Open call – your field recordings of obsolete sounds wanted | Hacker News Reader

Open call – your field recordings of obsolete sounds wanted

citiesandmemory.com

115 pointsrapnie58 comments

I record audio vignettes all the time using iOS Voice Memos, opportunistically snapping 30 seconds or so, the same way one might snap a random photo with a phone. City noises, transport noises, in-situ music, birdsong, machinery, a bedtime story, hold music… all kinds of cool stuff. I haven’t found any better way to organize this collection than chronologically with a short title for each.

I’m also a big fan of Live Photos (remember Live Photos? Nobody talks about them any more), and the short burst of audio you get with each.

Looking and listening back at some of these, it’s the sound which brings the scene back to life. The sound feels alive, while photographs alone feel frozen and distant.

I love snapshots like this and I wish there were more devices like google glass. I know it's a big privacy hazard, but it's so nice to just have even a short video of a moment in time. maybe i just need to be less shy about taking video in public

I know people who've done video projects where they take 2-3 second clips over the course of a year and create a summary video at the end. They can be very cool.

wow! live photos what an idea! i have lots of them.

think how nice would it be if architects incorporated sound / music in the spaces they create.

This probably doesn't deserve it's own HN article, but seems highly appropriate for this thread; in 1998, an artist named "The User" released an album of music composed for dot matrix printers. The recording quality is outstanding, as are the compositions, so while it may not have the automatic familiarity of covering "The Eye of the Tiger", I would argue it is a superior piece of music, to which this is the link:

https://staalplaatlabel.bandcamp.com/album/symphony-2-for-do...

I was completely blown away when I found this years ago. I'm a kid of the early 1990s, and this was music on dot matrix printers. I just couldn't believe my ears when I first listened to the whole thing.

I did some radio production back then and needed a soundtrack for a lecture by an eminent computer scientist from my country (he's got an oddball sense of humour, and he was approaching 90 at that time). Since our country is, well, poor as compared to Canada (where The User is from), the band was kind enough to allow me to use their composition free of charge (the initial fee they asked was well above my head). They sent me flac or wav files just like that. This still makes me feel warm when I think about that. Really nice people.

Their "Symphony No 2" is also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m43MkQgF9p0

And on Vimeo (needs login): https://vimeo.com/16207657

Might be their old webpage: http://www.undefine.ca/en/projects/symphony-for-dot-matrix-p...

Would be really interesting to have a look at the actual code that made the printers work. I wonder what language they used, etc.

I’ll toss Ryoji Ikeda into the mix for ‘interesting data music’.

Dataplex (2005) is a fine place to start.

his 2017 release 'music for percussion' [1] and large and immersive video installations [2] are worth a look as well

[1]: https://www.discogs.com/release/11738371-Ryoji-Ikeda-Eklekto...

[2]: https://youtu.be/omDK2Cm2mwo

what a great find, cheers!

Did the makers of this site ever consider cooperating with e.g. freesound.org? A simple "city" search returns 13000 recordings. E.g. this one (https://freesound.org/people/Yuval/sounds/197759/) is really good.

hi, I'm a freesound developer! We'll reach out to them.

Freesound is just the most interesting and useful tool, you rock.

Whoa! Freesound looks like it might be one of the last few missing pieces I need for a long term passion project.... (I love, and occasionally am lucky enough to be paid to work on, audio signal processing things.)

* goes to create an acct *

Hah! Apparently I made an account 9 years ago, excited to see if it's useful to me now. :D

Do you happen to do audio cleanup? There was a java app 5 years or more ago that could clean up old recordings of records. It worked quite well, and I was looking at paying for it when lightning put that PC out of commission, so I don't have browser history either. Had I actually paid I'd have an email.

I used it to clean up some old police training videos with narration by Jack Webb on YouTube. Didn't tag the video with the software, something I normally do.

The software was better than Adobe and audacity. I'd like to find it because I want to 'fix' the audio on quite a few Old Time Radio Researchers titles.

Izotope RX is a Swiss Army knife for these kinds of tasks:

https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx.html

> Do you happen to do audio cleanup? ...

I love this project idea! I don't want to oversell myself, I "do things" not nearly as much as I'd like or should (or used to).... more like "I study, research, fool around with equations, tend to know a lot about, &c". ;-)

But yeah, noise removal is in there! Other forms of restoration too.

_Ideally_ if you can somehow remember what the program you used was, it's possible for me to poke and see which approach they're using. But, assuming that knowledge is lost to the wind, can you link me to the recordings? Ideally a few "before and after". That way I can load them into MATLAB and start to see what's up.

Adobe's Audition is pretty good, iZotope RX is also well loved.

EDIT: Either way, and even if I don't end up doing anything with it, I'd love a link to the recordings. Dirty and clean.

Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiRcOVDAryM

My first pass and first use of the software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xazubVJ0jz4

I used that Java app to clean up about a dozen of my vinyl records! It was the best for transient pops.

For general grunge removal, that's best done by cleaning the record as best you can; heavy post processing tends to screw it up. Learning Izotope is on my list of projects.

Java app. Real simple. Now I need to recall what it was... but for time frame, it was around 2005.

You too? HAH, now I'm really curious.

