Here is a test to determine if maybe I could post audio at a higher quality. This is a rare piece from 1980 by artist Geoffrey Chandler. Let me know how well this plays. The first item is the normal WordPress audio player running an mp3 at 320 kbps. The second item “Polaris” is link to a lossless flac file (free lossless audio codec), which you can download or attempt to stream to a media player. For me it streamed in VLC and not in Winamp or Media Player Classic. It may be possible that I configured the flac encoder incorrectly, since I’m trying it out now for the first time. Remember, I am supposed to be dumb! Also, note this was from an LP record and I applied click and pop reduction, as well. Keep in mind the two additional files I made probably don’t sound any better than the original, except fewer clicks and pops may be more pleasing to the ear. I simply want to see if they will play. The original file is from the internet, and is a 256 kbps mp3. I actually own a copy of this recording on vinyl from the album “Starscapes,” but mine is warped and doesn’t sound very good.
[audioplayer file=”http://www.negativland.com/dumb/audio/polaris.mp3″ titles=originalfile256kbps]
Direct mp3 download or play: Polaris – original file
This time around, I kept it simple by using my Oktava MK-319 condenser microphones. One was placed outside my front living room window facing west, and the other on my back deck facing east. The microphones were connected through my Yamaha model MG10/2 mixer and then to the computer. I recorded using VST Host and I used one VST plugin called Barricade (a brick wall limiter). I kept the microphone gain controls on the mixer on the low side which preserved dynamics, and the limiter did not need to reduce the gain that often. After that, I checked the recording waveform in Adobe Audition and I boosted the lows (below 100 hertz) by about 6db. I felt that was necessary because I had the low cut filter switched on at the microphones and on the mixer. The low cut was on because these mikes are very sensitive to wind noise. I think I overdid it though, because the the very low frequencies of the exploding fireworks put on by the city of Seattle really weren’t audible on the recording. Finally, I converted the file to MP3 using Razorlame and the lame encoder. The file is 192 KBPS stereo and48 KHZ sampling rate. I’m not sure if 48 KHZ is a problem , but it is supposed to be better than 44.1 KHZ. Most MP3s are at 44.1. Let me know if it’s a problem and I’ll change this to 44.1. Enjoy!
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, not only was I recording amateur radio operators, I was listening to and recording more radio noises in general. One of the more interesting sounds was radio pagers. Back then, there was no texting or smart phones so when people needed to get in touch quickly, individuals would actually call on the phone to a paging service. I thought that live operators, quite often women, would speak into microphones and deliver messages just like police and fire dispatchers over VHF radio or the individual wanting to place a page would speak into their phone. I honestly don’t know which way it was done, but the professional quality of the female voices suggested to me that they were operators rather than individuals placing voice pages. Before the actual page was spoken, special tones were sent out which would activate the correct pager. I would guess if this was how paging was done, then the person calling the paging service may have pressed touch tone buttons to activate the correct pager receiver. Then it was up to the individuals with the pagers to respond. I f anyone has a thought about this, please comment. Also I had recently been noticing the film “THX-1138” and because of its soundtrack, it rapidly became one of my favorite movies. I noticed a lot of the sounds I was recording were similar to the sounds in the film. I imagined if the paging offices were actually like the environment in “THX-1138.” Then I wondered, “What actually do the letters and numbers t-h-x-1-1-3-8 mean? It must be a phone number, Star Wars director George Lucas’ phone number.” Phone prefix THX or 849 I thought were in Oakland or Berkeley, and probably not belonging to George Lucas. As you can hear, I finally called the number and it turned out to be disconnected. Over the years I made several “communications” ambient mixes. Bits and pieces of these have been on “Over the Edge” radio programs. Another version mixed by “Everyman” can be heard by searching “The Weatherman and Everyman – Analog Paging.” This search brings up several “questionable” mp3 download sites. Be careful! I was able to download the audio from at least one of these sites, however.
