the matrix mixer

because of all my university/theatre work this term, this little thing has been sitting patiently on my shelf for a long time. i got the schematic for this from nicolas collins’ hardware hacking book - it’s a mono matrix mixer, with 3 inputs and 3 outputs. the inputs are the bottom row and the outputs are along the left hand side. i have a few packaging ideas for this, but for the moment it will remain a mess of coloured wires. at least it works fine. there are lots of exciting things you can do with these – routing inputs through effects and back again to make feedback loops, for example. i want to combine some piezo drivers with this and set something incredibly beautiful up, but as this is designed for line level signals, i need to make a pre-amp rack and a bunch of other things first.

this is my first proper test of the mixer – i combined the bloom app [oh how i love that thing] on my ipod touch with my trusty music box through a delay pedal, and then fed it back into the mixer to make a feedback loop before it comes out the final output to the amp. the contact mic on the music box goes through the distortion pedal first, just to make it line level. its a bit exciting because all of the percussive noises of my moving the music box around are picked up and blend in to the audio – i need to get my good ol’stompboxes into this setup too i think. there are a few things to sort, like my levels [the box is a fair bit louder than bloom at points], but in the meantime it’s a glorious mess of cables and wires and many happy accidents.

listening to spaces

the rather massive gamble in terms of how the lovely church of Trinity Apse would add to my sounds for gormenghast paid off. incredibly, in fact. it was amazing to hear simple stereo panning of birds’ wings become actual birds moving up towards the roof in the space, thanks to the tilted speakers. at least, there were a few times i thought i could see them (sleep deprivation obviously). i managed to tape up some nice microphones onto the lighting truss for the last two performances, and i’m hoping to assemble a proper live bootlegged version of the show between them. the reverb of the space was incredible, it coated everything in a thick chocolate-y darkness and even muffled the actors at points. here’s how the scary-as-hell death owls sounded in the space on the friday night, 25th november. there are three triggered sounds for this: the slop/chewing sound of sepulchrave eating swelter (with some drone going on underneath this time, i was feeling reckless i suppose), then an owl scream, and then the main death owls flock. for that, i pulled together 15-20 tracks of birds flying/calling/flapping/screaming and auto-panned them towards a point and around to make a squall, but i swear there are sounds in there that don’t exist on the dry track. they must have been added by the church. unless the audience were crying out in fear… for maximum effect, i suggest you close your eyes. then you definitely will see them.

gormenghast analogs

the theatre production of gormenghast happened back at the end of november, and in the end all of the sounds i performed were encapsulated in a laptop/ableton/apc40 setup, and i hid down the back of the immense church behind the audience, and pushed brightly lit buttons in the dark. it was great. i had been working on various foley objects and some guitar pedal/contact mic setups to play live for the performance which never made it to the final piece – purely because the job became so huge and the sounds multiplied themselves many times over, and i only have two hands. a laptop became the best way to achieve the sounds we needed, so i’ve parked the other ideas for another project. here are a couple to listen to.

this was my very first idea, and the one i pitched way back when at my interview… a contact-mic-ed wooden box (in this case, a speaker i ripped open) filled with soup mix, monkey nuts and metal a4 pad spines (i wasn’t this specific back in august, honestly). swooshing the whole lot around, pouring the little beans and processing it all through a delay pedal makes some convincingly horrific rain/storm noises.

this is the same idea really, but the contact mic is on my broken music box, one of the best things i bought this year. she cost £1 at omni centre car boot sale, and was broken, but after some judicious wiggling with a screwdriver the mechanism woke up again. she was the music box for cora and clarice in gormenghast, as well as finding her way into a lot of uni assignments this term. nice. this clip is the box played through the delay pedal again, but by manipulating the delay time and repeat rate the sound warps all over the place.

gormen-GHAAASSST

gormenghast, in other words. besides all of my university coursework fun, i have been having the honour of working with the indubitably incredible Theatre Paradok on a production of mervyn peake’s monolithic trilogy of novels. my job title is music director, but this is somewhat misleading as what i am really doing is creating soundscapes, making foley (sound effects like splashes and creaking doors), and threading thematic noises through the dialogue and movements onstage. we are also going to have images projected, and my colleague alistair grant has been hard at art director work making some beautiful things. you should check out his blog.

