted in a weaker signal.
I thoroughly enjoyed how the Mongolian singing convoluted with the glass breaking resulted. It created a really cool effect that I could definitely see myself using in the future.
Hello! For this assignment, I took several impulse recordings and convolved them with different sources of audio. For my original signal, I used the opening to Jethro Tull’s Thick as A Brick. I picked this recording because it was an acoustically “dry” signal, but also had many different elements of audio in it:
My first impulse recording was recorded in the bottom of the Doherty stairwell:
The resulting audio sounded exactly as if it had been played from the bottom of a stairwell:
My second impulse recording was taken from the inside of a grand piano:
Ian Anderson’s voice reacted strangely to this impulse, probably because of the harmonics produced:
The next impulse response I used was actually a recording of a handpan that I found on freesound.org:
Convolving this signal with Tull provided some interesting results:
For my final impulse response, I took the impulse of my room at 4am. Needless to say, my roommate wasn’t pleased.
I had to doctor the impulse signal up a bit to produce an interesting response:
The resulting convolution produced an interesting echo effect:
For my convolution piece, I recorded a cover of Skyhill’s “City as You Walk”. I split the recording up into 5 different pieces. The first chunk was convolved with the IR from the Doherty stairwell. The second chunk was convolved with the inside of the grand piano. The third chunk was convolved with an IR from the top floor of Margaret Morrison. The fourth chunk (and my favorite part of the song) was convolved with the IR of my roommate at 4am. The trailing bit was convolved with the handpan, because the handpan IR destroys most of the vocals. You should be able to make out when the impulse response changes from section to section.
For my Max Patch, I used the following patch to generate most of my audio signals:
In his documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore asks Marilyn Manson, “If you were to talk directly to the kids at Columbine and the people in that community, what would you say to them if they were here right now?” The musician, having been falsely accused of influencing the perpetrators of the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999, responds, “I wouldn’t say a single word to them; I would listen to what they have to say. And that’s what no one did.”
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Here is an excerpt from the documentary :
Using a fragment from one of my favorite interviews of Marilyn Manson as the original audio signal (3:40 – 3:46), I explored the ideas of “hearing” and “listening,” considering the latter as making a conscious effort to understand what is being heard.
A variety of impulse responses were used to convolve the original signal, yet the statement became barely comprehensible each time, preventing me from the act of “listening.”
The idea that we may be “hearing,” but perhaps not “listening,” or consciously digesting what we are given with, is one to cogitate on.
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IR recordings + the original signal convolved through them :
Heyo. For this assignment I decided to play around with the first few seconds of Alt-J’s song Hunger of the Pine. Also, I used Garageband to edit my sample clips, and I uploaded them to iTunes to use them for this project. The video link is right below.
(If you decide to watch all of it, just know that the guy gets shot with arrows in the end incase you don’t want to see that!)
I then uploaded four samples from Max and put them on Soundcloud.
For the first sample, the IR is actually the first note of Hunger of the Pine. This actually creates a smoother version of the piece that actually blends the notes together.
The next sample was one of the balloon popping samples from the back stairwell behind the CFA practice rooms. This also mutes the sound a bit, but it is blended less together compared to the first sample.
The third sample is a voice clip of Link from Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild. You can hear his signature ‘hyah!’ in the beginning of the clip, but it slowly blends in with the rest of the sample, and also creates a sound that reminds me of a rubber ball bouncing on the street.
The last sample is a loud cymbal crash. This sound is the least blended together, and it sounds like it’s playing a from a few rooms over.
Overall a few of my sounds turned out to be pretty similar, but I like how most of it turned out!
For this project, I decided to use the source material of Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. I took the first minute and a half of his lecture, which had lots of interesting material in my opinion. It had applause, laughter, and some key phrases I thought I could emphasize in my composition (i.e. “CT scan,” “this sucks”).
I used two impulse responses. My first was a recording of a staircase in Doherty. I predicted that it would make his voice sound distant and omnipresent.
Two others I tried that ended up not sounding super interesting or good:
A hit on my drum pad– since it’s basically noise, and not much decay, it didn’t have as interesting of an effect as I wanted to.
