Freesound Forums

(From DouglasJewett, Ann Arbor, US.) I was planning to send some further ideas privately to Klankbeeld about ambient sound, but I thought other people might have fun with some ideas as well.

Atmospheric inversions: As a child I loved to sleep on my parents' screened porch (in Madison, Wisconsin, US) in the summer. There were many more songbirds to wake up to in the 1950s. I went back sometimes as a young adult. One morning I woke up at first light to find myself enveloped in sound. These were sounds I could identify as to source, coming from bells, factories starting up and trains being switched around on sidings. A lot of far away sources were right up close mixed with near ones. It lasted only maybe a few minutes. I was spellbound, and often hoped to experience it again. But times changed, the old people died, the bird sound changed more to road noise, the factories lost their morning rituals, the trains were no longer switched right in town. I realized later, in reading about atmospheric inversions, that this was what I heard, rather than some private call from God, etc. In brazenly stealing Klankbeeld's ambient sound, I hope, as time permits, by the right mix to approximate the experience of that morning.

Searching for a sound needle in a haystack: As a teenager, as many did, I built a ham radio station from surplus radio gear from World War II. In that vintage of receiver, all the code signals on the 40 and 80 meter ham bands were piled nearly on top of each other, but distinguishable by pitch, loudness and the peculiarities of each sender's style of keystroke. Of course, as kids, the excitement lay in reaching the remotest possible senders, who consequently tended to have the weaker signals. (Of course the catch-22 was that with our home-built transmitters, it was very likely that they wouldn't be able to hear us trying to answer them). Anyway there was always a big cacophony of sound, maybe 5 or 10 signals coming into the ear at once, all shifting in amplitude because of atmospheric effects. And we were trying to copy the faint signals that threaded through the foregound sound. So I experienced, in a limited context, the effect of extended intense concentration. Gradually I became a deliberate meditator, always clueless and clumsy at it. But I never forgot the power of a tiny sound in a matrix of potential distraction to focus the mind. Up until recently I have depended on the occasional happy accident to find such situations. But Free Sound has opened endless possibilities to experiment with ambient sound and mixtures to this end. Too bad I became so old without becoming very enlightened, but maybe one of you out there will. Right now, there's money to be made in religion if you can only get a gimmick.

More on religion - Choirs of angels that sing in motors: When I was about 7 or 8 my father bought a boat motor. He didn't have a boat at the time. But we had fun. We used to clamp it to a post and run it with the propeller immersed in a wash tub. About the time the motor had seen better days, my dad had finally saved up enough for a twelve foot rowboat for fishing. My favorite thing about going out in the boat was to listen to all the music and angelic voices which appeared to come out of the sound of the motor. As I got older, my exposure to music broadened, and with it the sophistication of the sounds I heard from this and that motor. One night, going cross country, I heard for maybe an hour wonderful voices and complex harmonies while lying on the back seat of a Greyhound Bus right above the motor. (In real life I could never sing or read a single note, and was the only kid to be suspended from my grade school choir.) Anyway, I recommend you get down deep into some of the sound on this site. In this vein, I ask contributors to sometimes upload extended sounds so we don't have to create loops, even if it clogs up the bandwidth and gets us a citation from the narks who, day and night, police the Free Sound site.

Murinnis: (Lots of spellings and interpretations of this term.) Especially in about 1970 there was a fad to create and share murinnis. People would carefully arrange bundles of colored glass rods. When they heated these to softening and pulled them out into a single rod, then sliced them up you could make little disks or buttons that had flower patterns, etc. If you collected a lot of these rods rather than slice them up, you could then bundle, heat and draw them into an even more complex pattern. An so ad infinitum. Well not quite. But experts did get wonderful fractal designs when they were lucky. And they traded murinnis with other people, so the number of combinations were infinite, again not quite. In messing with Klankbeeld's tracks it occurred to me that there is a possible sound analog of this process arrived at by mixing extended tracks of sound. When we get an interesting mix we upload and share it with other mixers. They mix our mix with some track they've mixed and load it up for another mixer. An so ad infinitum. Again not quite. Or ad nauseum? I wonder what you end up with in the limiting case - white noise? Kind of a math problem. Again, as with music, math was not my strongest subject. There might be some Darwinian aspect that caused people to select and propagate the fittest track mixes by some process known only to God. (Sorry about my inability to suppress my religious OCD.)

I did not know that there was a lot of thinking and praying behind my long tracks

As I understand well; you want people make a mix with long recordings and up-load these mixes to freesound. That's a really nice way of playing with sound. The next will build on that mix?! etc. etc.

And what the never-ending result will be? I am curious.

One tip; up-load the mix always as 48kHz/24bit FLAC to be sure of the quality.

I will up-loud, like more other freesounders do, long HiFi tracks.

have fun.

Ah, now i see this is the first result: http://www.freesound.org/people/DouglasJewett/sounds/178753/

Mixed-ambient-sound is a good tag for it.

Somewhere in here I beleive there is a good idea for a dare. Or perhaps a continuum mini-dare...
Let me know what you think klankbeeld - here or by PM.

AlienXXX wrote:
Somewhere in here I beleive there is a good idea for a dare. Or perhaps a continuum mini-dare...
Let me know what you think klankbeeld - here or by PM.

O jey that is nice. Hope Douglas will react. It is his idea and his story. I just wondered by this honor on my sounds.

I love Klankbeeld's recording too. As a beginner on working with sound, I was thrilled to see the Douglas Jewett had put together his mix using the base of K's sound. It was exactly what I was looking for to go with a presentation I am making in a couple weeks. (Donation will be made to freesound in thanks).

OzarkDogWoods wrote:
I love Klankbeeld's recording too. As a beginner on working with sound, I was thrilled to see the Douglas Jewett had put together his mix using the base of K's sound. It was exactly what I was looking for to go with a presentation I am making in a couple weeks. (Donation will be made to freesound in thanks).

Too much honor, but very nice to hear. I hope you 'song / sound design' should hear.

thank you

I have to warn you, OzarkDogWoods, that Klankbeeld is quite exceptionally eccentric, and it may be irresponsible to egg him on with praise. He's (Why am sure it's a male person?) quite capable of setting up in the middle of the Autobahn just to get the right 18-wheeler road noise, or crawling out on a 14,000 volt power line just to pick up an elusive hum. Why FreeSound Forums bothers to have a "Dare" category with Klankbeeld around I don't know. It's redundant, in any case. DJ.

DouglasJewett wrote:

I have to warn you, OzarkDogWoods, that Klankbeeld is quite exceptionally eccentric, and it may be irresponsible to egg him on with praise. He's (Why am sure it's a male person?) quite capable of setting up in the middle of the Autobahn just to get the right 18-wheeler road noise, or crawling out on a 14,000 volt power line just to pick up an elusive hum. Why FreeSound Forums bothers to have a "Dare" category with Klankbeeld around I don't know. It's redundant, in any case. DJ.

I have recording in haunted houses as well. Naked, to scare the spirits. The results are in my horror packs. WWWhhhhaaa

DouglasJewett wrote:

I have to warn you, OzarkDogWoods, that Klankbeeld is quite exceptionally eccentric, and it may be irresponsible to egg him on with praise.

Doug,

I believe I was egging you on to the dare...?

Sasha

Klankbeeld, if I were to go into a haunted house naked it would definitely scare the spirits. It even scares my cat.