i hadn’t even read the book by the time we started work, which was worrying me a little, but my worries turned out to be unfounded. i went to the initial read-through of the script (john constable’s adaptation), and that night had my first of many gormenghast dreams, in which i wander the castle all by myself listening to the walls and doors and stones, knocking on surfaces and investigating spaces. that might sound a bit weird, but once i settled into it, collecting and arranging the sounds and foley objects started to feel like a collaboration with the castle, as well as the cast and production team. we have a lovely church venue for the performance now, and because of the enormously echoic space the sound performance will really be a collaboration with the castle – thanks to a clever speaker array idea (not my own!) the natural reverb of the church will take hold of every sound hurled at the walls, and spread it around and up into its lovely roof. we will all be listening to the stones, as it should be.

so – practically my rig will consist of a laptop to play pre-recorded sound files, and also some foley objects and homemade rain machine effects boxes plugged into a mixer, so the whole acoustic-amplified-digital spectrum can be covered.

the sound files below represent my first test runs for character themes, weather/foley effects, and some scene ambiences. most of these will play from my laptop setup. the files all peak at -3db (for the nerds) and are mp3 format (so i can get the nice wordpress audio player up). they have all been assembled from my own raw field recordings and studio recordings… even the birds. apart from the owl hoots, these were originally a bbc sound effects recording before i got to them and pitch shifted the life out of them. the flapping and turning book pages for sepulchrave were recorded with alistair, who had the original idea of books representing the owls’ wings. he has some interesting test videos of book flapping on his own blog. each sound file below is swamped in a protools preset ‘cathedral’ reverb to give an idea of how all of the sounds will behave within the same space.

i’ll give a little bit of detail on how things were made and link to the character pages on mervyn peake’s site for more info and book extracts, but apart from that you should really just listen.

CHARACTERS/AMBIENCES

sepulchrave, 76th earl of groan: surrounded at all times by his library of books and perhaps a distant owl

gertrude, countess of groan: keeper of many birds

fuchsia groan: her fragile music box theme will deteriorate in pitch and speed as her situation becomes more desperate 

titus groan: this clip is for titus’ rituals through time, his sounds will be based around the ritual and the stones but will mostly be performed live rather than pre-recorded. 

cora and clarice : their music box is already broken, with as much noise from the mechanism as the notes. it will also pitch lower and slower as time goes on.

steerpike : his theme needs to be sinister and also cut through the gormenghast soundscape because he stands out as the bringer of change and ultimately chaos; this is me trying out a bowing action on a little spanish guitar. his sound will hopefully be performed live rather than pre-recorded.

the thing: outside in the natural world full of leaves and birds. this is me pointing a microphone into an aviary in edinburgh zoo. i will be cutting the people noises and my laugh at the end from this clip, but couldn’t resist leaving it in for just now

swelter: the grotesque chef of gormenghast or, more accurately, the ambience of his kingdom – the kitchen

death owls: i’m not giving the plot away, but in one scene some of the characters are eaten alive by a swarm of owls. this is my initial sketch for the scene; it begins with a creature eating something’s flesh, before the owls descend.

FOLEY/WEATHER EFFECTS

smash

splash

creaking doors

storm

wind

rain

fire

the castle flooding

DRONES

i’m also working on building up some drone/textural rumbles to create tension and unease, particularly as the third act escalates to the finish. these are tests for the first sub-tastic layer; i’m going to have three or four elements to play with and layer/mix about live rather than compose one complete tone to trigger. these clips are, appropriately enough, slowed down clips of some of the above samples. they need a little patience but persevere, they sound lovely. to me anyway.

the first two were originally titus’ stones

this last one is the castle flooding noise; it takes a while to hear it and you almost feel it before it is audible (or maybe i was just looking at the waveform in protools).

