The Official Sequential/Oberheim Forum
OTHER DISCUSSIONS => General Synthesis => Off Topic => Topic started by: Sacred Synthesis on October 17, 2018, 09:06:00 AM
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We synthesists love to use our instruments to emulate nature - whooshing wind and surf, tinkling ice, moaning lakes, mellifluous bird songs, majestic thunder and rain, and so on. Here's a video in which nature seems to be emulating the synthesizer.
It would be fascinating if we offered samples on this thread of our imitations of nature. I'd say Soundquest is presently the master - at least in the bird song category - but I'm sure others have come up with impressive results.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w56RxaX9THY
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We synthesists love to use our instruments to emulate nature - whooshing wind and surf, tinkling ice, moaning lakes, mellifluous bird songs, majestic thunder and rain, and so on. Here's a video in which nature seems to be emulating the synthesizer.
It would be fascinating if we offered samples on this thread of our imitations of nature. I'd say Soundquest is presently the master - at least in the bird song category - but I'm sure others have come up with impressive results.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w56RxaX9THY
Nice, and not at all what I expected to hear!
As a synth teen in summer time I'd record with the basement door open. One day I had a synth-bird patch going (Korg MS-10 or Pro One, I'd guess, in those days...) and a scrub jay hopped through the door, intrigued. The same bird came back for several days in the afternoon when I'd crank up the synths.
I've written before about how the Korg MS synths are great for all sorts of yowling monkey and laughing cat sounds. I've got banks of cricket/frog patches somewhere, but possibly long lost for now...
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My very first synthesizer was a Univox MiniKorg. When I was about fifteen years old, my father bought it for me, used, for $200. I practically ate, drank, and slept with that instrument. From the start, I was a synthesizer fanatic.
The Korg became well-known in the neighborhood because I used to put my speakers in my bedroom windows and play. One thing I have to say about that little synth: it makes the most convincing bubble sounds! It became an expected feature of our neighborhood that, when you walked past our house, you were bound to be confounded by all sorts of strange sounds, especially a sustained tidal wave of bubbles.
I was never able to find a place for that sound in a piece of music, but I used to listen to it long and loud in a state of blissful wonder. It's funny; the natural sound is of no interest, but the notion of an electronic device reproducing it with such life-like precision is captivating.
I think I can proudly say that I've listened to far more bubbles than the average teenager.
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Well, here's one use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0TSDcPW2Kk
Ducks
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See what you started Sacred Synthesis....Bubbles, laughing cats and ice creaking, well I do like the idea of where this is going already. If nothing else, it may help keep our chops up. I mean with the advent of readily available samples for most anything nowadays, making your own "sound effects" could become a lost art. I'm not attempting that ice sheet though ;)
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I enjoy making sounds that imitate the realworld "physics" actually... be it nature or even acoustic instruments... i never aim to hit the original sound 100% perfectly (though it would be nice sometimes), but instead try to induce the character of real life audio physics into my sounds... for some reason those sounds come to life in a different way than pure synthesizer sounds, and they seem to work very well in the Ambient genre I'm trying to do.
In fact, I see this goal of creating sounds that remind you of realworld sound as kind of a "Frankenstein" kind of approach... it is to me, like if those sounds I create that try to emulate nature and acoustic properties simply "come to life" more... it's like they're induced with a "soul", but never really capturing it perfectly making them some kind of aural "Frankenstein abomination" :) (please forgive my strange analogy, but it IS Halloween times ;) )
Also... often I find it hard to create many of these "real life" sounds because, yes, you can make the sound of the wind, water, fire etc... but very quickly you realize that some sounds are quite abstract... how do the sound of fire really sound? and is it the sound of fire? or is it really not the wind blowing on the fire that you hear, or the wood cracklings? ... also goes for the sound of "Earth" when I tried to create the four elements as REV2 sounds... Air and Water were easy, fire was a challenge but Earth really got me... what sounds depict "Earth"!? ... I ended up with trying to make a sound that resembles dirt and rocks falling down a slope... what about the sound of an Earth Quake!? is that the sound of the earth?
