{"id":3358,"date":"2025-11-21T18:11:57","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T17:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ecotronics.ch\/wordpress\/?p=3358"},"modified":"2025-11-21T18:11:57","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T17:11:57","slug":"noise-box-revised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ecotronics.ch\/wordpress\/?p=3358","title":{"rendered":"Noise Box Revised"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recently I started experimenting with noise boxes<\/strong> and sound design<\/strong>. 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<\/strong> and some 4 mm screws <\/strong>in various lengths and the associated nuts<\/strong>. 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<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some variations of my “noise box”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With this concept I was much more flexible in my experiments. The first advantage<\/strong> was that I could add and remove different objects<\/strong>, test their sound effects, assemble different variations and take them apart<\/strong> after I had recorded sound samples. Another advantage was that I could position these plates<\/strong> not only on wooden boxes, but on different resonant bodies<\/strong> like a ceramic bowl or a metal box. The final advantage will be that I can take everything apart and reuse the components<\/strong> in other projects when I’m done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Popsicle kalimba<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I also experimented with different contact microphones<\/strong>: First I tried with cheap piezo mics in different sizes from an electronic shop. I bought also a contact mic with a suction cup<\/strong> and one with a clamp <\/strong>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<\/strong> plug with adapters to the same TRRS <\/strong>socket. The only way to make it work with the two bought microphones was via an old steinberg interface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My contact microphones<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Noise box” with small metal pans<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n