S.O.U.N.D.D.E.S.I.G.N

yes, it’s been a while but my excuses are better than good, i promise. firstly, i’ve started on the MSc Sound Design course at the University of Edinburgh. the first ridiculously intense six weeks are past, and my mind and ears are already a very different shape. a monster is emerging i think. the world has turned itself over and now everything is an opportunity for noise making. i haunt charity shop bric-a-brac sections, car boot sales and the bins of edinburgh like a woman possessed, shaking and tapping and scraping to decide what the best loot is. besides the glories of introducing small broken things to expensive microphones, there’s a vast array of software and hardware to learn to get around, and getting around all of that means anything can happen with a sound. oh. yeah. i’m not going to try to maintain an air of sophistication about all of this, because that would be impossible. it is unbearably exciting listening to so many new and wonderful things sometimes, and if that sounds nerdy then so be it. by week 3 i realised it was love. one of the best things about being in love is you get to make a complete overly-enthusiastic fool of yourself.  and you’re not able to help it.

so, secondly… oh wait, that’s the next post…

piezo driver piece 1

this piece is something i’ve been working on for quite a while. it uses a piezo driver, which thanks to the lovely nicholas collins i know how to make now. the piezos i’ve been happily soldering into contact mic arrangements are actually made to PRODUCE sound rather than absorb it from a surface. if you solder a piezo to the output of an audio output transformer [with an 8 ohm load on one side], you get a vibrating disc, which when applied to a surface, will turn that surface into a speaker.

here’s mine – the transformer is housed in a little taped-up box with a speaker drawn on to remind me which way to connect it.

because the audio output transformer has to have an 8 ohm input, i have to connect it to the output of my radio shack amplifier [which delivers this load], and then the audio i want to amplify into its input. i will eventually get around to putting drivers into a more sophisticated arrangement without the radio shack amp [i have designs on a big glut of them all singing together].

i’m not too sure yet how artistic this piece is, although it clearly has designs in that direction. i recorded my voice onto a cassette tape on my sony tc 152sd tape recorder [a wonderful machine i found in a charity shop a long time ago - it's an old bootlegger's device i believe], and although the speech isn’t scripted in any way i do read out a poem by judy grahn at the end. she is great, if you like poetry you should check her out. i went through a phase of recording my friends taped letters after i picked this machine up, and i would inevitably end up reading poems and things too. as i explain in the piece, i’m not too comfortable with the sound of my spoken voice and although i have ambitions to do spoken word/music and poetry recordings, my voice is still putting me off, and it makes my poetry vocabulary a bit limited… nerves i suppose.

anyway, during this video the audio reverts back to the ‘clean’ tape playing when i turn off the radio shack amp before switching piezo positions. when the piezo is applied to the guitar though, that is what you hear – i’ve just turned down the source a bit and it distorts less. ah my faithful guitar and its clarity.

there will be more of these driver explorations on here soon – i am already thinking about the other permutations.

 

motors and tape heads

i still have all of my old cassette tapes, and it turns out my hoarding hasn’t been for nothing. the magnetic tape heads inside cassette players can be removed and connected to an audio cable. they will produce sound if they rub against magnetic tape, but also other magnetic strips that store binary info [those 1s and 0s] in credit cards, train tickets, floppy discs, etc.

i pulled apart an old sony tape recorder [another car boot sale find] because it just wanted to chew my tapes up, and salvaged a few of its parts including its DC motor and tape head. the motor just spins around when connected to a battery [this is what rewound/played the tape in its former incarnation], and between that and the tape head rigged up to my little amp i figured it was time to reinvent the record player.

the handy crocodile clip on the end of an arm is my ‘helping hand’ which clamps things still while i solder them. you can’t really see the motor here as it’s under the disc but it is a bit more visible in the last video.

tape head player 1: blank zip disc

i had to turn the distortion right up on the amp to hear all the lovely high pitches this made. i really want to fill a whole room with these things one day.

 

 

tape head player 2: floppy disc

this floppy has some of my uni essays from first/second year [back in the good ol' days when USBs probably didn't even come in 500MB sizes]. i assume that the re-arrangement of the binary code is what gives a tone, as opposed to the disc being blank.

