Some sounds
Mar. 28th, 2010 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sen_no_ongakuRecently, as an exercise, many of us in Audio were tasked with making three kinds of sounds: power-ups, menu selects, and creature noises. Our raw material was a bubble sound, footsteps, a closing door, and a braying donkey, and we could only use the default effects in SoundForge.
Here are mine:
PowerUp1
There are two parts to this sound: the high whistling and the lower ripple. Both were made out of our bubble sound.
1) I took the bubble sound cleaned it up a little bit by EQing out most of the high frequencies. This removed some of the subtle clicks and pops, leaving me with just the round sound.
2) For the high whistling, I copied and pasted the bubble over and over again, and put an accelerating upwards pitch bend on the sequence. I then chorused it to make the sound...uh...curlier.
3) For the low ripple, I time-stretched the original bubble by a factor of about five so it was the same length as the whistling; time-stretching anything by more than about 1.5 causes artifacts to happen[1] -- glitches in how the audio gets processed -- which often makes sounds even cooler. I then applied a steady pitch bend[2] to that result and mushed it together with the whistling.
PowerUp2
1) I used the closing door sound, took the second half(3), and time-stretched the hell out of it, probably by a factor of 20.
2) I gapped it[4], and then applied heavy reverb to cover those gapes, which gives it that pulsing sound. Then, as is standard, I put on a steady pitch bend, and there you have it.
PowerUp3
This was originally derived from the footstep sounds. They were so short -- maybe 10 milliseconds max - that SoundForge had trouble interpreting them correctly, and introduced all sorts of weirdness when altering them. For this...
1) I pitch-shifted the footsteps up two octaves, which introduced all sorts of weird clicks and pops to spontaneously appear in the file.
2) After that, I took one of those pops and applied reverb to it, which somehow resulted in a weird static-y sound. I reversed it and pitch-bent it, and ended up with this.
Select1
I wasn't that excited by making select sounds, so I don't really remember how this one was put together, actually. I think it involves combining footsteps, the closet door, and that metallic sound is actually a very isolated segment of the braying donkey.
Voice1
1) A part of the donkey actually sounded like a person screaming, so I isolated it, and pitch-shifted it down an octave, and then another octave, so I had two files.
2) I then added those two pitch-shifted screams to each other and used it as the impulse for the acoustic mirror[5], applying it the original scream. Done.
Voice2
1) I fed the whole donkey file -- which was about 15 seconds long -- through the whistling bubble sound using the acoustic mirror, and these ghostly whorls came out. I took the two sections that sounded most like something trying to communicate, and here we are.
BONUS: Raw heartbeat, Twonky
When we recorded the result of the Doppler ultrasound, it was pretty messy, so I decided to clean it up before posting. The first couple of heartbeats were fairly isolated, so I ran a spectrum analyzer on them to find out what frequencies were most important, and then took everything but those frequencies out of the file so that the heartbeat would be more apparent.
___
(1) If you time-stretch something too far, these artifacts make the result sound...uh...ribbed...because the DAW is basically blowing up a 100x100 picture into fullscreen.
(2)Pitch bends that are relatively tiny can still sound huge. IIRC, the ripple only goes up by 0.2 semitones from start to finish, but it's still wicked noticeable.
(3)A closing door is comprised of two sounds; the sound of the tongue first impacting the slot, and then the mass of the door settling into place.
(4)Inserting silence at regular intervals.
(5)What I like about convolution is that it gives sounds a kind of acoustic halo, an otherworldly quality. It also can completely transform a sound into something totally unexpected and cool.
Here are mine:
PowerUp1
There are two parts to this sound: the high whistling and the lower ripple. Both were made out of our bubble sound.
1) I took the bubble sound cleaned it up a little bit by EQing out most of the high frequencies. This removed some of the subtle clicks and pops, leaving me with just the round sound.
2) For the high whistling, I copied and pasted the bubble over and over again, and put an accelerating upwards pitch bend on the sequence. I then chorused it to make the sound...uh...curlier.
3) For the low ripple, I time-stretched the original bubble by a factor of about five so it was the same length as the whistling; time-stretching anything by more than about 1.5 causes artifacts to happen[1] -- glitches in how the audio gets processed -- which often makes sounds even cooler. I then applied a steady pitch bend[2] to that result and mushed it together with the whistling.
PowerUp2
1) I used the closing door sound, took the second half(3), and time-stretched the hell out of it, probably by a factor of 20.
2) I gapped it[4], and then applied heavy reverb to cover those gapes, which gives it that pulsing sound. Then, as is standard, I put on a steady pitch bend, and there you have it.
PowerUp3
This was originally derived from the footstep sounds. They were so short -- maybe 10 milliseconds max - that SoundForge had trouble interpreting them correctly, and introduced all sorts of weirdness when altering them. For this...
1) I pitch-shifted the footsteps up two octaves, which introduced all sorts of weird clicks and pops to spontaneously appear in the file.
2) After that, I took one of those pops and applied reverb to it, which somehow resulted in a weird static-y sound. I reversed it and pitch-bent it, and ended up with this.
Select1
I wasn't that excited by making select sounds, so I don't really remember how this one was put together, actually. I think it involves combining footsteps, the closet door, and that metallic sound is actually a very isolated segment of the braying donkey.
Voice1
1) A part of the donkey actually sounded like a person screaming, so I isolated it, and pitch-shifted it down an octave, and then another octave, so I had two files.
2) I then added those two pitch-shifted screams to each other and used it as the impulse for the acoustic mirror[5], applying it the original scream. Done.
Voice2
1) I fed the whole donkey file -- which was about 15 seconds long -- through the whistling bubble sound using the acoustic mirror, and these ghostly whorls came out. I took the two sections that sounded most like something trying to communicate, and here we are.
BONUS: Raw heartbeat, Twonky
When we recorded the result of the Doppler ultrasound, it was pretty messy, so I decided to clean it up before posting. The first couple of heartbeats were fairly isolated, so I ran a spectrum analyzer on them to find out what frequencies were most important, and then took everything but those frequencies out of the file so that the heartbeat would be more apparent.
___
(1) If you time-stretch something too far, these artifacts make the result sound...uh...ribbed...because the DAW is basically blowing up a 100x100 picture into fullscreen.
(2)Pitch bends that are relatively tiny can still sound huge. IIRC, the ripple only goes up by 0.2 semitones from start to finish, but it's still wicked noticeable.
(3)A closing door is comprised of two sounds; the sound of the tongue first impacting the slot, and then the mass of the door settling into place.
(4)Inserting silence at regular intervals.
(5)What I like about convolution is that it gives sounds a kind of acoustic halo, an otherworldly quality. It also can completely transform a sound into something totally unexpected and cool.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-28 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-28 02:12 pm (UTC)Also, TWONKY! (*hug*)