My point is, that we very often give sounds in nature their traits from other things... how about the sound of the Northern Lights? ... the sound of spiders and other crawling insects which we really do not hear? ... the sound of a slithering snake? ... all those folley sound FX can be rather tricky... it's an artform in itself because you have to trick the listener into believing that a thing that actually makes no sound in itself, has a fake sound given to it, that will make the listener feel it's "fitting" somehow.
You even mention the "sound of tingling ice" ... hey... ice do not have a sound at all, but anyway we often associate cold, freezing, snow and ice with the sound of bells... why? ... is there a direct connection between bells and cold because bells are often associated with Christmas and therefore winter which equals cold, snow and ice? ... is it because ice has a bellish kind of resonant property i do not know of? ... or did someone a long way back simply just decide that "hey! we use bells for this icy cutscene!" and then it has passed down thru history that "this is just how the sound of snow and ice should sound!" ?
But nonetheless... it's fun to try and make them, and in the process you almost always come up with other strange and organic sounds defying anything "real life", so it's totally worth it... really :)
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Hope this isn't too off to the side, but some years back I recorded an album with the Bevis Frond backing me. For one of the songs, the long, trippy track on the record, I'd brought to the studio a tape of synthesized "mushroom" sounds. I also had a recording I'd made of rain (real rain!). After we'd got the backing tracks in shape, we added these sound effects. Nick, the main Frond, upon hearing the rain track, laughed and said, "What the hell is that supposed to be?" I said, you know, it's rain... He said, "No mate, that sounds like bacon frying. Or someone having a piss." Uh... At least he didn't say anything about the mushroom sounds!
The mushroom sounds were from the venerable Korg MS-10, coming in at around 3:04. The rain is in from the top of the song.
https://soundcloud.com/anton-barbeau/sylvia-something
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I love this topic. Some of the comments have been quite amusing. I must confess that my original post naughtily included a mystery that I hoped would lead to some questions, if not objections. Tinkling ice? Absolutely. But it's a sound that only an outdoorsman would know.
I lived for ten years alone in a small house beside a lake. They were the richest and most formative years of my life, and it was then that I became intimately familiar with nature at all times and seasons. I would sometimes walk for several miles well after dark, and if there are two sounds I'll never forget, the first is that of a deer running through the woods in the black of night and repeatedly snorting at the same instant its hoofs strike the ground. You would be nervously expecting a Triceratops to appear in full gallop. The other sound is tinkling ice - beautiful, gentle, and complex.
As far as I can tell, you can only hear the sound of tinkling ice for about one week in the year. It's produced in the late winter or very early spring when a frozen lake is beginning to melt. As the melting line moves across the lake, countless tiny fragments of ice break off but are then tossed by the waves back against the still solid ice. The result is a gorgeously delicate tinkling sound, somewhat similar to an extremely high-pitched wind chime. But the sound is so soft that you can't hear it from the shore. You have to row out to the middle of the lake where the waves are big enough, and even there it's the most delicate of sounds.
Imitating tinkling ice would require a chime-type patch for starts, but it would have to be soft, high-pitched, rapid, and random sounding. Of course, it wouldn't be natural to isolate the sound from that of the lapping waves, and perhaps a soft breeze as well. In which case, it might just be smarter to take a little row this coming March with a Tascam portable recorder!
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I love this topic. Some of the comments have been quite amusing. I must confess that my original post naughtily included a mystery that I hoped would lead to some questions, if not objections. Tinkling ice? Absolutely. But it's a sound that only an outdoorsman would know.
I lived for ten years alone in a small house beside a lake. They were the richest and most formative years of my life, and it was then that I became intimately familiar with nature at all times and seasons. I would sometimes walk for several miles well after dark, and if there are two sounds I'll never forget, the first is that of a deer running through the woods in the black of night and repeatedly snorting at the same instant its hoofs strike the ground. You would be nervously expecting a Triceratops to appear in full gallop. The other sound is tinkling ice - beautiful, gentle, and complex.
