A quick post today to say that my first three sound effects libraries are available now on A Sound Effect.
They were recorded as part of my final piece of MA research and I’m pretty proud of them!
They’re all 50% off right now and available here.
That’s all for today, happy halloween!
Tag: Research
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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.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/632112153″ params=”color=#040405&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]
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.
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This month I have begun my MA program and so far it seems like it’s going to be loads of fun.
The other folks on my course all seem very nice and they have a diverse range of interests in all kinds of things sound related, from the super high tech, to the very low tech.
So far, aside from the obvious beginning of essay writing, I have mostly been focusing on making some underwater recordings.
I hired out some Jez Riley French hydrophones from the uni’s asset store and have been making lots of recordings with them. Mostly this involves trying to get them to stay underwater by sticking them in slightly awkward places like this:
Results have been varied to say the least but I’ve got some recordings that I’m pretty happy with and the process itself really encourages you to listen and experiment with placement a lot, which has been very fun.
I’ll update this post with some of the recordings I’ve made in the next week or so.
Update: Here’s a recording I made at Bristol Harbourside from the end of a pontoon. I dropped the hydrophone about 4 metres down into the water and came across this terrifying scraping sound. Ten nerd points for anyone who can identify it. My best guess is some kind of sluice/valve thing or some part of a boat (although there were no obviously moving or loud boats around at the time)
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/517949211″ params=”color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]