 

tape head player 3 – magnetic tape

for this piece, i pulled apart an old cassette [sorry dido, you're not my thing, i only bought you because of that eminem song] and glued the tape onto a floppy. i need to source a slower motor to make the sound a bit more detailed, but what came out was lovely.

 

tape head player 4 – train ticket

capturing embra

the workshop has upped and moved to edinburgh over the summer, as i am heading back to university this month. edinburgh gets nice and crazy over festival time, and i headed out with some binaural mics and my swanky ipod touch [running the fire 2 field recorder app - it's great by the way] to capture some sounds. in a joke only nerds will get, my ages of work soldering tiny electret capsules into a convincing-looking headphone arrangement was pretty much a waste of time as the ipod only records mono audio through its headphone jack, not stereo [apple!!! grrr]. so the two signals come out as if i was walking around holding a mic. oops. however, secret microphones are pretty CIA-tastic and when i get my hands on a stereo recorder they will be properly lovely.

this audio is of me trying to negociate the royal mile sometime in august. i manage to avoid the flyering people until towards the end.

some of my field recording efforts made it into a track on my new bandcamp release shoulder to the wheel. i edited crowd noise, a squeaking metal container handle and footsteps into the background of this.

 

 

some more circuit fun

i’ve been hard at work breadboarding some distortion pedals and learning a bit more about the many uses for CMOS chips. before the perma-building begins in earnest i thought i’d share another couple of things i am very proud of.

the first is a little amplifier made with an LM386 chip -

 

and this is an LED sequencer made with a CD74C14 chip connected to the clock input of a C4017 chip, which then lights the LEDs in a particular sequence. this exciting device can built on to make an audio sequencer. oh yeah.

circuit tones 5-6-7

well my camera was a bit sicker than i first thought and had to go all the way back to the pentax people to get her microphone replaced before she’d record audio for me. so by the grace of pentax [and the argos people] the circuit work can be documented again on here…

circuit tones 5: body contacts
this oscillator circuit replaces the resistor/potentiometer/photoresistor component with conductive metal bits [electrodes] for touching – in this case two ring pulls and two pennies.

to actually get a tone the electrode pair needs to touch to complete the circuit, or you need to touch both of them with your fingers. the 9V battery power is actually running through your body to get from one electrode to the other, so your body becomes the resistor. both of these pairs were running with the same size capacitor, so technically they should be producing the same tone, but because of the different materials and the chaos of fingers and skin conductivity, it gets crazy.

i’m kind of in love with the sound the ring pulls make and have been collecting them pretty obsessively since i discovered how great they are. the pennies produce such a different tone, and are also much better at giving you a mini electric shock too. the feeling of a 9V current can be intense on the fingers, but a girl gets used to these things.
you can watch the video on youtube here.

circuit tones 6: simple theremin
this circuit is based on a theremin, with two photoresistors controlling the pitch of the output and the volume. they are difficult enough to control, being so close together and therefore dark/lit at pretty much the same rate all the time, but the sounds get nice and spooky regardless. i need to mount one of these in a wooden box or something and put a bit of distance between them for the full effect i think.

you can watch the youtube video here.

circuit tones 7:NAND gate oscillator
this my first foray into new IC chip possibilities, so instead of the hex schmitt trigger this uses a quad NAND gate chip. i’m not going to try and explain the thing away because i’m still getting my head around these babies, but this chip has a different logic setup, so you rig up two oscillators on each side of it, and one from each pair is the ‘control’ – it gates the other depending on what it’s doing. so more sound possibilities again, and according to my Nicholas Collins bible, i will be able to make a more triangle-shaped wave output from this one, so something closer to an analog oscillator sound. oh yerrr.

sadly there’s no video for this one, i did shoot it but it’s dark as anything so we will have to make do with a photo and the lovely audio.

that’s it for my circuit tones series – the next electronic goodies on here are going to be permanent, beautifully packaged, covet-able things. so there.