As far as I can tell, you can only hear the sound of tinkling ice for about one week in the entire year. It's produced in the late winter or very early spring when a thickly frozen lake is beginning to melt. As the melting line moves across the lake, thousands (millions?) of tiny fragments of ice break off, but are then tossed by the waves back against the still solid ice. The result is a gorgeously delicate tinkling sound, somewhat similar to an extremely high-pitched wind chime. But the sound is so soft that you can't hear it from the shore. You have to row out the middle of the lake where the waves are big enough, and even there it's the most delicate of sounds.
Imitating tinkling ice would require a chime-type patch for starts, but it would have to be soft, high-pitched, rapid, and random sounding. Of course, it wouldn't be natural to isolate the sound from that of the lapping waves, and perhaps a soft breeze as well. In which case, it might just be smarter to take a little row this coming March with a Tascam portable recorder!
Lovely! The sound of your words is a sound of nature. Thank you.
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Thanks, Ant.
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As part of his Scapes series the sound designer Francis Preve created some impressive simulations of natural sounds just by using Ableton's Operater FM synth. The project arose from developing a musical equivalent to landscape paintings and highlights the importance of listening as a precondition for sound design or rather an understanding of sound.
Worth a listen: https://www.francispreve.com/scapes/
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.......The mushroom sounds were from the venerable Korg MS-10, coming in at around 3:04. The rain is in from the top of the song......
https://soundcloud.com/anton-barbeau/sylvia-something
Sorry Ant, I'm not hearing the mushrooms, but nice jam in the middle of the tune :)
Sacred Synthesis, if you take that Tascam out in March in a rowboat, snap a picture. They might pay you to use that as a commercial for an odd recording location :D
Speaking of ice....what about that sound a real thin new layer of ice makes when you throw a small pebble onto it and it bounces. Has a "shimmering sound" to it. That'd be another ice patch. Just occurred to me that our forum friends in the equatorial areas are probably at a loss of what the heck we're talking about :)
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.......The mushroom sounds were from the venerable Korg MS-10, coming in at around 3:04. The rain is in from the top of the song......
https://soundcloud.com/anton-barbeau/sylvia-something
Sorry Ant, I'm not hearing the mushrooms, but nice jam in the middle of the tune :)
Sacred Synthesis, if you take that Tascam out in March in a rowboat, snap a picture. They might pay you to use that as a commercial for an odd recording location :D
Speaking of ice....what about that sound a real thin new layer of ice makes when you throw a small pebble onto it and it bounces. Has a "shimmering sound" to it. That'd be another ice patch. Just occurred to me that our forum friends in the equatorial areas are probably at a loss of what the heck we're talking about :)
Not just the Equitorial areas really... I live in the north (Denmark), and have never heard or witnessed hearing these ice sounds myself, so I don't get it either... but would really like to hear that sound, so yes... out with the mic, and lets hear it ;)
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Besides... I bought a SONY mobile recorder earlier which I sold again... mainly because recording in the wild simply disappointed me... I'd have to travel to very remote areas to avoid getting "humans" into the recordings... the aural polution really start to dawn on you when you try to record stuff outside... there is ALWAYS some noise coming from somewhere nearby... cars... engines... planes... voices... I simply got so tired of it I decided that this is not the way for me, and thus the design of synthetic nature suddenly becomes much more relevant to me... the only other solution I've got is to buy expensive real life recordings from artists who have traveled the world to record them. The only things I'll be recording myself in the future will be things i can carry into my home, and set them up in a noise free environment really... but that's fun as well :)
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I'd have to travel to very remote areas to avoid getting "humans" into the recordings... the aural polution really start to dawn on you when you try to record stuff outside... there is ALWAYS some noise coming from somewhere nearby... cars... engines... planes... voices...
Well, tools exists to clean up samples. RX is a pretty neat tool. And its in theory possible to win a license for it in the sonicstate competition:
https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx.html
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I live in the north (Denmark), and have never heard or witnessed hearing these ice sounds myself, so I don't get it either... but would really like to hear that sound, so yes... out with the mic, and lets hear it ;)
The next natural question is, then, have you ever been out in a rowboat exploring the edge of a lake's melting ice cover in late winter? This is not a sound that anyone else I've ever met has heard. I've experienced it perhaps twice in my life. So, I guess you'll have to trust me on this one.
