Recently I started experimenting with noise boxes and sound design. In YouTube you may find hundreds of examples of this noisy outpouring of human creativity. Because I don’t want to have more objects standing around in our already cluttered apartment, I came up with a better idea: Somewhere among my craft materials I had some perforated metal sheets and some 4 mm screws in various lengths and the associated nuts. Instead of fixing noisy objects like spring coils, bells, pans or popsicles on wooden boxes for eternity, I started to screw those noise objects on the perforated plates.
With this concept I was much more flexible in my experiments. The first advantage was that I could add and remove different objects, test their sound effects, assemble different variations and take them apart after I had recorded sound samples. Another advantage was that I could position these plates not only on wooden boxes, but on different resonant bodies like a ceramic bowl or a metal box. The final advantage will be that I can take everything apart and reuse the components in other projects when I’m done.
I also experimented with different contact microphones: First I tried with cheap piezo mics in different sizes from an electronic shop. I bought also a contact mic with a suction cup and one with a clamp which is normally used with acoustic guitars. While my self soldered piezo mics worked on the TRRS socket of my notebook at first try, I learned it the hard way that it is not possible to chain a mono jack plug with adapters to the same TRRS socket. The only way to make it work with the two bought microphones was via an old steinberg interface.
As noise objects I used household items like small pans. To record the samples I used partly the free software Audacity and partly the DAW Reaper. Quickly I was confronted with the fact, that most of the recordes samples where not really impressive in their raw form. Here a raw sound generated with one of the pans in the image:
Fortunately I had recently learned some tricks in Reaper during a sound design workshop. With a little bit of reverb (the Reaper VST ReaVerbate) I find it much more interesting:
Another interesting Reaper effect is stretching a sound and panning it from one side to the other:
Even with the coils of old ballpoint pens you can generate interesting sounds:
The next project on my bucket list is to take some of these samples as an input in Synplant und make software instruments with physical modeling for my midi controllers.