Misinterpreting Sounds

While I was down in Tekapo I had an interesting sonic experience, where I heard a sound and simply could not immediately identify its source – it took me a few minutes of moving around & investigating it to find the what was creating the sound, but during those minutes my brain kept coming up with theories as to what it might be… I’ll explain it below but the experience reminded me of the few other times in my life when I couldn’t identify the source of a sound and what fascinating psychological territory it is.

It is, of course, a technique sound designers use all the time, whether literally taking a sound out of context and manipulating it so the source isn’t identifiable, or deliberately mis-leading or confusing the audience… so when it happens in real life it is a valuable experience worth remembering… & potentially using… So it prompted me to ask on SDD of others recollections of such experiences – I’d be interested to hear of yours, there or here…. But here are a couple of mine…

It was maybe the first or second time I visited Japan (maybe 2004?) & I remember staying at a business hotel near Tokyo Station and after a day of racing around exploring Tokyo I went back to the hotel, put on my iPod & lay down to have a nap. I don’t remember exactly what music I was listening to (maybe Future 3?) although I know it was an album I knew well… I was half asleep and I very slowly noticed this very odd sound: it was slowly rhythmic and felt quite dense, and my brain did a flip as I tried to assimilate it as part of the music. As I fully became conscious I realised I knew the music I was listening to well enough to know it wasn’t part of it, so I took my headphones off and stood up to discover the sound was coming from outside, and it was getting closer! I grabbed my recorder (a DV camera with a preamp & pair of mics) and opened the window & after recording for a few minutes a large crowd walked past the hotel! The crowd was obviously protesting something, as there was a leader in a van with a loud hailer shouting a slogan, which the crowd then repeated almost as a chant. Here’s a bit of the recording I amde of it, I still don’t know what they were protesting so if you speak Japanese please do comment & enlighten me!

Tokyo protest by timprebble

I don’t remember exactly what I suspected it might be, maybe because I was half asleep and listening to music & soon discovered its source, but I remember the affect it had on me VERY clearly – it was perceptually confronting – WTF was I hearing!?

The more recent example was more subtle and occurred when I was in Tekapo last week. One of the places I specifically planned to visit was Mt Cook Salmon Farm which is very well know for how good its salmon is, primarily because of both the quality and purity of the water and the fact the farm exists in a reasonably strong current so the salmon are fit and get lots of tasty exercise… Leaving Tekapo heading South you meet a cross road which follows along the side of a big deep canal – the canal eventually feeds a power station and along the way the salmon farm. So I drove across the bridge & stopped on the other side to take a few photos:

I had to wait for a few minutes until there were no cars coming, so I walked out to the middle of the bridge and took this photo but at the same time noticed this very odd ambience…

The ambience was very stereo but also quite diffuse, it sounded distant but clear. This whole area is very quiet, but these sounds were quite distinct.. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, but noticed a distant car approaching so walked off the bridge and went around the side of the bridge to have a listen. The car went by and being an open road it was doing 100kmph and I really noticed the perceptual masking/compression that occurs – all the ambience went away while the car was close/passing and then slowly returned as my ears & brain regained their sensitivity. Sitting down beside the bridge the sound I was hearing was much clearer and by then I’d grabbed my 722 recorder and DPA 4060 mics from the car and recorded a bit, have a listen:

Weird pigeons by timprebble

It reminded me of two things: myself when playing music through/with a space echo, where the delays inform the sound produced that is feeding the delay… and when kids find themselves in an acoustic space & start vocally reacting to it…

In hindsight, obviously it is the sound of pigeons, but what I worked out was that they were roosting underneath the bridge, so their cooing was being amplified and was resonating in the concrete upside-down concrete chamber that was the underneath of the bridge, and that sound was then bouncing off the surface of the water to me… If you imagined how you would simulate this processing you can soon see how altered their sound would become, but I think what threw me was how diffuse it was – it felt like it was a soft sound all around me, although there were discrete stereophonic elements from pigeons at different positions under the bridge. I was struck by what a beautiful ambience it was – pigeons cooing is quite a melodic sound but diffused and resonated created a slightly more abstract ambience… Will definitely use that in a film sometime!

When I sat down beside the bridge it was far more apparent where the sound was coming from… Any time a pigeon left or returned there was also a lot of intense wing flapping involved too as I would imagine it takes a reasonable amount of energy & movement to fly underneath the bridge & get to a roosting spot without landing in the canal itself.

A handy side benefit of doing this recording was getting used to recording with the DPA mics, as I intend to take them to Vietnam with me… I recorded a few car passes which they coped with okay, but a truck pass overloaded so it gives me a good reference as to maximum SPLs… The 4060s are the more sensitive of the series (quite amazed at their bass response!) with the 4061 and 4062 being able to cope with higher SPLs, the trade off being they are less sensitive with quieter sounds…

Its quite surreal driving alongside the canal, through this lovely barren landscape. It travels quite a distance before reaching Lake Pukaki and the Tekapo power station:

Mt Cook salmon farm – read the PDF about their sushi grade salmon – Oishi!!

All good salmon go to (sushi) heaven!