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.......The mushroom sounds were from the venerable Korg MS-10, coming in at around 3:04. The rain is in from the top of the song......
https://soundcloud.com/anton-barbeau/sylvia-something
Sorry Ant, I'm not hearing the mushrooms, but nice jam in the middle of the tune :)
Squint softly, it's clearly the sound of mushrooms mushrooming! Nick Saloman on gtr, Ade Shaw (Hawkwind) on bass and Andy Ward (Camel) on drums. Me on, uh, Korg mushrooms!
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I live in the north (Denmark), and have never heard or witnessed hearing these ice sounds myself, so I don't get it either... but would really like to hear that sound, so yes... out with the mic, and lets hear it ;)
The next natural question is, then, have you ever been out in a rowboat exploring the edge of a lake's melting ice cover in late winter? This is not a sound that anyone else I've ever met has heard. I've experienced it perhaps twice in my life. So, I guess you'll have to trust me on this one.
No, because Denmark is geografically a bit different... sure we have lakes, but it rarely freeze enough and the right way to create such a scenario... neither do I have access to a boat, and many of the small lakes are private anyway... so the option is not there really :)
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Are we talking about the sound OF mushrooms here, or the sound ON mushrooms? ;D
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Earth really got me... what sounds depict "Earth"!? ... I ended up with trying to make a sound that resembles dirt and rocks falling down a slope... what about the sound of an Earth Quake!? is that the sound of the earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBfrLoBpsIQ
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Ah, the wonders of nature. She's full of surprises, and so many musical ones.
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Ah, the wonders of nature. She's full of surprises, and so many musical ones.
This really is a lovely thread. I'm staying on a farm at the moment, and while I'm literally surrounded by synths, it's so easy here to re-tune to the sounds of nature, even as I sit staring at the laptop. So many bird calls (we had three hawks trying to get at the chickens a couple days ago), and the various leaves falling from various trees. We used the sound of falling apples on a track a while back (the song was called "The Apples Are Falling," but the apples were of course dropped)...
All that said, as I prep to fly back to Berlin tomorrow, one of my first and favorite memories of living in Berlin was the "sound" of the silence after the first heavy snowfall. As a California boy, hearing the sudden soft soundlessness of Sanderstrasse covered in 6 inches of snow was startling.
Tying things together in a DSI-friendly way, I'll be reunited with my Prophet 6 soon. I rarely use it to generate "organic" sounds, though. The Korg MS-20 lives the same wild life as the MS-10, with goat howls and snail whispers coming easily. The Micromoog is crickets and bees when it's not The Bass. Etc. The P6, for me, says "But I'm a synthesizer making synthesizer sounds!" I use it for gorgeous electronic musical tones primarily. I'm certain I could get a donkey cough or a wind-swept discotheque dungeon if I *needed* to, but I don't know I'd actually want to. Every creature has its place in the food chain or in the parking lot!
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Ant, you referred to a host of exotic sounds. I most liked in your post the reference to silence from the dampening effects of snow. Now tinkling lake ice has a companion - the sound of snowfall. That's not hyperbole. Snowfall does have a sound of its own, but - as with the lake ice - it can be heard only under certain circumstances, when all else is silent. If you ever find yourself in the woods during a snowstorm, there is an extremely delicate sound made when a million flakes are coming to rest on limbs and leaves (American Beech leaves stay on through the winter). It is the pinnacle of petite tones - a soft flutter and whoosh that disappears the instant you take a step.
Speaking of farms, I once worked on a dairy farm milking cows. I heard a variety of sounds there that I don't care to recreate on a synthesizer.
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My brother is a geophysicist, and has used geophones to listen to reflected waves from shotgun blasts into the earth (as well as regular seismometers to model subterranean structures). It's hard to find frequency-multiplied versions of it, but here is a specific electronic music project around it, with the second piece seeming to be raw samples:
http://sos.allshookup.org
"Cluster One" on The Division Bell used audio translations of the solar wind, and if I remember correctly Tomita used waveforms from the output of stars in some of his later music.
