Freesound Forums

I've read about many of the early musique concrete artists and how they amplified extremely tiny sounds many times to distort it. Sounds of things like insects, small animals, rocks and leaves and sand, and even simply air itself.

How can I do this, and what equipment would I need to use?

hello^2 flowers,

what you need is called "contact microphones"

have a google!

- bram

i have some, but i don't think they're sensitive enough. and I also need a way to reduce or eliminate the humm I get when I amplify the sounds.

would connecting a preamp to the mic's help?

hello_flowers:

'they amplified extremely tiny sounds many times to distort it'-

If you want to record and then distort very quiet sounds then just use a good uni-directional mic going through an analogue (digital desks give horrible distortion) mixing desk and whack up the trim, you will get nice distortion and your quiet noise loud.

'reduce or eliminate the humm'-

To reduce humm and hiss, which is likely if you do this through an analog desk, just use some VST plugins like parametric EQ, an expander and/or a deesser to try and reduce the unwanted noise. If you not sure what the those VST plugins are or don't have them available e-mail me the files or post 'em and send me a link and i can try to reduce the background noise for you.

Bram:

Those contact mics sound very interesting, they use Piezoe transducer though? I learnt that those are only good for high frequencies, low quality signal and high amplitude like fire alarms, clock alarms etc. Either way those mics look interesting. You could do some awesome binaural recordings with and a dummy head and those as the ears.

Dan.