Devlog #23
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Swarming
This week we’ve been trying to recreate the sound of a swarm of bugs with a synth. It’s surprisingly difficult, because bugs don’t tend to be all that musical.
Duncan’s first thought was to set up a couple of oscillators - a square wave and a saw wave, which transition between random amplitudes and pitches. Here’s what it sounded like. It kinda works, but Miriam described the bugs as “a bit big and scary”, so she made her own version.
That new version had five different saw wave oscillators, with pitches that ranged low to high to simulate both larger and smaller bugs. The smaller ones move quicker, so the amplitude and the pitch shift more quickly. The larger ones are more sluggish. Here’s what that sounds like.
Also a bit terrifying, and a bit too noisy for our purposes. We’re probably going to drop these in favour of something simpler and more backgroundy - a drone sound of some sort. But it was a fun road to travel down nonetheless!
The Lombard Effect
Did you know about the Lombard Effect? We didn’t until this week. It’s the tendency of people and animals to adjust their voice to be heard best in loud environments.
That doesn’t mean just speaking (or chirruping or whatever) louder. We also adjust the pitch, rate and duration of our communication when it’s harder to hear. The effect has been recorded in species as diverse as whales, cats, birds, monkeys, chickens and frogs.
The frogs are particularly interesting. Each species has a distinct call, but in a situation where lots of frogs of the same species are around, individuals retune their frequency so it’s distinct from others of the same species.
This is super-cool, so we’re stealing the idea (sue us, frogs). When there are lots of insects, we’re going to vary the pitch of their calls more, but when there are just a few we’ll vary it less. It’s another way of making a soundscape sound “fuller” or “emptier” respectively.
Elsewhere on the Web
In other sonification news on the web this week, we love the Vapourwaves installation by Thinksamuel, which takes eight stocks and uses data to control their musical parameters.
We also liked the idea of Caretunes for Families, a design project that “transcodes information like heart rate, brain waves and a patient’s movements into a soundtrack that their loved ones can listen to”.
Seen any good sonification work on the web? Send us a link and we’ll credit you when we post it!