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Sept 2013 I did some soundscape recordings. For one part of the project, I simply hid a mic at the side of a nearby street and left DP in record mode for three days, looping once per hour. I never bothered going back to this recording until today.

Most of it is the expected street noise, airplanes, and people talking as they passed by. But hour 2 of day 1 has only about 6 minutes, and sounds like synth tones played at random pitches and tempos. Unless someone it playing a trick on me, I assume the file was corrupted in some way, but it sounds too organized. One of the other loops is just white noise.

The level of this file is very low so you'll have to turn up the monitors, but please note, it gets very loud at 2:36.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Is there any explanation?

Click here.

Wow! Facinating!! People work kind of hard to do that on purpose. Sounds like some part of the DAC or audio interface crashed, but was still letting out it's buffer in little bits as data came in. Just spitballing that. Granular, dude.

I don't know what to think, either, but many of the intonations seem vocal in nature.

What kind of mic cable were you using? This sounds to me like packet switching on an analog carrier wave. Not that I know what that sounds like, but it's the only explanation I can come up with that fits what I'm hearing. Is this a moderately busy street where you'd have lots of cell phones passing by? I think you set yourself up a big antenna, and you were picking up cell tower/client activity. Funny thing, this is what I'd imagine the robot world's version of whales sounds like. That tower is a whale out there in the electro-ocean, singing to whoever can hear it, listening to whatever comes by.

Or something crashed, as you suggested. You might see if you can duplicate it with the same mic/cable, though those things sometimes don't happen when you're messing with them. They kind of settle into a position where a poor solder joint acts as a transducer or something. I don't know. As Jon said, just spitballing here.

Shooshie

Maybe cell tower/whale is looking too far out and big for what this is. Maybe it's a mic set up near a router. Router/guppy may be more like it.

Shooshie

Digital distortion. I used to get that on my DAT when the heads were out of alignment. My best guess is that there was some kind of bad sector on the hd.

Aliens

Phil O wrote:Aliens

Most likely explanation so far. I sort of like what they've done with it, and might use it some time. Would it be wrong to claim it?

Take me to your leader tape.

bayswater wrote:

Phil O wrote:Aliens

Most likely explanation so far. I sort of like what they've done with it, and might use it some time. Would it be wrong to claim it?

It's a trap! Someone has done us up the bomb!

sometimes I use DP's timestretch to get that exact effect, I will stretch the audio to its maximum, and then re-stretch the already stretched audio a second or third time, it sounds %100 exactly like that.

try a little experiment with a synth sample and see the comparison.