Archive for the ‘random coolness’ Category
This is a good article on field recording. I don’t mean that in a technical sense of the mechanics of field recording – it’s not a DIY or howto article – but in the aesthetics and the artistic intent.
Here’s an example track they included; it’s really neat. Give it a listen.
This building isn’t a Lair. It’s not. It might be a retirement villa for the successful supervillain, though – I know I’d be happy to have it. But no matter how you classify it, it’s lair architecture, in oh so many important ways.
And it’s unremittingly lovely, and I want to stress most strongly, this is not a drawing, this is a real, actual, extant place, no matter how much it looks like some 1960s futurist vision, possibly in space. This exists.
This, like the previous, is also actually real.
So is this.
Here’s the listing. When that goes away, here’s an article that I hope will last longer. Lots more photos. Enjoy.
A nice little bit of fun on Friday. You’ll see, pretty often, illustrations of gears for some sciencey or engineering-invoking illustration or logo, and they’ll be all shiny and pretty and stuff, right?
Problem is, those gears can’t turn. They’re wedged together. Play with it in your head, you’ll see one gear is forced to turn in two directions at the same time, and of course can’t.
So Numberphile – who has a youtube channel – decided to come up with some three-gear systems that actually work. They’re really cool. Enjoy:
A new lair is on the market! Yes, it’s small, might be a good starter lair for the aspiring supervillain, but I’m really thinking more a… rural redoubt, perhaps. And it’s got extra bedroom space for the minions you might bring along.
As I understand it, the Tesla Death Ray tower behind the lair is included, so that’s definitely added value there. A starting supervillain wanting to use this as a primary lair should convert it to a shield dome emitter, but, of course, that goes without saying.
It’s a common story – lots of women enter the workforce during World War II, doing all the jobs normally restricted only to men, before millions had to go off to fight Fascism. Then the war was won, the soldiers came back, the women were forced back out.
But, at least, it was acknowledged, and, at least, some credit was given.
But not at Gibson Guitar. They officially say that they shipped no instruments during World War II at all – not a one. But that’s simply not true. They did – they made and shipped thousands of instruments, with a wartime workforce of women. Some even went with GIs overseas.
Apparently, management decided that people wouldn’t want instruments made by women, so they erased the Kalamazoo Gals from history. When law professor and music journalist John Thomas got a hint there had actually been wartime production, and found out the story, the acoustic department was initially very interested – and then corporate found out he had been digging, and started threatening him for revealing it. It’s fascinating:
Women guitar makers scratched from Gibson history
By Ryan Grimes
Women are constantly being erased from history, including music history. Sometimes more aggressively – and pointlessly – than others. Never forget that.
I have a song I call “Missing Home Row,” which is Great Big Sea’s “Goin’ Up” but all the chords – none of which are bar chords – played one fret too high.
The effect is remarkably similar to this:
mmmmmmmmmmmmmm musical supervillainy mmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Thanks to Sean Zimmerman, who I met at Conflikt, I got to go poke around at and in Microsoft’s anechoic chambers! One of them just recently set the world record for the quietest place on earth. And it was really cool.
These rooms are called “anechoic chambers” because they are rooms that don’t echo sound. (An-echo-ic: An – negation, “echo” – echos, “ic” – characteristics thereof.) All normal rooms echo sound all over the place, as I’ve talked quite a bit about previously. These… pretty much entirely don’t.
Microsoft actually built four of these chambers, at different sizes, for different purposes. Two are tiny – far too small to walk into. Those are for various kinds of small device testing. But the two we’re looking at today are both much larger.
The first one, which I’ll call the Green Room, has a really big door!
It also has a metal grate floor which brings the noise level up a bit. It’s like -8db from 0 reference, which doesn’t give you much of an idea of scale – but for pretty much everyone, 0db is completely inaudible. Anything below that starts getting crazy, and the lack of sound reflection will start freaking some people out. Sound just kind of …collapses. It dies around you. That’s the territory we’re in, and we aren’t even in the world record room yet!
The absolute minimum for sound in this measurement scale is brownian motion in air – the sounds produced by random collisions of gas molecules. That’s -23db, and more or less the absolute zero of sound in a standard atmosphere.
The Green Room is neon green on the outside. It needed painting for protective purposes, but nobody specified a colour, so when this chamber started going up they asked the contractor ‘why this neon green,’ and the contractors were all ‘you got something against the Seahawks?’ XD
Green Room connects to the building HVAC, but has its own control zone and is baffled heavily inside – which means it can be completely cut off from building HVAC when in use. From memory, I think it completely blocks out everything external below 180Hz, and almost everything below that as well. That may and may not sound super-impressive if you don’t know how this works, but trust me – it’s impressive.
But this isn’t even the big story. The bigger chamber you haven’t seen yet? That one holds the world record. It certified at -20db for the Guinness Book. When people talk about Microsoft’s Anechoic Chamber, they mean the bigger one.
