Theremin
Theremin is a simple and fun audio synthesizer built in HTML5. My kids did not want to stop playing with this.
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kottke.org posts about Audio
Running from the knowledge
Every year, a bunch of folks play a game called Last Man, in which the participants attempt to be the last person to find out the result of the Super Bowl. TLDR did an entertaining podcast on this year’s contestants.
Update: The New Yorker recently ran a piece on the Last Man game.
Most of the runners, however, found themselves waking up each day in a cold sweat. “I feel like I’m being sequestered for the stupidest jury trial in modern history,” one competitor said. “It’s gotten to the point where three things may end me: recklessness, homesickness, or sheer boredom.”
The Great Language Game
Think you can distinguish between 80 of the world’s most spoken languages? Play the Great Language Game and find out. (Oof, I am bad at this.)
The search for absolute silence
Mostly because of jet aircraft, there are very few places in the world free of man-made noise.
For the past 30 years, Hempton has made it his mission to discover what he calls the last great quiet places, areas that clock in at audible human noise-free intervals of 15 minutes or more. He only counts areas of around 3,100 square kilometres (1,200 square miles) or larger — enough to create a sound buffer around a central point of absolute quiet. Over the years, his list has shrunk as he returns to a previously quiet spot, only to find it now polluted by noise. Still, he says 12 such quiet places exist in the US, with more found around the world. A spot in the Hoh Rainforest in Washington is one, as are places in Grasslands National Park in Canada, Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota and Haleakala National Park in Hawaii. The others, however, he keeps confidential.
(via @bobulate)
The secretive inventor of the laugh track machine
Working for CBS and later on his own in the 40s and 50s, sound engineer Charley Douglass perfected the laugh track technique, which was then called sweetening. His secret weapon was the laff box, a machine that you could use like a typewriter to produce the type and sequence of laughter you needed for a particular situation. Here’s how the machine worked:
The one-of-a-kind device — affectionately known in the industry as the “laff box” — was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Only immediate members of the family knew what the inside actually looked like (at one time, the “laff box” was called “the most sought after but well-concealed box in the world”). Since more than one member of the Douglass family was involved in the editing process, it was natural for one member to react differently to a joke than another. Charley himself was the most conservative of all, so producers would put in bids for other editors who were more liberal in their choice of laughter. Douglass used a keyboard to select the style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a foot pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, yocks, and belly laughs; exactly 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, 10 to a loop. Each loop contained 10 individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up. Since the tapes were looped, laughs were played in the same order repeatedly. Sound engineers would watch sitcoms and knew exactly which recurrent guffaws were next, even if they were viewing an episode for the first time. Frequently, Douglass would combine different laughs, either long or short in length. Attentive viewers could spot when he decided to mix chuckles together to give the effect of a more diverse audience.
I found out about the laff box from Kevin Slavin & Kenyatta Cheese’s talk about how, with the Internet, the audience now has an audience.
Listening to the White Album 100 times, all at the same time
I have previously reported on Rutherford Chang and his large collection of first-pressings of The Beatles’ White Album.
Q: Are you a vinyl collector?
A: Yes, I collect White Albums.
Q: Do you collect anything other than that?
A: I own some vinyl and occasionally buy other albums, but nothing in multiples like the White Album.
Chang has taken 100 of those records, recorded the audio, and overlaid the resulting 100 tracks into one glorious track. Here’s Side 1 x 100 (Side 2 is available on vinyl only):
The albums, as it turns out, have also aged with some variety. Some played cleanly, others had scratches, noise from embedded dirt, or vinyl wear. And though the recordings are identical, variations in the pressings, and natural fluctuations in the speed of Mr. Chang’s analogue turntable, meant that the 100 recordings slowly moved out of sync, in the manner of an early Steve Reich piece: the opening of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is entirely unified, but at the start of “Dear Prudence,” you hear the first line echoing several times, and by “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” the track is a nearly unrecognizeable roar.
The sounds of old New York
The Roaring Twenties web site is “an interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City”.
The Roaring ‘Twenties website is dedicated to that challenge, attempting to recreate for its listeners not just the sound of the past but also its sonic culture. It offers a sonic time machine; an interactive multimedia environment whereby site visitors can not just hear, but mindfully listen to, the noises of New York City in the late 1920s, a place and time defined by its din.
(via paleofuture)
An audio time machine for your phone
Related to constant photography is an Phone app called Heard that buffers five minutes of audio, allowing you the option to save if anything interesting happens. (thx, andy)
The making of a Steinway grand piano
Steinway & Sons, the celebrated piano making company, recently produced this video of how their grand pianos are constructed. Their process for building pianos has changed so little that they were able pair 1980s factory tour audio from former chairman John Steinway to contemporary footage of their Astoria, NY factory.
