Sound Blog
a story about my grandma · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
My grandma was quite a character. In fact, I never knew her except as a character in several stories that my dad told me about her. Like the one when she taught him how to kill a chicken when he was four years old. In one such story, she’s sitting on the front porch in steamy, humid, north Louisiana in her nightgown, dipping snuff with the frayed end of a twig and spitting into a Folger’s tin that she kept with her at all times. Her dog, Charlie, had been chasing around an armadillo all morning. Charlie was the fattest dog you’ve ever seen, which is why he couldn’t manage to catch an armadillo. He ran around and barked for hours, in spite of Grandma barking back at him with every obscenity in her vocabulary, which was extensive. Charlie trapped the armadillo in the culvert, a concrete tube that lets the ditch continue under the driveway. As he hopped in and out of the ditch, darting from one end of the pipe to the other, his barks resonated in the pipe, making them that much louder. It must have terrified the poor, stupid armadillo. The noise only made my grandma more irritated. Now her voice couldn’t even be heard over the barking, and since they had stopped running around all over the yard, she could finally put a stop to this without having to chase anyone down. So, the obvious thing to do, was to get the shotgun. My grandma kept a double-barrel shotgun around for defense and for rascals. She didn’t have to go get it, because it was laying on the porch right by her rocking chair. She marched over to the culvert, cocked both barrels, knocked Charlie aside with the end of the shotgun and shoved it halfway into the culvert. If you’ve ever thrown an M-60 into a culvert and heard the PFTHOOOM that it makes, you have some idea of what it must have sounded like a few miles away when Grandma pulled the trigger. Charlie yelped, locked his tail between his legs and dashed off to hide under the porch. The armadillo didn’t hear a thing. After that mess was over with, the rest of the day was very peaceful.
miles and minutes of wind and leaves · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
Most of the time when I add an entry to this blog, it’s because I heard something big, I mean really big. This is one of those entries. I went camping this weekend and had an incredible time. One of the best moments, aside from being with some great friends, was being silent while everyone else was asleep. I haven’t heard a forest in a while, especially in the mountains. The animals in the forest have so much control over the sounds they make; they are silent when they want to be, and they are loud when they call to each other. I’m pretty sure I heard an owl hooting from far away, then that same owl attack something on the forest floor, then the same owl parked in a closer tree and hooting again a bit later. I can’t be sure because the owl was silent in between these events; the flight leading up to the attack, and the flight away from the attack. I had to make up the story in between. The more interesting sound, the big sound, was the wind. Since the leaves were dry and falling off of the trees, they rustled loudly with the wind, meaning I could hear a gust of wind coming from miles away. I could hear something coming, and it would take several minutes for it to slowly get louder and louder until finally it was rushing over our tents and dropping leaves over us. It seemed to help that we were set up at a bend around the mountain, which seems to whip the wind around, making it speed up.flutter glitch · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
Acoustic Shadows is a great BBC program about several amazing spaces. It outlines several architectural strategies, from the fragile balancing act of performance hall design to sculpting bird chirps from the sides of Mayan pyramids. If anyone wants to take a road trip to Mexico, I’m down.
They mention a certain acoustic glitch called a flutter echo, where an otherwise pleasantly reverberant room will have a pocket of echoes in a certain spot that are so quick that they sound like a flutter. While this is usually a huge annoyance for an acoustic engineer or a performer, like any other glitch, there’s nothing keeping an entire aesthetic practice from coming out of this. The house I’m living in now has a couple of flutter echoes that my roommates and I play around with occasionally. Just as a digital glitch reveals something fascinating about its medium, these acoustic flutters reveal something about the way sounds travel through their medium.
No Public Action Required · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
We had a siren test today. I was pumped, as you can imagine.sky scraping · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
I was at a huge fireworks show in Charlotte the other day, and I got to hear the city in a pretty unique way. The explosions from the fireworks were ripped across the faces of several skyscrapers, each one reflecting it back with it’s distinct signature. There were 3 buildings in particular whose windows were arranged in smooth columns seperated by concrete. As the impact of the explosion reached each building, it was alternately bounced back and absorbed by the different surfaces, sending back a quick sequence of smaller explosions: effectively a square wave. The columns on each building had different widths, giving different pitches to their square wave reflections. From any particular location, these sounds reached you in a certain order (for me, a middle tone first, then a high one and a low one), and each explosion from the fireworks repeated this theme. Rarely do I get to ping a space so large.mock · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
It’s already been pointed out many times that children today can’t identify the wide variety of birds and trees in their area, and instead can distinguish between an enormous number of brands, logos, and products. Whatever agony or shock there is at this loss of touch with nature has overshadowed an even more disturbing change in the behavior of the mockingbird. Sitting on my back porch one day, I heard someone’s cell phone ring. I was sure that it wasn’t my cell phone that was ringing. (This particular ringtone was an option on my phone, but much too obnoxious for my taste.) Trying to locate the sound, and noticing that I was alone out there, I realized that it was coming from above. Looking up at the trees, I noticed a mockingbird. It then precisely mimicked my neighbor’s car alarm chirps. And then like my car alarm. And then the ringtone again. Mockingbirds, as you probably know, are famous for their remarkable ability to catalogue all the various songs of birds and even frogs in their area. But I’m afraid this knowledge is quickly being lost, and the mockingbird will be divorced from nature, just as we are.12 miles out · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
Out in the ocean there are these oil rigs, also called platform bouys. They stand 40 ft. above the water on thick yellow legs. Other rigs stand out on the horizon, but besides that there is nothing nearby. The platforms are packed with tanks and pipes and cages and ladders, and warning signs. Each platform has a warning sound, a solid tone, absurdly loud that seems to come from a strange ringed metal column on the platform. It blasts the tone in all directions. After a few seconds it stops. The tone takes just long enough to repeat so that you can’t anticipate it. Out in the ocean, where there’s nothing in the sound’s way, no walls to bounce off of, no canyons to resound in, there is still some reverb. I suppose the sound in bouncing off of the water, even hundreds of feet away in every direction, and returning to the boat that I’m in, fishing below the platform.this hidden bridge in greenville · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
JT, John, Will, Jon, Drew, and I took turns clapping, snapping, screaming, stomping, and yelling like howler monkeys. Below this bridge, with the curved concrete ceiling, every sound is wrapped back to you, I think twenty times sometimes if you’re loud enough. We had no clue what we were walking into.
my spot · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert
I was looking for a reason to park my car in the same spot every day at school, so I would know where to find it. Day after day I would wander around at the end of the day with 5 hours of crit in my head trying to remember anything distinctive about that morning that would remind me of where I parked. One day, by pure accident, I parked over a water drain. When I closed my car door like I do day after day before heading to class, I heard my car door close 5 times more, deeper and deeper each time. It was echoing in the underground tunnel below the water drain. I slammed my door more and more, squeezing 8, 10, and more echoes out of it and decided–this is my spot.