The record holder is basically a separate isolated building. It’s completely surrounded by the large cement building pictured up top, including overhead, and has its own separate HVAC system. There’s a gap of about a metre between the two structures. The only common point is the ground on which the two buildings rest, and the power and sound cables, which are, themselves, sound-insulated nine ways to hell and back.
Mind the gap:
This – okay, few people remember this, but there was a time when home audiophiles of the particularly batshit sort would do this sort of thing for their turntables. No, seriously, they’d cut a hole in the floor of their house, and pour a cement base and column, onto which they would mount the turntable, for complete isolation. And as goofy as that is in a home audio environment – I mean seriously, what? – it is meaningful here.
Anyway. The floor in the big chamber is just fun to walk on. It’s a coarse square mesh that feels like walking on a trampoline. Bouncie bouncie! Obviously, this is a flats-only room, no heels here:
Below that is a super-thin fine mesh which catches dropped objects, and below that, more of the same sound baffling as used on the walls. Then – in all directions but down – the aforementioned gap separating the two buildings.
The Microsoft audio-testing crew want to put a tentacle in the gap space, or at very least an inflatable alligator. (This came out after I said that in Fallout 3, that gap would have water in it. And ghouls.)
Both walk-in chambers use special lighting. I don’t know the technical details, but they’re designed so what incredibly tiny amounts of noise they might make is at 40,000Hz, well outside human hearing. This to avoid the 60Hz hum of many light bulbs – even incandescent. I don’t know if they’re supplying DC power or very high frequency AC or whether that’s possibly a trade secret. Could be!
Oh, wait, you didn’t know light bulbs made noise? Surprise! When lighting out my studio I went through several different bulbs, testing for quietness. I didn’t go to the extremes shown here, of course, but still.
I did the same for my computer monitors, which is one of the reasons why I’m afraid to upgrade my digital audio workstation to widescreen – I don’t know what kind of noise profile the new ones might have, and going to a store will not help. Everything below air horn sounds quiet at Best Buy.
This room, like the green one, also has a Really Big Door. This one opens inward, instead of outward, which creates a problem – and check out how the back of this door interfaces with the wall it has to open into as a result. It’s pretty cool.
That interfacing is important; those wedge panels are interlinked. Damage one, and you have to disassemble all the way back to the door to replace it. Bill Gates once sent a memo to Microsoft Security saying, “Yes, the developers are allowed to play golf in the halls,” but that would not apply here.
That door – and the walls, and everything else, of course – mean that all sound above 150Hz is blocked completely out of the room, as is damn near everything below that. Then the wall treatment takes care of anything generated inside. And the microphones and mic preamp combinations they use for testing cost like $10,000 each – well more than my entire studio!
I’d like to say that I fruck out a bit when they let me stand in there in the dark and in quiet, but really, I didn’t. I found it calming and nice. They only kept the doors closed and lights off for four or five minutes; they say people can get pretty antsy in that short a period of time, but I was still rather enjoying it. To me, it sounded like a very quiet studio, just… lots more so.
I’d’ve liked a couch or something to lay down on. And would no doubt have fallen asleep almost instantly. No Sith Lord would have anything on me!
Relatedly, Minion Paul doesn’t like being in my studio for long, because even that is too quiet and it freaks him out. So there you are. 😀
All in all: super-cool experience, and I can 100% legit say I have stood in the quietest place on Earth. Pretty awesome day. Thanks again, Sean! And as always, larger versions of the pictures are on Flickr.
A few weeks ago, I got to go to visit Microsoft’s anechoic chambers. This was super cool, particularly since I got to visit the world record holder, which was neat. A lot of people find them eerie and/or creepy; I just thought it was awesome. I have a big post queued up next week, with lots of pictures.
But I also wanted – since I had a unique opportunity here – to snap a thematic variant of David Bowie’s icon Station to Station album cover, from his Thin White Duke era, wherein he is also walking into an anechoic chamber. Mission accomplished!
(I wanted originally to do a straight-up re-creation, but the setting was too different. Science of sound damping has progressed since 1978! 😀 And inversion and variation is better art anyway!)
I’m really pleased with it. Thanks for the help, Christian – and, for that matter, the tour, Sean! And I’ll post about the whole experience next week.
Sansui apparently made an all-analogue physical-slider graphic equaliser… with memory function. Yes, you could save multiple settings.
How did this work?
Pulleys.
It is hilariously slow. Jump ahead to 1m 13s, that’s right before this guy hits recall.
Big shout-out to Montco Radio and Amazing Obscura for the airplay today! Maybe it’s a little oldschool of us, but hearing your band named and played on the radio is still 100% totally awesome. \n/
And talking of, the Save KPLU campaign is about halfway through by both calendar and fundraising, and they’re a bit ahead of plan, which is excellent. They have another matching gift campaign going right now – half a million in matching funds, through April 15th.
Indie radio still matters – particularly journalism-heavy stations like KPLU. So if you haven’t jumped in yet to help save KPLU, go on over and do that now. Get that matching grant nailed down!
THE NEW SINGLE
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