The version I’m presenting in this post was made by setting up five media players playing wav files off the hard drive, and internet radio steaming live. If you would like to see exactly what the media players were doing, go to the large picture and if you can blow up or magnify the image you will be able to see everything including my computers CPU usage. CPU usage is important to monitor when using multiple media players because as more players are turned on, the higher the CPU usage. When you get closer to 100 per cent the more likely the computer will crash, which should be avoided. It did happen, possibly on this computer, once when I had twelve media players running simultaneously. It didn’t damage anything, and the computer simply turned off the media players and then restarted. I wouldn’t recommend doing this, mainly because I’m not sure if it actually is hurting the computer.
There are a couple of interesting web sites that relate to the sounds that I recorded in this post. The first one relating to “very low frequency radio” or VLF is about electromagnetic energy in the Earth’s atmosphere and the sounds it produces. The other site, “Phone Trips” goes into great detail about how telephone networks operated, mainly from the 1960s and 70s. In addition there are many sound files that remind me even more of THX-1138 and vintage communication noises in general. Just a few other things I forgot to mention. My favorite voice page starting at about -2:12 is “Jim Call Your Exchange… Holding A Massage For You.” Also the Vallejo mobile or marine operator (-3:30 and-3:11) for car phones or ship-to-shore phone calls is heard saying “Vallejo… Vallejo Off.” Keep in mind, there were no cell phones at this time and it was quite a big deal to have a phone in a vehicle. The phone call was originally recorded onto cassette tape with the red and green phone wires connected to the line input of a cassette recorder, possibly my Norelco 1530. There was a capacitor in series with the input to prevent DC phone voltage from getting into the recorder. I think the phone line (Martinez, Ca. prefix 228) may have still had a party line with a neighbor. All radio noises were received on my inexpensive Radio Shack Patrolman 4 multi-band radio at my home in Martinez, California, between 152 megahertz and 153 megahertz. The poor selectivity of this radio (wide band FM only) made these sounds more like the sounds in THX – 1138.
You probably will not know what to think after listening to this recording. This was made in the early 1970s, probably 1971, while I was in the 11th grade at Alhambra High School in Martinez, California. I was friendly with a fellow student who had a distinctive voice and an interest in recording. My parents had just purchased a Sony TC – 560D open reel tape recorder, the same machine that I used to record “Harry To The Ferry.” So one day I had my friend over to the house, and it didn’t take long to decide what to record. As soon as he spotted a copy of The Contra Costa Times newspaper on the coffee table, he knew just what to do or maybe not. But nevertheless he started turning pages and reading parts of sentences and then recombining them in all sorts of nonsensical ways. Some of you might recognize some of the names including Gary Bogue, the pet and animal columnist , Royal Pools, and of course Walnut Creek Inn. The idea of Hong Kong being at Walnut Creek Inn seemed very funny to me. Now I think that idea would be quite reasonable, such as an Asian restaurant being inside or somehow associated with a large hotel.
I recorded my friends voice using my Calrad DM-59HL dynamic microphone, plugged directly into one channel of the microphone input on the Sony tape deck at 3 3/4 inches per second. Years later I thought it might be fun if I had the sound of an angry parakeet to go along with the voice. I already had recordings of my pet parakeet “Greenboy” and so I think (I can’t quite remember) I played a cassette tape connected to the other unused channel on the Sony. On the TC – 560D there is a record button for each channel so you can record one mono track on the left or right, and then rewind the tape and record the other side while listening to the first recording, and since there are only two heads on this recorder, syncing the recordings was never a problem. I think while I was still living in California, I digitized the voice recording to a 256 KBPS MP3. I know now that digital recording should have been made into a lossless file like .aif or .wav, but it still sounded okay, anyway. In preparing the recording for this post, I used Adobe Audition to process the stereo version (with parakeet squawking or scolding as I like to call it) with room ambience. In the monaural version I used several types of compression to try to make the voice consistently as loud and clear as possible without clipping distortion. Also on this version, you might notice the fade up and the fade out have filters that open the high frequencies at the beginning and close back down at the ending.
I know all of that was a mouthful or whatever, but I hope you can enjoy and have a laugh!
