Music of Sound

Via notcot Swedish musician Moto Boy has released a musicbox with the melody to one of his songs on it – what a lovely idea! Downlaod the actual song

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& buy the album and/or the music box here

Nicely cut/composed!

Soundscapes – by Ace Norton from IE HAGY on Vimeo.

A clever idea beautifully executed! Directed by: Oren Lavie, Yuval & Merav Nathan

The ffffound site is one of my favourite visual inspirations – basically it works like delicious except people tag images there instead of bookmarks… Heres a few recent funny/great images tagged there:

And for some visual humour, I’m a fan of the xkcd site – heres a great example:

I often find musical phrases when I’m manipulating sound effects & I came across one yesterday that I just had to share as it is so beautiful & yet the source is so unlikely.
First the backstory: a few years ago I heard of a plant shop having a closing down sale so I went & had a look & ended up buying a small tree. This tree was about 12 foot tall & it survived for a while but eventually died & all that was left were these long spindly branches, which I kind of still liked so I left it where it was…. Just before Christmas I was clearing out my old studio space prior to moving & discarding any & everything that was non-essential & I decided the tree had to go. I had been collecting up a pile of wood to break & record FX of, so I added it to the pile & carried on working.
A few days later I got inspired & started recording wood breaks – the room I was recording in was a smallish studio space with a glass ranch slider door & as the tree was way to tall to fit in through the glass slider door I accidentally scraped one of the branches across the glass as i was dragging it into the room. Hmmm: STOP RIGHT THERE! It produced a nasty shrill screech which I just knew I would find a use for sooner or later (ie tag the metadata with: use in the next horror film!)
Anyway I recorded many various scrapes & I discovered some of the most nasty ones were when I applied gentle pressure to the branch so it almost stuck & wouldnt scrape, but then pressure gently overcame the friction & a nasty screech ensues… So I recorded maybe 15 minutes of them, basically until I got tired of it & felt I had exhausted the tree branch & my own repertoire….

Yesterday I suddenly remembered these recordings (I originally just loaded the recordings & dumped them into my sound library) so I started wading through auditioning bits. I was in the process of making some spooky kind of stings & I wanted a high shrill element so I started trying the branch glass scrapes as a component – first at real speed, then at half speed, then putting each of those through various impulse responses. And thats when I found a little bit of music that is so hauntingly beautiful it stopped me in my tracks! So I exported the progression of sounds for you to have a listen to;

First an example of some of the glass scrapes (watch your ears/monitoring level – they are shrill!)

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Ok so next, here is the little phrase or fragment of sound I pursued, at real speed:

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Here is the same sound at half speed (can you hear the musicality in it yet?)

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And here is the half speed branch-glass scrape through an impulse response:

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Beautiful huh? Its almost symphonic.. but what is weird is how the first 3 ‘notes’ of that glass scrape obviously belong to a musical scale. The impulse response is adding a lot of tone to the sound, but the melody is there in the initial recording…

Ok, as promised heres a couple of kelp recordings from last night… The results were good & got better as the session went on, mostly because the backgrounds got quieter… After having a good listen i realised some of the freakiest sounds are actually very quiet sounds – bits where the kelp is sticking to the ground & sliding etc so I decided i will get some fresh kelp & do a late night session on the next quiet windless evening…

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And if security or a passing police car decide to come visit I’ll make sure I leave the mics rolling!

“I have two suspects flagellating some kind of alien looking sea creature in a carpark. I am going to investigate, over!”

One of the main challenges with the film we’re working on at the moment is creature sound design…. Apart from creature vocals I’ve been working on movement & as these particular creatures have tentacles I’ve been trying various approaches – using mud recordings, various plant material etc but yesterday I had a spark of inspiration to try recording some kelp/seaweed & as it was such a beautiful summers day I was desperate for an excuse to skive off/i mean do some work at the beach so I grabbed a bucket, the record kit & headed off for a drive around the South Coast from Wellington. It is one of the best things about this little city; within 15 minutes you can literally be in the wild! And its my excuse for owning a 4WD, because you sure need one to get to this place (or a few hours spare to walk)

There was plenty of kelp but it was so hot that it was impossible to get away from cicadas… I had kind of suspected that would be the case, hence the bucket, so I climbed down on the rocks & managed to break some slimey long pieces of kelp off… And sheesh it is hard to break – its seriously strong! I also took a broom as figured I would need something to try & entangle the kelp – either that or go for a swim & swimming in kelp isnt my idea of fun! Anyway I managed to drag some kelp up on to the rocks & proceeded to break through it by hitting it with the broom… About this point some tourists came wandering along & asked what we were doing… ‘ah we’re collecting kelp to make sounds for the tentacles on a monster’ ‘for a movie?’ ‘ ah yes!’

There was no way in hell I was going to throw slimey smelly seaweed around in my studio so this evening I waited until most everyone had gone home & set my mics up outside. I hadn’t really thought about it, but a neighbour came wandering along & once he realised what I was about to do offered me some rubber gloves (he does prop building etc) and in hindsight, man was I grateful!

I recorded about half an hours worth of material, slithering & slapping the kelp down on concrete, and shaking the daylights out of it. The sound seemed like a cross between rubber & leather, except it also had a wet component to it – creepy! But the best material was when I was throwing pieces around that had multiple tendrills… I’ll upload a few bits tomorrow once I’ve loaded it up & sifted through it. Will definitely be putting some of this through the Doppler plugin too!

A fun day at the office!

If you are a bit squeamish then this might make you feel a little bit weird, but you do get to see someones vocal chords from the inside! And no, they dont have a disco in there! The strobe is to slow down the means by which tone is generated… It is equal parts freaky & beautiful…

Thank god for that calming music in the background! Replace it with discordant tones & I would almost expect a fright from Aliens or something!? Thanks Danijel for the link!

And heres Mel Blancs vocal chords in action while he does some of those fantastic cartoon voices

Derek Sivers, founder of CDBaby, has launched a new site called Music Thoughts which pretty much sums up its sole purpose – as a repository for music related quotes & thoughts, heres a random example from Robert Fripp:

It reminds me a little of Brian Enos Oblique Strategies although the thoughts contained within those are more specifically philosophical & relevant to the creative process in terms of provoking change… I own a copy of the 4th series of Oblique Strategies & consult them occasionally – the fifth series are still available although so is a free version for the iPhone/iPod Touch…

Music Thoughts is a great idea – whenever I’m reading a book or wandering around the interweb & come across a spark of wisdom specifically relevant to me I tend to write it down in my moleskin, as good thoughts are very worth revisiting. Relevant to this, on the front page of my current moleskin I have a saying I try to refer to often. Its says: “we become what we think about” and at a later date I’ve added in brackets “so think the future”
It was prompted by watching the following video, basically its a speech by Earl Nightingale (who sounds a LOT like Orson Welles) & it is very worth the ten minutes to check it out, its not new or quirky – its just worth thinking about…

Another great quote form that video: “The opposite of courage is not cowardice, its conformity” or in short form: “baaaaaaaa”

ps Earl wasnt the first person to come up with that saying, Buddha beat him by quite a few decades!
“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.”