Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Week 2 - CC - Paper Noises

Well, this has been a troublesome exercise. The idea was to record 5 different noises made with a piece of A4 paper, record them and then edit them using Peak LE 4. After some confusion, such as an M-Box that wouldn't connect, and various other connection problems I managed to do this. I am now attempting for the second time to post this, as last time it deleted half the words. I don't know why. You'd think it would explain. OK, well here are the sounds. They have been uploaded to an outside site (ripway) and I'm hoping that they link properly.

(it can't seem to post this with this link in the file. This is the direct URL lnk though, so maybe that will still work? In fact none of them work, the tag is broken. I'm hoping that if I just post these URL's you will still be able to find the recordings) That sound was made by punching the piece of paper. I then used Peak to change it around and see what different sounds I could make. The finished product has a reversed middle section, and a changed gain envelope. I wanted to slow it down and hear it in slow motion, but couldn't work out how.

- This sound was made by rubbing the paper on the desk. The only edit I did was to put random fades through it. I found that putting a lot of fade ins next to each other created an interesting effect. This one was hard because any effect I put into it wasn't obvious.

This one was just scrunching the paper quickly. I did it slowly as well because I wanted to see if there was any difference. Again, most of the effects used weren't detectable, but I managed to make an interesting effect by fading in and out around major sound parts, like where the sound was the loudest. It made it choppy, and interesting I thought.

This was the slow version of the scrunch, and to be honest, didn't really make much difference. All I did was invert random sections, which didn't seem to do much n this situation, changed the gain, and added something called a boomerang effect. I still don't really know what this does, but I left it there anyway.

This one was a simple tear down the length of the paper. All I really did to this one was reverse the second half. What I'd hoped for was to have it sound like it was tearing, and then repairing itself, but it wasn't as obvious as I'd hoped.

The main problems I encountered were trying to make the sounds sound different to the originals. Most of the noises were too crackly and unsteady to have any real effect from the gain envelope or reversing. And also, posting this blog is becoming difficult. To start with, I couldnt get the music files to load. Now it's having errors posting what I have here. Next time I think I'll write all this on Microsoft Word so at least it won't delete everything again.

I was surprised that I understood Peak though. Even though it was explained during class, I usually don't familiarise myself with programs like this for a fair while, but I'm getting the hang of it pretty quickly.

Now I'm just hoping this posts properly...

1 comment:

Ben said...

The links seem to work fine, but a couple things-

.aiff format files are huge and uploading them will use up your uni internet credit, as it will for anyone else who listens to them. Try exporting them as MP3 in Peak (I dunno how, as I use Audacity instead of Peak)

Also, when you're entering a new post into Blogger you should be able to highlight a word and click on the 'insert link' button so addresses are embedded within the highlighted word, like this. It'll work well for linking to stuff on ripway.

Those paper exercises bring back weird memories... like blowing on the edge of the paper to get a whistle... yeah...