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Sound Clip: The Rabbit Hole by Chris Vaisvil.
A drone from one hit on a large carbon steel barge piece. The music uses a program called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch which will take a wav or mp3 or ogg, and stretch it to extreme lengths using a fast Fourier transform manipulation of the source. In this case, stretched a 7 second strike of a bell like object and stretched it to almost 8 minutes – or about a factor of 66 increase in length. When one does this unexpected things happen such as bringing out the harmonics which may normally pass too quickly to notice. So while in a way this sounds complex – it is really a trivially thing to do – the real complexity is in the audio processing. Do note that since the source is a bell-like object the sound is microtonal. The bell like object is the largest “hairpin” in the photo – the length in real life was about a foot – weight 5 or 10 pounds – made of solid steel. It was part of a system that allowed barges to be tied to a dock or to each other.
This is fantastic! It’s the new artists of today, like this, that give me hope for the future. It’s musical experimentation like this that can make one forget the problems of daily life, such as a dislodged barge, mysteriously rouge and crashing into the bridge that I commute over on a daily basis.
This is so cool. I can’t wait to try out the program!
This IS cool. I can’t hear any digital artifacts from the stretch. I’ve used many types of audio stretching programs before to do the same sort of extreme stretching as here. Soundhack (freeware – google it) has a really good stretching function. However, all of these programs introduce prominent artifacts into the audio. I actually like this side effect but there are times when I have wanted to stretch audio and preserve the integrity of the original waveform. To do this I have used very complicated and time-consuming processes which I will not detail here due to space and for fear of boring you all to death.
One thing I will say, which might be obvious to most: The quality of the resulting audio will depend on the source material. If you have a noisy recording (ie: one where the desired sound object is accompanied by other signals (traffic, wind, surf, whatever), the noise will remain, and will become part of the new waveform. I usually welcome this, as it can sound very compelling. However, if you want to preserve the pure timbre of an instrument (or whatever) in a stretch, try and get as clean a recording as possible.
Best wishes,
Brent
Nice work. Looks like everyone is going to be trying Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch for the next few days. Bravo
Another great spectral manipulating program is Mammut, which takes fft to its logical conclusion: fft the entire sound which results in on massive frame. Then manipulate the frame and IFFT. It looks like you’ll have to scrape around to find it, though.