To begin my experimentation, I took a snippet from the poem The Rose That Grew From Concrete, written and performed by the late Tupac Shakur. This poem has a beautiful cadence, and an authority I wanted to hear convolved in different spaces. For clarity, all trials were convolved and recorded twice per track.
In Trial 1, I used an Impulse Response recorded from the basement of Hunt Library’s stairwell, with the IR created from the top of the stairwell. This was done at night so as not to disturb anyone.
In Trial 2, I imagined Tupac atop a balcony giving this as a sermon. Naturally, I recorded an IR to make this a reality. In CFA, I recorded the IR from a floor below a balcony, where there balloon was popped. This created an interesting sound, and placed perception of this poem 4 flights of stairs away.
Interestingly, recording of Trial 2 lead to the inadvertent recording a weird clip that sounds almost like an IR. It came from sound waves created when picking up the recording device. This trial created distortion that aligns with the space the IR was recorded, similar to the previous trial.
The results from this experiment led to interesting results, where the instrumentation from the track were clearly audible, yet muffled, while vocals are difficult to discern. This surprised me because the “impulse” used was very effective at keeping the melody of the original snippet.
In Experimental Trial 2, the impulse used is from Freesound.org, and is of a child laughing. At the end of the original snippet Tupac laughs, giving inspiration for this peculiar “impulse.” The results of this convolve were interesting, as the laugh dominates the sound, but the original snippet offers some of its rhythm. I was hoping Tupac and the child’s laughs would somehow mesh, but, sadly, this did not happen.
Following is the hyperlink to the google drive, where all these files are stored.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BVn6pZVpdqyWZEbPTU4TaU0r_-wraHoE