I've often been fascinated with audio transformations of data like that, but I've never had the ability to do anything with it.
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Earth really got me... what sounds depict "Earth"!? ... I ended up with trying to make a sound that resembles dirt and rocks falling down a slope... what about the sound of an Earth Quake!? is that the sound of the earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBfrLoBpsIQ
Sorry... even though it's the sound of a rock (or rather a combi of metal vs. rock), it gives me no feelings of "earth" :D ... I'd say this is just the sound of metal, and I also firmly believe that the metal is what is vibrating most here :D
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But the "funny thing" is, that even though some things DO have a sound, even if it's miniscule like with snow falling or the sound of ice, i don't think that most people would associate these sounds with what they actually are... exactly because so few hear them, and are also influenced by movies and history when it comes to sounds we associate with a particular thing... to make people associate, it's often needed to use abstract sounds that has nothing to do with the thing, or at least something else... the sound of snow falling? ... the sound of snow is easy, it's this crunchy sound that snow makes when you walk on it... this is something people can relate to... I'd say that the sound of snow falling is (to me at least) silence... absolute silence... why? ... because it's usually quiet when snow is falling because the layer of snow on the ground absorbs soundwaves so that we hear less reverberation.
My point; foley sounds somehow has to connect to stuff ordinary people associate with the situation... thus, simulating the sound of the earth by taking seismic soundwaves and multiply them into the hearing range serves nothing really because ordinary people have never heard such a sound and would not associate it with earth in any way... in many cases, people see the sound of the earth as something huge and low... preferably something "rumbling" because they probably associate huge low groaning rumbles with earthquakes and the like... or a landslide (thus my trying to create the sound of rolling dirt, boulders and pebbles).
The reason I'm trying to recreate something like this is because my sounds are based on fantasy roleplaying... I wanted to find sounds that would represent the four elements for some fantasy creatures like Earth, Fire, Water and Air Elementals... how would such creatures sound if they were to sound believable? ... a Fire Elemantal is simple... it's the roaring sound of fire... A Water Elemental is also simple... the sound of water splish and splashes... Air is also simple... the sound of a roaring wind... but Earth was harder... why would it rumble!? it's not quaking... I just thought that small pebbles and dirt rolling of the creature would be the best representation, maybe with a bit of low rumble to depict it's earthly heritage... this is where sound design is a bit of an art in itself... being able to find the sounds that makes the listener feel convinced :)
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Cool problem. Borderlands 2 had a fantasy RPG parody DLC that included some animated rock creatures. They made various rocks-clunking-together noises, and then a neat collapsing sound when you defeated them. Your idea sounds pretty good. Maybe record some pebbles and dirt being poured into something, then slow it down a little? Maybe a shovel being thrust into soil for the footsteps, if it has feet?
Synthesizing it with the hardware I have would be...tough.
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Cool problem. Borderlands 2 had a fantasy RPG parody DLC that included some animated rock creatures. They made various rocks-clunking-together noises, and then a neat collapsing sound when you defeated them. Your idea sounds pretty good. Maybe record some pebbles and dirt being poured into something, then slow it down a little? Maybe a shovel being thrust into soil for the footsteps, if it has feet?
Synthesizing it with the hardware I have would be...tough.
But it is exactly synthesizing I'll have to use right now as the only synth I've got is the REV2... I actually have synthesized something already, but it's not perfect yet... When I get a Prophet X it'll be a lot easier... though not as fun as having synthesized it instead... there is a challenge in trying to synthesize these sounds for me... and it's a great learning experience to boot :)
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Aha!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwWmKx2kq-s
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Aha!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwWmKx2kq-s
Nice.
I'm in the UK at the moment, with the natural sounds of "wind blowing cars down the motorway" keeping me awake!
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Earth really got me... what sounds depict "Earth"!? ... I ended up with trying to make a sound that resembles dirt and rocks falling down a slope... what about the sound of an Earth Quake!? is that the sound of the earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBfrLoBpsIQ
Chysn,
OK, I was a geology major in college. I never witnessed this!