Awesome video. I have used the cracking of glass before for ice etc... Ableton Live is fantastic for manipulating samples and creating new sounds very quickly. I still use the cracking glass sample in almost every project.

This is something I never really considered. For the last 20 years I’ve been playing racing games here and there, but when they started becoming realistic (i.e. the cars weren’t square and the engine noises weren’t square waves), the enormity of the sound challenge never really struck me. Engine, road, and tire noise, plus accurate doppler effects, different crunches and thunks for impacts… the list goes on. As if that wasn’t enough, you have to worry about engine noise contaminating your samples.

What if someone hits the clutch while their tires are squealing? Less engine, more squeal. But if you recorded the tires squealing in the real world, chances are that the engine noise is inseparable from the squeal. Even if you can deconstruct the sound, it’s a lot of work and the end result isn’t as good as the real thing.

So it’s no wonder that some game designers from Microsoft jumped at the chance to use a Tesla for recording game audio. No engine noise and careful mic placement means you can get tire squeal, or any other audio component of driving, almost completely isolated. Now, I know you guys aren’t really that hot for the details of audio production, but I know you like fast cars. And it actually is pretty entertaining to see a Tesla with so many big hairy mics on it that it looks like a pussy willow.

The audio guys are working on the new Forza and Project Gotham Racing titles, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those games will be praised for their audio. A few good samples and they can tweak them to their hearts’ content. I don’t know whether the Tesla will be in either of the games, but adding the sound should be easy if they decide it should be.

The details of this Roadster’s little adventure are at the Tesla blog, where you will be regaled with all the tidbits about mic placement, clapboards, and that sort of thing. Sounds like it was a lot of fun. Thanks to Tom Burt for offering up his Tesla.

Windows/Mac only: Free application Orb lets you access music, video, and other media stored on your computer from virtually any device (Wii, PS3, cell phone, etc.). It's been around a while on Windows, but today it's also available on the Mac.

We've been fans of Orb for years now, having used it to stream music to any PC and use our Wii as a media center, and now the same sort of great functionality is available to both Windows and Mac users. Using it is dead simple: Just install the Orb application, point it toward your media, then head to http://mycast.orb.com/. Once you log in, you can access any of your media through your browser or device-specific interface. (See our guides above for finer points on different devices.)

As Macworld points out, Orb is also now available as a $10 iPhone app or a free trial app. $10 isn't cheap, but it if you're an Orb user, the easy access to all your computer's media is a pretty sweet deal.

Orb is a free download, Windows and Mac only. If you've been a die-hard Orb user all these years on Windows, share your experience with Orb in the comments.

Orb [via Macworld]

Send an email to Adam Pash, the author of this post, at adam@lifehacker.com.

Building a Contact Microphone

After doing a little research on various websites and conferring with some knowledgeable Twitter acquaintances, I decided to try building a contact mic. What finally put me over the edge were the recordings at Tim Prebble’s fantastic website, The Music of Sound. Since these devices measure vibrations picked up through objects rather than air, the recordings take on an amazingly exaggerated character. This process renders audio fodder that is perfect for further processing into larger-than-life sounds.

The fact that a contact mic can be built for only a few dollars means that the barrier to entry is almost zero. Let’s take a look at the process of building one of these devices, and at the end I’ll link you to some monster growling sounds I made while testing the mic.

First, let’s take a look at the required materials:

• soldering iron and solder
• piezo transducer (Radio Shack part #273-073A
• 1/8″ audio jack
• pliers

Optional stuff that I bought:

• clamp for securing the mic to surfaces
• heatshrink tubing for covering the wires
• foam paintbrushes for covering the piezo, itself

The first step was to break the plastic casing off from around the piezo element. Needless to say, patience is a virtue here because you have to snap off the housing a little bit at a time.

Since there’s a little hole on top of the casing, I chose to wedge in a scissor blade in order to cut out a little notch. Once I cut this little flap of the plastic, I used needle nose pliers to start pulling away the rest of he housing, bit by bit.

Once I chipped off enough of the plastic, the housing basically fell apart in my hand and it became much easier to pop out the wafer-thin piezo element. As you can see, there isn’t much to this device, so you’ll want to be gentle with it. However, they’re so cheap and quick to make that it won’t be a huge issue if it does get broken.

The next step was to slip some thin heatshrink tubing over the wires coming from the piezo. I only did this as a simple way to keep the wires together and somewhat protected from the elements. (After I was done making and testing the mic, I used a hair dryer to shrink the tubing down, creating a snug shield for the wires.) Additionally, I unscrewed the sleeve off of the audio jack and slid it over the tubing so that it would be ready to pull over the jack once the soldering was complete.

Next comes the soldering. First, I tinned the two piezo wires so that minimal heat would be needed to solder them to the jack: When working with electronics this small, you can cause a lot of damage by applying extreme heat for more than a few seconds. Next, I connected the black wire to the large contact which protrudes from the bottom of the jack and the red wire to one of the contacts further up on the jack. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, just take a look at the picture and you’ll see the correct configuration.

After soldering, I pulled the sleeve up over the connection and screwed it back on to the jack, itself. All done!

Since I was going to be using a clamp to hold the piezo firmly on various surfaces, I wanted some kind of padding to protect the delicate unit. While searching around in a hardware store I came upon some foam paintbrushes. These ended up being the perfect padding after I pulled out the handles, leaving just a piece of foam with a little slot in the middle. Just slide the piezo into the slot and clamp it onto a surface and you’re ready to record.

Now that the microphone was done, I connected an 1/8″ cable between the mic and the input on my Edirol R-09HR, making sure that the mic input mode on the R-09 was set to “mono.” I also did a few test runs in order to set the correct high-pass filter frequency and input level. I walked around the house, clamping the mic to various surfaces and listening to how they sounded when hit with various objects. The results were quite satisfying! Although I’m going to save most of these sounds for future posts, I thought I’d share three “monster growl” variations that resulted from clamping the mic to a piece of acoustic treatment in my studio while I rubbed my fingernail across the fabric.

• Growl 1
• Growl 2
• Growl 3

This project was cheap and easy, and I can’t imagine being without one of these devices as a sound designer. What excites me most is that this little mic will open up even more options for creating original sounds while relying less on commercial libraries and stock effects. More posts will come in the future as I continue to experiment with different builds and surfaces to record on.

Posted on Oct 29th, 2009 | 8 Comments 8 responses

Science makes Air Guitar Hero a reality

by JC Fletcher

{ Oct 28th 2009 at 10:00AM }

University of Washington Ph.D. student Scott Saponas demonstrated his muscle-movement interface for computer systems, by using it to control a familiar application: Guitar Hero. The system appears to guess finger movements by reading the signals from muscles in the forearm. The result: a true air guitar experience. In the custom Guitar Hero setup, the player can hold frets simply by touching a finger with his thumb, and strum by, well, strumming the air. See it in action after the break!

This is just a demonstration of some experimental technology. It's not specifically a game controller, and Activision won't be shipping electrodes to stores any time soon. This is a presentation for the Association for Computer Machinery's Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology -- the Guitar Hero thing just makes for an impressive show.

[Via Kotaku]

Tags: experimental, guitar-hero, muscle-controller, scott-saponas