Pixelh8 “Hidden Sounds & Timbre” Music Workshop @ Suffolk New College
Today was different to the other lessons, we started by looking at organic sounds, sounds with no electronic circuits. I had asked the students last week to bring in something metal, something all in one piece like a spoon or a fork, we simply attached the item to a piece of string and held each end of the string to our ears. The sounds is incerdibly different as it allows the energy in the lower frequencies to make it to our ears. Hanging the items from a microphone stand and using a Cducer Contact Mic borrowed from friend, colleague and composer Mike Challis, it allowed an even fuller sound to be heard in the headphones. We even used a whammy bar that was in the studio and used that as the instrument itself.
After this we had a look at timbre, which the students had already learnt about, but had never seen the concepts behind it. So using Sygyt’s Overtone Analyzer, I played several different sounds through it, I explained how we could alter a sound of a piano to sound like a guitar by making several cahnges to it’s properies. The image above is of the sounds produced by a Nintendo DS altering the the wave duty at 12.5%, 25%, 36.5%, 50% etc.
Below are some sounds recorded from spoons first with a normal SM58 type clone and then with the Cducer Contact Mic.
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