First Game Jam!

Last week I went to my first game jam and had a great time! Fuse Jam in Bristol. We made a little game where you float around on a boat and you can raise and lower the water level by collecting pluses or minuses dotted around the world.

You can play or download the game that we made here: https://tidalloch.itch.io/tidal-loch

I made the music that plays in the background when you start and quite a lot of the sound effects too, I collaborated on the audio with Starshine Audio.

It’s the first time I’ve ever done any kind of audio work for games and luckily folks were kind enough to help me with implementation in Unity and explaining some of the basics of how that works.

In terms of audio stuff I created the music by making multiple variations of a simple piano loop, made using Kontakt, Tritik’s Krush (which is free and awesome) and Izotopes DDLY that looped seamlessly, and then telling unity to play them in a random order.

The idea was to create the impression of the music being generative, without the serious work involved in doing that properly! I was pretty happy with the result.

In terms of sound design I kept things pretty simple due to time constraints and because my goal for the jam was more to meet people and learn a bit of unity/implementation stuff than imprve my design chops.

I used Collected Transients flusher library quite a lot though, especially for the water drain/fill sounds. Thanks to some of the folks at the jam I’ve now discovered Bitsy so the next mission is to make a little game using that and then learn how to make audio work within it!

Circuit Bending Adventures: Part 2

A short one today, to say that I’m nearly finished with my MA and I’ve been designing some sounds using the library I’ve created from circuit bending some old toys. It’s been a pretty fun process and hopefully will just be the beginning of my circuit bending adventures!

I’ll be releasing the library of sounds that I’ve recorded and created from these toys sometime over the coming months.

Check out some of the sounds here:

Circuit Bending Adventures: Part 1 (Plus I Have a Mailing List Now!)

So I’m coming towards the end of my MA studies now and as part of my final major project I decided to create some sound libraries. These are based on filling gaps within my own library, and exploring techniques and ideas that I’m unfamiliar with and interested in. So far it’s been both a steep learning curve and extremely fun!

I’ve been interviewing people who do this currently, field recording, editing, tinkering learning about metadata and all kinds of other stuff pretty much non stop for the last few months! I’ve got three libraries currently in the works and I’ll be releasing them from sometime in late October onwards. If you’re interested you can sign up for my shiny new mailing list, you’ll see a pop up form on the homepage of this site!

Okay, plug over, now back to the subject in hand, circuit bending! Specifically circuit bending some sweet old toy synthesisers, a Major Morgan and the legendary Stylophone! The Major Morgan I’ve had ever since I can remember but it was gathering dust in my dad’s house and so I brought it home with me a while ago with the intention of doing something creative with it. The Stylophone was a kind gift from my mother-in-law (she knows me well)! I’m a total newbie to the world of circuit bending, so I decided to keep it simple and just add an output jack and on/off switch to the Major Morgan.

Because he’s so small, I found it tricky to fit them in him, so inspired by this great blog post  (which involves a much more complex build than mine) I built a breakout box and stuck the components in there.  I followed the instructions from this article to wire up the components.

The process looked like this:

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The initial opening him up and inserting bits into the breakout box

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Then I built some multicore wire using heat-shrink I had kicking around and hooked up the speaker and jack

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Connected up the on/off switch and proceeded to try and get everything back in the box

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And here he is post surgery, looking as maniacally happy as ever…

I bought all my components from Bitsbox who are great and UK based, and it came to under a tenner in total. I used a switch jack as suggested in the article so the speaker turns of when he’s plugged in. I then went on to dismantle the Stylophone feeling emboldened by my new found circuit bending success, but then I remembered I don’t really know anything about electronics so I basically just put it back together!

I did add an LDR to the circuit, attempting to use it as a pitch bend by mimicking where the tuning knob was wired up and it did indeed affect the pitch. However, it only changed the pitch by about a semi-tone in either direction. I’m guessing it’s not providing very much resistance and this is why, any electronics aficionados please feel free to tell me if that’s correct in the comments as I’d love to get some more extreme light based pitch shifting nonsense out of the Stylophone!

Here’s some of the sounds I got out of both instruments:

This is going to be the first in a series of circuit bent toy libraries as I’ve got loads of other toys waiting to be messed with in my cupboard at home. I’d encourage anyone to give circuit bending a go, even if you know literally nothing about electronics. I didn’t know anything at all when I started this project and I feel like I’ve come away (a little) wiser and having made some fun new sounds. If you do have a go, please let me know, I’d love to hear about other folks projects and hear the sounds you make!

DIY Stethoscope Mic

It’s been a while since i’ve written anything here as I’ve been wrapped up in studying for my MA and working at my new job at Doghouse Post but this week I decided I should get back on writing this blog and making some recordings.

With that in mind, and inspired by Akash Thakkar and Rene Coronado, I decided to make a stethoscope mic. I’ve only recently come across these as a concept, and Akash’s GDC talk about the sound of Hyper Light Drifter (which you can find here) made me decide to give it a go myself!

The build was based off of Akash’s design and both he and Rene were (as far as I know) inspired by Diego Stocco so thanks Diego for inspiring me by proxy! My version is substantially lower budget than all of these guys, but I was able to make it in under an hour, for under a tenner and mostly out of stuff I already had lying around.

The ingredients were as follows:

1 x Stethoscope – From Ebay – £3.99 inc. postage.

1 x Lav Mic – I already had this from my previous DIY parabolic mic build, I decided to reuse it for this as the parabolic mic was a bit fragile and just all round not that good.

1 x 3cm section of garden hose – From my garden hose! Thankfully my housemates didn’t seem to mind me cutting up the hose.

1 x Shitloads of gaffer tape

That’s it. The build was super easy and the end result looks a bit like this (I’ve since added more gaffer around the hosepipe section, please excuse the state of my sofa!)

I haven’t had much chance to make recordings yet this week as I’ve been pretty busy with work, but hopefully I’ll get the chance to make some and share them here in the next few weeks. I did, however, take a quick test recording of my own heartbeat.

As you can hear, the noise floor is pretty high, but I expected this from a mic that cost less than £10 to build. It’s running through my Zoom H1 which has quite a high noise floor anyway, but i’m still pretty happy with the result and will be running around like some kind of weird sound doctor for the next few weeks, i’ll share the results here when I make some more recordings.