This will be the final post of a recording I made on Mother’s Day 1985. It’s all of side 2 of a C-90 cassette tape with the material from the posts “Mother’s Day 1985 # 1” and “Mother’s Day 1985 # 2” as well as all of the other parts on side 2. There’s over 45 minutes of sound with my mother, father, grandmother, and myself. In addition you can hear all of the first part of this recording by going to the post entitled “Mother’s Day 1985 # 3.” It’s actually side 1 of the same C-90 cassette tape. This part is only a little more than 15 minutes in length, due to the fact I started recording after the first 30 minutes of tape. I actually didn’t realize the tape had another recording on it already, and it was too late to buy more cassette tape. I didn’t want to record over the other part, and I may post it another time. But for now I’m not going to tell you what it is……it’s just too dumb!
I want to point out that I think I already posted this around Mother’s Day of 2010 as “Mother’s Day 1985 All side 2” and somehow it was accidentally deleted. I sincerely apologize for that error!
Here I am back again! For the last few months I’ve been quite lazy and uninspired, but I’ve been on my YouTube (a54dumb) page periodically. This video is similar to “Bicycle Horn Under Water ’09” except that I had no help and I placed a microphone directly in the water. I covered the microphone with plastic wrap before submerging it into the glass bowl filled with water. The plastic wrap was sealed using a rubber band, and I used tweezers to hold the microphone in place. Hopefully this will provide for a few chuckles and inspire me to be here more often.
I’ve had a Van de Graaff generator for some time now and I didn’t think much of it until now. A Van de Graaff generator makes static electricity and more information is available here. In addition, I have two wigs, and the brown one shown here was worn by Richard Lyons as the character of Marsha Turnblatt in the Negativland 2000 tour. It was frustrating because the wigs would repeatedly fall off of the Van de Graaff generator. When the wigs fell, I said “hell” and “aw hell” several times and “damnation” one time. Then Isis the cat pawed her drinking water bowl. Also, I’m trying to start a YouTube channel and you can see this version (better picture and sound) and another version of the video. On YouTube go to “a54dumb” to see the videos.
I started recording about 11:59 PM, December 31st, 2010 and stopped just before 12:20 AM on January 1st, 2011, using only my Sony PCM-D50 digital recorder. The recorder was on a tripod facing out of the sliding glass door which opens out to my deck. I kept the door open during the recording and with the outside temperature possibly below 25 degrees Fahrenheit, the cold air rushing in caused a lot of creaking as the furniture and other items inside my living room began to make contact with the cold air. The occasional snapping and popping noises are sounds that the table and chairs made as cold air rushed into the room. I believe the door frame made some noises, as well.
Here I am with “a Santa Claus” inside Capwell’s department store at the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center in El Cerrito, near my childhood home in Berkeley, California. Even though I was only five years old at the time, I think I had my doubts about the existence of Santa Claus. It didn’t make sense to me seeing Santa Claus in different stores in a fairly short period of time.
This is everything I recorded on Christmas Day, 1983 at my grandmother’s home in Santa Rosa, California. The recording setup was the same as in “Thanksgiving 1983,” except in place of the Shure SM58, I used my new Electro-Voice DO54 microphone. In addition some material from this recording is likely featured on “The Willsaphone Stupid Show.” I know this to be true, because there is a short piece of splicing tape stuck to the cassette case of this tape. Most of my family tapes from the 1970s and 80s have the splicing tape stuck on their cases. If I’m remembering correctly, it was Don Joyce who did this after dubbing the cassette to open reel tape to be edited with a razor blade, of course.
Video still of testing Electro-Voice DO54 omni directional dynamic microphone. Go here to see video.
This is a recording from the early 1980s (possibly December 1981) of mischievous amateur radio operators (hams) that like to have a lot of fun while talking on their radios. On this recording, I used my Bearcat 300 scanner radio at my home in Martinez, California to receive the 146.82 MHz repeater located in the hills of Berkeley, California. The scanner audio was fed to the line input of my Shure M67 mixer and the mixer line out connected to line in on my Superscope C-104 Cassette tape recorder.
Many times these amateur radio operators would play the audio of broadcast stations, and other amateur stations and tapes. Quite often they would make strange noises, not identify their call-signs, use foul language, and make other amateurs upset. I could go on, but if you listen to this and my other recordings of ham radio jammers, I suspect that it will make quite clear what jamming is all about. Incidentally, this tape is fairly clear of really extreme foul language except for an occasional sexual reference. Maybe it’s because the jammers are discussing religion. Be sure to click here “Ham Radio Jammers” or in the right hand column of this page for more.
