While working on another audiobook, I decided to make this sound.
It's 38 voices, each saying different things, panned around and mixed together, creating a "wall of sound" that speaks like 38 radio channels at once.
Recorded with a Zoom H2 via USB into Ardour2. Mixed and exported to FLAC with Ardour2.
PS: It's all Polish (with some possible German shout-outs), but the amount of noise makes it almost completely incomprehensible. Only a few words that are being yelled in a different voice can be understood. No sound repeats here, no recycling - every voice and every second of this recording is unique. Yes, it required quite a lot of work to record so much talking in quality! It's almost an entire audiobook squeezed into 5 minutes.
Strangely (or not) listening to this makes my mind rest, because the noise blocks all other sounds from the environment - making my mind free of stimulation, allowing for sleep-like rest state.
The signal is so much modulated that it appears to be not modulated at all - like static you get from a FM radio of you tune it wrong. The brain receives less data when you listen to this, than when you sit in a room hearing even faint (but distinct) noises from outside, other rooms, other people or yourself.
This is sound masking in action. A very interesting psychoacoustic property of human hearing.
Also: this is an interesting material to study of my voice's spectral energy distribution while speaking (as opposed to singing). As you can see using the spectrogram view, most energy is present in the band below 600 Hz.
Type
Flac (.flac)
Duration
5:00.908
File size
62.1 MB
Sample rate
48000.0 Hz
Bit depth
24 bit
Channels
Stereo
Comments
8 years, 1 month ago
lol cool
8 years, 5 months ago
This is cool, thanks for this!
8 years, 7 months ago
this is really lovely! I am just about to play with it. :D
8 years, 9 months ago
While conducting a search for voices of foreign languages, I stumbled upon your sound clip here and decided to use it to accompany a post I wrote for Duolingo (www.duolingo.com), quite possibly the best free language learning platform on the World Wide Web today (and no, I don't work for Duolingo or get paid to say that).
Anyway, as I listened to your audio clip, I got to wondering what it would sound like if more than one language was used and at what point the words become indecipherable to even speakers of multiple languages. If $387,000 of taxpayer money can be spent on studying “Swedish Massages for Rascally Rabbits," surely some money could be devoted to studying something of this nature.
Regardless, I really love what you did with the audio here and if you ever do another incorporating several different languages, please send me a message to let me know about it. I'd love to hear what it sounds like. In the meantime, if anyone would like to read my post and how it pairs with this audio clip, you can link to it here:
"Part 1/3: Fastest growing Duolingo courses?"
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/18466161
P.S. Where did you learn to record and mix? For those who know virtually nothing about this art form, how would you suggest they go about it? Are there any schools or courses (free/online or otherwise) and/or books/websites you would recommend attending/reading/visiting?
9 years ago
Thanks!