You can see how little has changed as you watch this 1929 film of how a Steinway piano was made:
Some of the shots in the two videos are identical, e.g. the men pulling the piano rim out of the mold or choosing spruce for the sounding boards. It interesting to compare these two videos with Wednesday’s video of how Telsa sedans are made. Together, the three form a view of the progression of automation in manufacturing. I wonder if the Tesla robots could construct a piano that sounds as good as a Steinway? (via open culture)
Screaming volcanoes
Volcanoes “scream” before they erupt. And they also have a heartbeat of sorts. Listen to these surprisingly intense sounds emitted by a volcano in Alaska before it erupted. The first recording condenses 10 minutes of audio into 10 seconds, so you can hear the pre-eruption scream:
The second recording is of 10 hours of pre-eruption mini earthquakes condensed into one minute of audio.
The pause right before the eruption is Mother Nature dropping the beat. (via @DavidGrann)
Louis Armstrong on keeping up his chops
In 1964, when they were teenagers at New Trier High School near Chicago, Michael Aisner and James Stein interviewed Louis Armstrong backstage at one of his concerts. In his boxers.
You can’t take it for granted. Even if we have two, three days off I still have to blow that horn a few hours to keep up the chops. I mean I’ve been playing 50 years, and that’s what I’ve been doing in order to keep in that groove there.
Aisner also interviewed Muhammed Ali a couple years later.
Seinfeld Theme Slowed Down
If you slow down the Seinfeld theme by 1200%, it sounds like the soundtrack to a bad 80s sci-fi movie.
You may also enjoy Justin Bieber at 800% slower.
What radio broadcasts sounded like in 1939
The audio of a complete broadcast day from radio station WJSV in Washington, D.C. The day in question is September 21, 1939. A partial listing of the schedule:
12:30 Road of Life (soap)
12:45 This Day Is Ours (soap)
1:00 Sunshine Report (news)
1:15 The Life & Love of Dr. Susan (soap)
1:30 Your Family and Mine (soap)
1:45 News
2:00 President Roosevelt’s Address to Congress (speech)
2:40 Premier Edouard Daladier
3:00 Address Commentary (news)
3:15 The Career of Alice Blair (soap)
3:30 News (news)
3:42 Rhythm & Romance
3:45 Scattergood Baines
4:00 Baseball: Cleveland Indians at Washington Senators (sports)
5:15 The World Dances (music)
5:30 News (news)
5:45 Sports News (news)
6:00 Amos and Andy (comedy)
(via @ftrain)
The father of the telephone speaks
Alexander Graham Bell famously participated in the first telephone call, but until very recently, we had no idea how his voice sounded. Then researchers used high-resolution optical scans of old audio discs and cylinders and converted them to audio…and found a short passage recited by Bell:
If you can’t quite catch it, Bell is saying “hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.”
Horn swarms and Manhattan’s noisy history
During a walk with noise historian Hillel Schwartz, Peter Andrey Smith discovers that parts of Manhattan, which many think of now as quite deafening, used to be even noisier.
“There was a constant flotilla of barges taking construction detritus away from the city, toward the Jersey shore,” he said. “All of these Irish tugboat captains probably knew the service staff, and they would be signaling to them, ‘Hi, I’m coming by!’ But they would be signaling with these huge horns! And they would be signaling late at night, also, to their complement of workers, who were now on shore, drinking heavily in a nearby tavern: ‘O.K., time to call it quits!’ The number of horns recorded over the course of an evening amounted to thousands. I hesitate to call them toots. They were horn swarms.”
My Design Matters interview
Debbie Millman interviewed me for her Design Matters podcast the other day. Spoiler: we did not actually talk much about design.
Old school BBC sound effects
BBC Research & Development have created a site using the Web Audio API that lets you recreate the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, stuff you may have heard on a Jon Pertwee-era episode of Dr Who. The Wobbulator is my favorite.
Unexplained sounds
Every once in awhile, something somewhere will make a sound and no one really knows where it came from. Among the unexplained sounds listed on Wikipedia are mistpouffers, The Bloop, The Hum, and Julia.
The NOAA’s Dr. Christopher Fox does not believe its origin is man-made, such as a submarine or bomb, or familiar geological events such as volcanoes or earthquakes. While the audio profile of the Bloop does resemble that of a living creature, the source is a mystery both because it is different from known sounds and because it was several times louder than the loudest recorded animal, the blue whale.
Note: Illustration by Chris Piascik…prints & more are available.
Lost radio interview with Muhammad Ali from 1966
From Blank on Blank, a great archive of lost interviews, a 1966 interview with Muhammad Ali conducted by Michael Aisner, then a high school student near Chicago.
From inside the club, Aisner and his friend watched out the front window as Ali screetched up in a red Cadillac convertible, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and jumped over the car door.
For the next 20 minutes, Ali talked boxing, footwork, why he wanted to fight — and launched into an epic, unprompted riff about traveling to Mars and fighting for the intergalactic boxing title. All went smoothly — until Aisner realized he’d forgot to turn on the tape recorder.