In the early days of cable television, a lot of channels did not have twenty-four-hour programming. These channels would sign on at or after 5 pm local time, often with much fanfare and fancy graphics. I know this cassette audio recording of The Playboy Channel doesn’t really come through with the dramatic impact they were trying to present, but I think it might give you a sense of how TV was in the early 1980s. I wish I’d had the thousands of dollars it would have cost to buy a really good VCR.
This is some the sound of steady, heavy rain which fell late on December 11th through the middle of December 12th 2010. In a little more than 12 hours, I received three-and-two-thirds inches of rain, and some areas around Seattle received over 10 inches. As you can see on a National Weather Service water vapor satellite picture I included, a stream of white appears to come up from the Hawaiian Islands and head straight for the Pacific Northwest, bypassing California completely. This condition is known as a “Hawaiian” storm, but more recently it goes by the more colorful name “Pineapple Express.” I guess the idea of where pineapples are grown makes this name more dramatic and exciting. To learn more go here.
Since I recently had my house painted, the outside microphones were removed. I simply placed the same microphones in windows about twenty feet apart. More information about how I made this and other recordings of this kind, check out my other posts here.
U. S. National Weather Service water vapor satellite picture, Dec. 12, 2010, 5 AM Pacific Standard Time.
This is a very recent recording of a baby room monitor (BRM) using my AOR AR-3000 communications receiver and a small 900 megahertz antenna. The baby cries and screams and then someone comes into the room and comforts the baby. As with all of my baby monitor recordings, it was received and recorded from within my home.
The picture shows reception at 49.845 MHz, but this baby monitor was actually transmitting on 902.795 MHz.
Here is a video that was brought back from the Negativland 2000 tour. I don’t know much about it, but it’s very funny to me to see someone like that beat up on an old household appliance. I laugh every time I see this video. Obviously, the title is something else, but somehow the words “Goth” and “Clothes Dryer” in the same phrase cause me to chuckle. By the way, if that is actually Velcro burning at the beginning and ending, it must have smelled really awful! Or maybe not, due to microgravity.
This could quite possibly be the dumbest thing I’ve made so far. For starters, I’ve been learning how to use free VST (Virtual Studio Technology) software. Just recently, I started to learn how MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) operates. Here I have two recordings of a MIDI song (Tea For Two), which I downloaded free from the internet. The first version is quite simple, and features the MIDI file playing a free VST instrument called “Tapeotronic,” which emulates (kind of) the sound of a Mellotron. I set this instrument to produce flute sounds. In addition I set up a free VST sample player to play my voice saying the single word “dumb.” The sample player attempted to play my voice as musical notes as the data from the MIDI song was fed to it. Then I thought I could do better and made a second recording.
I downloaded another free VST sample player and I decided to try to play the “Tea For Two” MIDI file using two sample players with my “dumb” sample and the “Tapeotronic.” One of the sample players has a feature called “auto tune” and applying that to the sample made my voice sound even more musical. I’m not quite sure if this could be referred to as a “techno masterpiece” or not.
This post was first put up early in August of 2010 and as with several of my recent posts any comments were lost due to a problem with the site. I know this post had comments simply by its sheer dumbness and I would like you to once again tell me what you think.
Don’t forget check out the single word “dumb” below.
I think I mentioned over a year ago that I enjoy listening to organ music. Well I have finally decided it’s time to do so again. This record was played on my Newcomb TR-1625M, fitted with a General Electric variable reluctance magnetic cartridge. In this recording, I used the built-in vacuum tube preamp and connected the line out of the Newcomb to a Mackie 1402VLZ mixer. Then I connected the unbalanced line output of the mixer to the sound card input on my computer, and the recording was done on Adobe Audition 1.5. I used several effects in Adobe Audition to try to make the sound clearer and louder. After that, I saved the recording as a monaural .wav file, and lastly I converted the .wav file to mp3 using Razorlame and the LAME encoder set to 128kbps monaural. I know that was a mouthful, but I think the sound quality is quite good.
This was originally put up early August of 2010 and due some trouble with the site any comments were lost. I apologize for that and I am sorry. By all means feel free to leave more comments!