A sawtooth wave at the same pitch as the Young Thug sample– it makes sense that without sufficient noise across the frequency spectrum, only the sound of the frequency really comes through.
My second was the opening few bars of Audemar by Young Thug. In those bars, he has an interesting way of pronouncing “SLATT,” a slang used by Bloods (“Slime Life All The Time”). I wanted to give Pausch a semi-rhythmic context, and figured that using a few bars as an impulse response would give that kind of output.
Here is how my Audacity mixer ended up. The top track is Randy Pausch’s speech convolved with Young Thug, the second one is with the hallway recording. I faded in and out the second track to emphasize the words in his speech I wanted to come through. The bottom track is just Young Thug’s first “SLATT” slowed down to be unrecognizable, as an opening to the track. I think it sounds dope. The rhythm actually came through, which was unexpected, and there was a static drone throughout the piece, because of the synth in the back of Young Thug’s sample convolving with noise. I thought it ended up with a pretty somber mood, which was my goal.
I decided to use this project as a platform to force dance!
The patch uses a similar movement analysis method that we covered earlier in the semester, converts that movement into sample rate for a video feed of the guest, which is also used to determine amount of feedback into the system within our delay patch. More or less, if you don’t dance you’ll have a super granular video, with a horrible mess of feedback of a song, BUT if you dance, you’ll have clear video, and better audio. Enjoy!
for my delay project, I created a kind of back and forth between real time and delayed footage, which alternated between showing what is currently happening, and an overlayed view of past motions.
For this assignment, I thought it would be cool to make a remix of a song and see what was possible in Max using the skills I’ve learned so far this semester.
I chose the song Good Times Roll – GRiZ x Big Gigantic, and created a patch from the first minute of it or so. It was definitely pretty entertaining, and I’m sure I could incorporate more techniques and higher-level uses of timeshifting in the future!
For this time, I used timeshifting and feedback in subpatches for different parts of the song, here’s one of them:
This particular subpatch uses a metronome and a ramp to slide between different delay times and also feedback into the system.
I used individual subpatches to distort the signal for any interval in the song that I wanted, and also created a couple sounds in garage band to add just for fun. You can adjust delay and feedback for each subpatch as well.
Here’s the link to the zip folder containing the necessary audio files:
Thanks for reading! It was definitely a lot of fun to make this!
For this assignment I did my best to create a layered noisy guitar drone sound by messing with signal delay timings, ramps and reverb. I approached the creation much like I would on a synth. A lot of values are fairly arbitrary and worked out through trial and error, and the end result is a little more irregular than I would have hoped, but I think it’s an interesting sound nontheless.
Learning various ways of time shifting has led me to think about the traces of actions that we decide to keep or discard, and whether the remnant are of any importance to the current, or final moment of a certain action. The idea of “stopping” time to study or compare different stages of a single motion reminded me of the works of Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer known for his pioneering work in motion-picture projection. Using technology to capture what the human eye cannot, he proved that a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at one point in the action of running. In his experiment, a galloping horse was used to trigger the shutters of a bank of cameras.
Horse in Motion, Eadweard Muybridge, ca. 1886
Photography collection, Harry Ransom Center.
My work, although different from those of Muybridge, also captures and compares the sequences of moving from one place to another. To add a stylistic element that not only emphasizes but also contrasts the rather bland action of walking, I converted the 4 plane matrix of ARGB data to AHSL data while displaying only the S plane. The elimination of color was my attempt to bring further attention to the action itself. Additionally, I allowed the time shifting to occur at a speed that is fast and slow enough to compare the different stages of the motion. This was an assignment that led me to further reflect on the value of the moments that are either kept or discarded.
Visually, my work resembles that of Étienne-Jules Marey than that of Muybridge, as the former consists of multiple exposures overlaying the instants, while the latter has frames separating them.
Chronophotographic study of man pole vaulting, Étienne Jules Marey, 1890
Albumen print, 6.9 x 10.6 cm, Courtesy George Eastman House
Chronophotographic study of man pole vaulting, Étienne Jules Marey, 1890