Sound capture
Section outline
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Discuss and summarize the two audio papers by Nicole De Brabandere and Graham Flett (2016), and by Robert Willim (2019). What are they about, and how do they make their argument. What do you hear in the audio papers? Organize your answer in terms of causal, semantic and reduced listening.
Consider your experience listening to radio.earth, and listening to soundscapes, the concept denoting the sonic equivalent of a landscape. This is one possible modality we can adopt in listening; analogous to landscape painting or photography, often nothing particular get's our attention; the focus is on the background rather than foreground. Often the foreground is empty.
A landscape view of Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord (photo by Mace Ojala).
A landscape view West from Bochum's Bismarckturm toward Bergbaumuseum (photo by Mace Ojala).
What sound might you expect, remember, fear, or hope to hear in the above landscapes? What spectral and temporal qualities do those sounds have? What might these places sound like in 1923, or in 2123? What about an hour, a week, a month, or thousand years from now? What might they sound like to a child? To an immigrant? To a factory owner? To a family? To a dog, or a raven? To Siri or Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa? To an MP3 compression algorithm? Which sounds are gone from these soundscapes, and are some of the sounds extinct? One of the photographs is from a Facebook group. Can you imagine a Facebook group which would consist of posts of historical sounds of a city, rather than photographs? One of them is from a Landschaftpark, ie. a landscape park. If your task was to design and build a "soundscape park", what would you do?
You can find collected soundscapes online, see for example radio aporee and Record the Earth. Some museums have collected sounds of e.g. work. Do you have a collection of sounds? What's in it, and how is it organized?
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This bleep was recorded on the 1st floor if building GB on RUB campus when Mace updated his transponder to get access to the seminar room on the 8th floor. It is therefore a sound of power, of access control, of legitimate rights, and of computer software.
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After a few media operations (amplify, mix to mono, compress to mp3, align with original, invert, mix down, amplify) in Audacity, we discover a "ghost" in an mp3. This ghost is the compression artefact of the MP3 algorithm.
Screenshot of a spectrogram by Mace Ojala (CC BY-NC-SA), with Audacity (GNU GPL v2) What does the ghost sound like? How would you analyze it's causal, semantic and reduced, ie spectral characteristics? What about aesthetic?
Try other MP3 compression settings. What happens if you repeat the operations on another audio file? Or using another compression algorithms than the familiar MP3? Which ones do you know and can find in Audacity?
For more on MP3, you can check out the work of Jonathan Sterne's book MP3: The Meaning of a Format, a media studies classic, published by Duke University Press in 2012. See also Sterne's paper The death and life of digital audio in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2006, vol 31, no 4.
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In Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference, 2014. The abstract:
The MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Layer III standard, more commonly referred to as MP3, has become a nearly ubiquitous digital audio file format. First published in 1993 [1], this codec implements a lossy compression algorithm based on a perceptual model of human hearing. Listening tests, primarily designed by and for western-european men, and using the music they liked, were used to refine the encoder. These tests determined which sounds were perceptually important and which could be erased or altered, ostensibly without being noticed. What are these lost sounds? Are they sounds which human ears can not hear in their original contexts due to our perceptual limitations, or are they simply encoding detritus? It is commonly accepted that MP3's create audible artifacts such as pre-echo [2], but what does the music which this codec deletes sound like? In the work presented here, techniques are considered and developed to recover these lost sounds, the ghosts in the MP3, and reformulate these sounds as art.
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Ryan's project webpage theghostinthemp3.com with audio and image examples, and explanation of his process. Ryan also has them on Soundcloud if you want to focus on listening.
Image Example 2. White, Pink, and Brown Noise - Lowest Possible Bit Rate MP3 (8kbps) by Ryan Maguire, from The Ghost in the MP3 project website -
"SPEAR is an application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis. The analysis procedure (which is based on the traditional McAulay-Quatieri technique) attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude."
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There was an observant question during the seminar about why the MP3 file is longer than the original WAV file. The reasons gets at the nittygritty of the MP3 file format, and it's encoder and decoder delays. See questions 1 and 2 in this FAQ of LAME, the MP3 encoder implementation Audacity uses.
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One of the students has explored hauntology, breakbeats, computer fans and vaporwave in their music production. It's about hauntology, breakbeats, Computer fans, and vaporave somehow."
Ole also shared his Eratekk breakcore project album IFLF v1.1. What on earth is "breakcore", you might ask? Maybe listening leaves no need for clarification.
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Recorders
Photo by Mace Ojala
Try to acquire, either borrow or buy, a high-quality audio recorder, such as a Zoom H4n Pro. Typically you can listen to your recordings directly on the recorder, or access the SD card with an external reader. You can also connect the recorder to a computer either as an SD reader, or as an sound card.
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