“I was mortified,” he says. “I said, ‘Champ, do you think you could do that again?’”
The champ obliged.
(via @LTBelcher)
MoMA audio tours narrated by kids
MoMA Unadulterated is an unofficial audio tour of some of the works on the museums fourth floor, narrated by kids aged 3-10.
Each piece of art is analyzed by experts aged 3-10, as they share their unique, unfiltered perspective on such things as composition, the art’s deeper meaning, and why some stuff’s so weird looking. This is Modern Art without the pretentiousness, the pomposity, or any other big “p” words.
A lot of these sound like my internal monologue when looking at art. What’s the difference between childish and childlike again?
This Door Sounds Like Miles Davis
This door in a Chicago parking garage does a pretty good impression of Miles Davis.
(via ★whileseated)
Alec Baldwin has a radio show?
And a podcast! It’s called Here’s the Thing and it features a different guest every two weeks.
Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin gives the listener unique entree into the lives of artists, policy makers and performers. Alec sidesteps the predictable by taking listeners inside the dressing rooms, apartments, and offices of people such as comedian Chris Rock, political strategist Ed Rollins and Oscar winner Michael Douglas. Here’s The Thing: Listen to what happens when an inveterate guest becomes a host. Subscribe now and get new interviews every two weeks.
A recent episode featured David Letterman.
Alien still hasn’t listened to all of Voyager’s Golden Record
Eighteen months on, the alien who discovered Voyager’s Golden Record still hasn’t gotten around to listening to the whole thing.
“The wind, rain, and surf sounds are pretty cool, but I usually sort of zone out when it gets to the crickets chirping, and then I just end up turning it off,” said Ellinger, adding that he will sometimes put the record on as background noise when he’s cleaning his electro-biological habitat.
Current status of The Onion: still really pretty good.
The silence of Mike Daisey
The long periods of silence by Mike Daisey were among the most compelling parts of the most recent episode of This American Life…you know the one. Michael Sippey edited together the silences into one glorious clip, the best audio of silence since Cage.
Reading the transcript of the Retraction episode of This American Life is one thing; listening to it is another. The most interesting bits were the silences, not only because Daisey is so clearly uncomfortable answering the questions, but also because we’ve been trained as radio listeners to abhor silence — it makes *us* incredibly uncomfortable.
This American Life retracts Apple/Foxconn story
This American Life is retracting their popular episode about Apple and their Foxconn factories, claiming that part of the story was fabricated.
Ira also talks with Mike Daisey about why he misled This American Life during the fact-checking process. And we end the show separating fact from fiction, when it comes to Apple’s manufacturing practices in China.
The audio is not available on the site yet (because the show hasn’t aired yet?), and the audio for the retracted show is no longer available on their site (but you can listen to it here). Mike Daisey, the performer of the retracted piece, responds on his web site:
What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic — not a theatrical — enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations.
(via @alexismadrigal)
Update: Ira Glass writes about the retraction on the TAL blog (mirror).
I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.
(via @waxpancake)
What the Space Shuttle booster saw
You’ve likely seen other videos taken from cameras attached to the Space Shuttle and its boosters, but this is one is exceptional in two regards: it’s in HD and the sound has been remastered by Skywalker Sound.
Watch, and more importantly, listen to the whole thing…at the very end, you can see the second booster land a few hundred yards away from the first one. Who knew that being in space sounds like being trapped with a whale underwater in a tin pail? (via ★mouser)
Self-deportation
The bulk of the Jan 27th episode of This American Life was about Alabama’s tough new immigration laws.
Last Summer, Alabama passed HB56, the most sweeping immigration bill in the country. It’s an example of a strategy called “attrition through enforcement” or, more colloquially, “self-deportation” — making life so hard on undocumented immigrants that they choose to leave the country. But as reporter Jack Hitt found, the new law has had lots of other unintended consequences.
Vocal fry
College-age women end sentences in the lowest vocal register, a creaky vibration called vocal fry, possibly to broadcast themselves as part of a social group.
Vocal fry…great term! Here’s a demo of how the effect is used in singing.
Update: About a minute into this clip from Louie, there’s a great example of vocal fry used by “college-age women [to] end sentences”:
(via @dalton)
More obsolete sounds
From the Smithsonian, a 1964 album of office sounds…”rustling papers, draws closing, typing and footsteps are just a few of the sounds heard on this album”. See previous obsolete sounds. (via @ian_crowther)
Hidden Radio
Remember the cleverly designed Hidden Radio?
The team behind it has turned it into a radio/Bluetooth speaker and is doing a Kickstarter campaign to get production up and running…all they need is to pre-sell 1000 units.
ps. That “absurdly clever” quote they attribute to Boing Boing? That’s mine! (thx, john)
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