AlChuck
Well-known member
A couple of issues back in Electronic Musician magazine there was an short article about using a feature in Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge audio editing software called Acoustic Mirror. Acoustic Mirror allows you to transform a recorded sound so that it sounds as if it were recorded in some specific place (e.g., in a barn, in Carnegie Hall, in a stairway, in a grain silo, out in a field, etc.) by using a mathematical process called convolution. All you need is an impulse file made by recording a particular reference sound in that actual space, and you can convolve what you have recorded with it and the end result sounds like you recorded it there rather than wherever you really did.
Anyway, that's the normal way that you use Acoustic Mirror. But there's nothing stopping you from using any sound as if it were an impulse file. The article suggests convolving a guitar with a birdcall, for example.
My curiousity piqued, I spent an evening recording some misccellaneous guitar bits -- distorted and clean guitar chords, arpeggios, and phrases, and also some funny noises made by raking the pick across the strings on the other sides of the bridge and nut, tapping my fingers randomly on the fretboard, and scraping the side of a pick on the lowest string.
Then I started arbitrarily choosing things to convolve them with, including the suggested birdcalls, recordings of my kids talking or singing, other guitar parts, etc. The results were unpredictable, often ugly and bizarre, but often strange and beautiful.
When I was finished, I had a grab-bag of sonic elements. I then used ACID to set up a strange rhythmic loop as a backdrop, and started dropping my convolved sound snippets here and there to taste.
"Erase My Head" is the result:
http://www.nowhereradio.com/artists/album.php?aid=1548&alid=-1
I gave it that name because the feeling I got from some of the sounds in this context reminded me of the David Lynch film Eraserhead for some reason...
Anyway, that's the normal way that you use Acoustic Mirror. But there's nothing stopping you from using any sound as if it were an impulse file. The article suggests convolving a guitar with a birdcall, for example.
My curiousity piqued, I spent an evening recording some misccellaneous guitar bits -- distorted and clean guitar chords, arpeggios, and phrases, and also some funny noises made by raking the pick across the strings on the other sides of the bridge and nut, tapping my fingers randomly on the fretboard, and scraping the side of a pick on the lowest string.
Then I started arbitrarily choosing things to convolve them with, including the suggested birdcalls, recordings of my kids talking or singing, other guitar parts, etc. The results were unpredictable, often ugly and bizarre, but often strange and beautiful.
When I was finished, I had a grab-bag of sonic elements. I then used ACID to set up a strange rhythmic loop as a backdrop, and started dropping my convolved sound snippets here and there to taste.
"Erase My Head" is the result:
http://www.nowhereradio.com/artists/album.php?aid=1548&alid=-1
I gave it that name because the feeling I got from some of the sounds in this context reminded me of the David Lynch film Eraserhead for some reason...
