Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
Digging in the Crates is a cool-looking project to explore sampling. Hard to get a good grip on exactly what’s going on from the video, but the projected interface on top of the vinyl record is an awesome idea.
(via Yamaha Research)
A record groove magnified 1000 times. But before you go getting all sappy about the days when things were objects and stuff was things, remember that hard drives are things too. If you haven’t read it already, I hereby recommend Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms.
(via aaronmeyers)
This nice-looking little documentary shows the vinyl record manufacturing process at Gotta Groove Records. I love factory tours, and it’s interesting to see a company that was founded only recently getting into the LP business (after all, vinyl is coming back, you know?).
I wish they could make one of these for MP3s.
(via acriacao)
From Katie Paterson: Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull and Solheimajökull is a set of three records made out of ice (and the names of the three Icelandic glaciers the water in the ice came from). On the records are sound recordings of the glaciers. Paterson played the three records until they melted, so the sound changes from recording of ice to the melting of ice on the turntable.
Very nice!
You can hear an excerpt.
(via today and tomorrow)
The Turntablist Transcription Method (TTM) is a way to notate turntable scratching. It basically takes the linear time of the recorded sound on record and maps it onto a second dimension; this second dimension allows you to represent the time manipulations of the turntablist’s hands.
I think it’s very interesting how this notation does and does not relate to the sounds made when following it; depending on the record, certain motions will obviously sound different, but I wonder if some of the quicker motions sound pretty similar, even on different records. (That’s a question for DJs to answer, I guess.)
It’s fascinating to see how a practice that originated from explicit violations of interface standards can be codified and transcribed to create a new set of standards.
In any case, this video is the best guide to the system I’ve found, and you can see more in the flash-ridden official TTM site.
(via SCRATCH)
I’ve seen, I think, all of these pieces in photos on various blogs, but it is nice to actually see them in action.
The sound chaser, in particular, is a very compelling little object, and I love how it is modeled on the slot car.
(via Displaced Sounds)
