Dr. M's Sound Laboratory

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As I was leaving my acoustic-ecology group last night, a rushing sound caught my ear. Although I was concerned about missing the bus, I whipped out my iPhone to record the sound of water pouring out of a gutter into the alley below. I recorded a little over a minute and still caught my bus.

Moments earlier, I had been sharing how I'd been experimenting with running field recordings into a software version of the Mutable Instruments Eurorack module Rings. When I got home, I AirDropped the recording to my computer and set some quick levels in Reaper. Then I fired up VCV Rack and put together the patch above.

A sample player is playing a loop of the gutter splash. Both the left and right channels are fed into instances of the Rings clone. Then a quadrature LFO crossfades between the original field recording and the output from Rings.

This seemed like a really simple patch in VCV Rack, but it involves a lot of modules. I replicated the patch in ModularGrid, and list price for physical modules to make these sounds would cost nearly $1200. Although VCV Rack lacks the immediacy of a hardware synthesizer, it is a convenient way to try out ideas and experiment with modules.

[drmlab]

As I was leaving my acoustic-ecology group last night, a rushing sound caught my ear. Although I was concerned about missing the bus, I whipped out my iPhone to record the sound of water pouring out of a gutter into the alley below. I recorded a little over a minute and still caught my bus.

Moments earlier, I had been sharing how I'd been experimenting with running field recordings into a software version of the Mutable Instruments Eurorack module Rings. When I got home, I AirDropped the recording to my computer and set some quick levels in Reaper. Then I fired up VCV Rack and put together the patch above.

A sample player is playing a loop of the gutter splash. Both the left and right channels are fed into instances of the Rings clone. Then a quadrature LFO crossfades between the original field recording and the output from Rings.

This seemed like a really simple patch in VCV Rack, but it involves a lot of modules. I replicated the patch in ModularGrid, and list price for physical modules to make these sounds would cost nearly $1200. Although VCV Rack lacks the immediacy of a hardware synthesizer, it is a convenient way to try out ideas and experiment with modules.

[drmlab]

I finally put together something interesting in the iPad app Drambo – a couple of months ago. I've been using it to tinker with software versions of Mutable Instruments Eurorack modules. Since the hardware modules are digital, I presume that the output of the Spectrum set of AUv3 plugins is similar to the real thing. These run as plugins in Drambo, which I'm also using as a sequencer and mixer.

I do sense that there's something lost in translation between physical knobs and an array of GUI controls. For now, though, I'm happy using Spectrum to discover the sounds Plaits and Rings can make. This uses the Rings algorithms to create drummy and bell-like sounds.

I made several takes of this patch, and I was never satisfied with one. That was a month ago, and I've started tinkering with a new Drambo patch. What I've uploaded is the last recording I made a month ago. Some passages were too quiet, so I ran the audio through Universal Audio's LA-2A compressor.

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I stuck a field recoder out the window when I heard thunder rumble. I tried to set levels low enough, but this clipped pretty badly. I still like the sound. This is the Tascam DR-05, which does 24-bit recording. Recording thunder makes the greater dynamic range of 32-bit float appealing, but I can't justify a new recorder right now.

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I recorded this at the 12th and Angelina westbound bus stop on March 19, 2024. I used a Tascam DR-05 with the integrated mics.

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It was a pleasantly warm sunny morning where I lived. To boost my energy level, I thought to play the Olivia Tremor Control album Dusk at Cubist Castle. It hit the spot. 

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I recorded this in 32-bit using Voice Record Pro running on an iPhone X. I used the front-facing iPhone mic with an omnidirectional pattern.

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Last year, a friend asked if I would want to record a sound work to play in their art studio during an open studio event. They had sounds like the Barndo drones in mind. I don't think they ever heard this one, but I've listened to it many times as background music at the office. Unfortunately, I didn't keep any notes of how I made this, but I'm sure it involved the Pamela's New Workout clock generator and filter pings.

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I spent an hour on the bus to capture the fewer than 30 seconds of audio above. I saw that UT Austin had arranged for a flyover of a B-52H bomber before a baseball game.

The fighter jets that swoop over UT Austin American football games make a tremendous amount of noise in my apartment miles away, so I expected a gigantic bomber to be impressively loud.

I was disappointed. This sounded to me like nearly any commercial jet. I may have erred in getting close to the baseball field since comments online mentioned how loud the B-52 was. Perhaps the plane slowed down as it approached the baseball field so the crowd could get a good look.

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A month or two ago, I finally succeeded in using the Disting mk4's I-J algorithm, "Audio Playback." I was so excited about getting the recording of an overloaded washing machine ratting items in my apartment playing that I have yet to actually use its features other than play back an audio file.

In the video above, the rattling noise is run through a phaser effect on the FX Aid XL, as well as Ears. Ears is sending triggers and an envelope that at times modulates the phaser and the wavefolder on the Befaco Pony oscillator. The field recording also frequency modulates the oscillator at times. Finally, there is a channel of the oscillator ring modulated with the field recording.

When I got into modular, the idea of a fully analog signal chain appealed to me. Clearly, this patch relies heavily on digital modules, and it confirmed somewhat my hesitation to get digital modules. When I set the feedback too high on the phaser, it can get glitchy in appealing ways, but also in annoying clippy ways. I don't hate the digital artifacts or things that sound digitally processed, but it's not necessarily what I want out of Eurorack.

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Before I bought my first synthesizer hardware in 2022, I had downloaded VCV Rack Free and casually experimented with it. The modular-synth simulation platform didn't check an important box at that time – finding a creative outlet away from the computer. There are also things I could have done to optimize the performance of the 2017 iMac I was using, but its limitations caused VCV Rack to glitch somewhat frequently. Even on an M3 Mac with 36GB RAM, VCV Rack will occasionally glitch.

