Monkey Sound

I’ve been meaning to put this up for a while… A little while back now, me and my girlfriend were sitting in her room, when a beautifully intriguing melodic sound came out of nowhere from one of the gardens down our street. Opening the window further, to have a good look around, we just couldn’t make out where it was coming from.

Out of our window...

All I knew was someone, a good couple of houses down, was having a garden party of sorts. The instrument was so intriguing and unusual, I just had to record it. I grabbed my trusty little Zoom H2 (unfortunately this time without the Rycote windshield, so I had to do some EQing to the sound afterwards) and stuck my arm out of the window to have a good capture.

The recording isn’t perfect (by a long shot) but it definitely captures this unusual melodic instrument… I wonder if I’ll ever find out what it actually is?

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The prolific and informative Epic Sound blog has pushed me on to this new project by the BBC. It’s a great concept and one that could really fit in with the whole spectrum of the BBC’s vast archive of media.

The general idea of it is to have sounds from all across the world, all plotted and archived for everyone to enjoy. It’s not just animals that can become extinct, but sounds too. It’s nice that the BBC have taken it upon themselves to archive all of this so they never get lost. The official BBC concept is this:

The eye is attracted by change, the new and the flashy. Our ears, by contrast, are seduced by the familiar. Yet, all the time, the sound of the world is changing. Precious sounds are dying while new ones enter our lives. So here at the BBC we want to build a sound map of the world – and save endangered sounds from extinction. And who better to help than avid audio consumers like you?

Though maybe not executed quite how I would of done it, but the Sound Explorer is quite nice. You sort of explore different objects in an urban landscape, so as you go up to them, you can hear their sounds. I’ve personally always been interested in ambiences and mixing these together – it’s where a lot of my own music ideas come from – so this was a nice little feature on the site.

Anyhow, cool project I think. Check out some of the links to various parts of it, and obviously have a good look around yourself.

• Introduction to Save Our Sounds
• Save Our Sounds documentaries
• Sound Explorer
• Interactive World Map

Here is another fascinating insight into how sound can affect the physical world. At the weekend I came across a post from the website Science Friday. Using just a metal plate, a bucket of sand and different pitches of a sine wave – all sorts of incredible shapes can form.

Recently, I’ve been getting more interested in digital art – in particular, generative art. A talented friend of mine, Justin Windle, runs his Soulwire blog which demonstrates generative art to a very high quality. After coming across this Science Friday video, it’s interesting how, with just sound and sand, mother nature can come up with it’s own breathtaking generative art too.

Check the actual video of this here.

I did actually see this quite a while ago now (well, a while ago in the Internet world) but seeing it again today just made me realise it needed to be shared (again).

Chris Supranowitz has been using some magic scientific machinary to inspect vinyl up close. What I have always loved about vinyl is that the music is actually there in a physical form. It’s tangable and real. I love vinyl so much that I recently brought a Project Genie III turntable and a Radial Engineering J33 preamp to fully enjoy the medium. Using this little system to listen and to sample vinyl is proving to be a wise investment.

These photos really show you the grooves of this beautiful format and that the music is right there on the wax. Check out more of Chris’ work to see what other interesting things he has been spying on up close.