Last year, I started to wonder about Mutable Instruments modules and what "Rings into Clouds" was really about. Since the modules in question are digital, experimenting with them in VCV Rack (or its controversial iOS fork MI Rack) seemed like a cost-effective approach. I'd be missing out on physical knobs, of course, but using MI Rack also provided a way to wiggle while a physical patch is in progress.

Using MI Rack, I got some early satisfaction using the Topograph clone of the Grids module to trigger Rings – it sounded like mellow Krautrock in a way that appeals to me. I spent some time futzing around trying to output a video on the iPad, and eventually gave up.

Last week, I quickly threw together the patch in the video above as a way to mask background sounds while working. It's not quite generative, but it changes enough that I can leave it running for hours and not get sick of it.

Outputting video from VCV Rack was also kind of a pain. It took several tries changing bitrate and compression parameters in the Recorder module before the output was at the correct speed. I then cropped and downsampled the video in Adobe Premiere Pro.

I can see VCV Rack being useful for learning the basic concepts of modular synthesis among casual beginners. However, I think that I needed the experience of CV patching with real hardware before I was able to do something I found interesting with VCV Rack. Using physical cables and knobs makes it so much more immediate. But now that I have a little over a year of experience with modular, it's an enticing way to try out expensive digital models or perhaps very complex patches with a profusion of modulators and utilities.

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Healthy Connections

My job has cash incentives for stuff like checkups and attending webinars about nutrition or ergonomics. I believe the idea is it reduces insurance costs. It ends up being about a hundred bucks when it's paid out in November.

I'd wanted the Takaab VLH early on, but shipping took kind of a long time when I ordered the low-pass gate. I decided to earmark the November wellness payout for the Takaab VLH. That would allow enough time for it to arrive before the holidays.

The suboscillator function in 2HP is what appealed to me most, but the first thing I played with was the noise output. I found that running noise into the Takaab LPG sounds a bit like banging on a cookie sheet. I also ran noise into the C4RBN filter for a kick or tom sound.

Ring modulation was an added bonus of the VLH that I don't really understand yet. A lack of understanding didn't keep me from using it in the video above. One voice is a folded sine wave from the Befaco Pony ring modulated with the drum sound from C4RBN.

In conclusion, the Takaab VLH seems to be a good use of my wellness incentive pay.

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My apartment doesn't have a washer or dryer, but it's next to the laundry room. That can be a blessing and a curse.

Other tenants often overload the washer, which then causes my entire apartment to shake. Yesterday, an overloaded washer was making a power strip sitting on my work table to rattle against the wall.

This sound was distractingly loud to a human, but I had to crank up the gain on my Tascam DR-05 solid-state field recorder to get a strong recording. As a result, it picked up sounds like the television in neighboring apartments.

This seemed like the right use case for a noise gate, so I experimented with using the ReaGate module in Reaper. It has a band-pass filter, so I was able to remove some but not all of the extraneous noise. Although this may not be good field-recording practice, it sounds more like how I heard it than the original recording.

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Wasp Farewell

I went about six weeks without a computer, and I've been slowly getting my new machine set up. My 2017 iMac had a hardware failure at the end of October. I think six years is a good run for a computer, so, although it was a disruption to go over a month without a personal machine, I'm pleased that the machine met my needs for at least five of those six years. Even before I got into audio, I threw some heavy loads at my machines with Photoshop and Lightroom.

With the new machine, I thought I would try using Da Vinci Resolve instead of Adobe Premiere. The free version of Resolve is a complete video editing system, but it lacks features like lens correction (note the barrel distortion above) that Premiere has. I don't think I'll want to pay for a Premiere license once my current license ends, so I'm exploring other options.

I made this video because I was about to pull the Doepfer A-119 external input and the Doepfer A-124 Wasp filter to make room for new modules. In the video, I'm messing around with using a cheap microphone run through the A-119 to frequency modulate the Befaco Pony VCO. I'm saying the name of Texas baseball player Nolan Ryan at a variety of registers. I later start Pamela's New Workout to trigger pings from the Wasp filter. I don't think this is good, but it's bad in a goofy way.

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It seems easier to make sounds that are dark or harsh with a synthesizer than to make pleasing or calming sounds. In the year or so I've been experimenting with Eurorack modular, I've gotten satisfaction out of taking a patch that sounds harsh and adjusting parameters until it sounds fun or chill.

Late last week, I thought the sound I was getting from modulating the wavefolder in my new Befaco Pony was cool, but kind of creepy. As I started to calm it, I realized that Halloween was a few days a way, and it was time to lean into the creepy, so I just added some drums and realized a field recording would fit well.

I finished this Monday night, but I had a bit of a scare on Halloween. My 2017 iMac has been having kernel panics and abruptly rebooting: I reckon it's time to get a new machine. But on Halloween, it was stuck with a white progress bar, and I didn't have the energy to fiddle with it more. That's why I'm posting this late.

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I shot this video of shadows during Saturday's annual eclipse. That afternoon, I thought it would be worthwhile to make a synthesizer soundtrack responding to the image. I hadn't done that before.

Since the modular was patched up for a different recording, I jammed on my East Beast semi-modular. My original intent was more droney, like the Barndo recordings, with changing parameters in response to the image. At the end of a "rehearsal," however, I stumbled on a pattern I found appealing and felt compelled to record. I decided to just use that as the soundtrack for this brief video.

Although my recording doesn't directly respond to action in the video, I can say that I used the eclipse as a creative prompt.

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Last Sunday, I heard again the person snoring under Lamar Blvd. I tried to capture a better recording this time.