Not that you asked but, for transient clicks and pops, a Compressed Sensing (badass new (past 2 decades) applied mathematics) based approach I expect would far outperform anything previous. (Previous approaches used higher order statistics, linear prediction, median cut"ish" things, filtering IIRC.)

I wonder if any of the commercial shops have made CS based impulse noise removal based plugins. I wonder if anyone would pay $$$ for it.

Someone is going to say "dial-up modems" and "dot matrix printers", but I had twenty of each, all absolutely brand spanking new and fresh from the factory, in the back of my car a couple of weeks ago.

Please tell me they weren't on the way to the dump >_>

I am going to guess they were going to be installed as replacements for existing units. I believe the GP comment was taking issue with them being considered "obsolete".

They might be superior to inkjets.

Got it in one. These are in fire stations, where they need to print out about a page of text, a few times a day. In some rural retained or volunteer stations they might only print something out a few times a month! Inkjet nozzles would have clogged, laser printers would either burn out the fuser or take several minutes to warm up. Inkjet printers will go <SCREEET SCREEEET SCREEET> for 30 seconds, and there's the job, printed out in triplicate.

As an added bonus if the ribbon has dried out you can just discard the top copy and work off one of the duplicates.

Or the <THUMP THUMP THUMP...> of line printers...

  > Inkjet printers will go <SCREEET SCREEEET SCREEET>

Surely you mean dot matrix?

Yes, I mean dot matrix printers.

A local garage still uses them for invoices, one is only a few years old.

Ribbons are cheap, and can be reinked.

And continuous paper (for the dot matrix printers that uses these) has interesting properties: being able to print only one line and advance the paper by only one line is quite something.

I always wanted a paper syslog output, and dot matrix is the best for it... for just this reason.

(just for notable events, not all logs)

Yeah, hack my paper syslog server!

No, but there are some old ones going to e-waste. They're pretty worn out but refurbing one (retrobrite the plastic, change the paper guides and platen roller) might be a fun youtube video.

I'd bet decent money one can also purchase a brand-new Hansom cab, complete with buggy whip. This is the nature of obsolescence.

did you record them?

I did a while ago actually:

https://youtu.be/sNNBI3llSnQ

Dialup modem sounds from 300bps to 56K: https://youtu.be/xalTFH5ht-k

British Library sound archive fwiw:

https://sounds.bl.uk/

Semi related, I recently watched these videos of Benn Jordan's field recording adventures and enjoyed them a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnJzRUjd4ds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1i_ECeB2fo

I own a pair of cheap binaural microphones that are worn in the ears like earbuds. For a time, I had access to a proper digital audio recorder and would record short snippets of binaural audio for my own enjoyment.

I’ve wanted to figure out how to connect them to a pocket sized recorder, but it appears (possibly?) that they require phantom power over the 3.5mm jack (or some other kind of adapter) as I have never been successful finding a way to connect them to a smartphone or a pocket voice recorder (and have tried several).

If anyone is more familiar with audio tech and has a thought, I would really appreciate it.

They may require something called "plug-in" power, which is different from phantom power. If you're using a recording device, there may be an option to turn this on. This is common for lav mics, so it may be true for yours too. As an example,if you have something like a zoom h5 recorder it's available through the menu system. It's also possible that you need an adapter that converts the plug from TRS to TRRS or vice versa. (Simplified: Count the number of "stripes" on the plug, if there are 2 you may need an adapter to convert it to 3, or the reverse)

Everything delgaudm said 100%

Plus, if you post the specifics of what equipment you have, and if you're willing to spend a lil bit of money, I'm sure this comment section will be full of audio people happy to help. (including me) I'm sure Tascam has a pocket sized recorder for $100-200 that will do the job for you.

Or, if you're feeling more DIY, you can inject the 3-5V yourself! Don't take my word on it (I dabble in EE but shouldn't be trusted), but it looks like all it takes is a few capacitors, resistors and maybe a voltage regulator to power up that microphone. Then you can use any ole sound card to record.

(Or, you could just spend the $150 and get a proper recorder. Whichever sounds more fun.)

Mine look almost identical to these from Sound Professionals: https://soundprofessionals.com/product/SP-TFB-2/

I would be willing to spend $100-150, but compactness is a high priority. My use case would be to basically have this microphone/recorder in my back pocket to record wild sound, playing with my 3-year-old son, random moments of friends making music, and so on.

I don’t want to need to ‘plan on recording that day’ - I just want it to be compact enough to carry around.

> My use case would be...

Got it! I'm gonna duck out right after this comment (this thread is too much fun) but now I fully see the problem, and need to ponder what an ideal solution would look like.

If you always have a smart phone on you, that can be leveraged perhaps...

(Presuming that the iCloud email service uses the second-level domain "icloud" under the top-level domain "com", you'll know if/when someday I think of something else)

Thanks. Honestly, if there were something equivalent to an iPod nano in size that would be almost ideal.

I believe there may be minidisc recorders which can do this.

[edit] http://felmicamps.co.uk/pluginpower.html

The BBC has some really nice old sounds in their archive whose URL escapes me.

e.g. there aren't that many organizations out there that have high quality digitized audio of a flyby of a squadron of English electric lightnings

This one? https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/

Damn, what's the license on those? Yoink

How does licensing work? Can I use a sound effect from BBC Sound Effects in my YouTube video?/ University project? You can read the terms of the licence here. However, as a general rule, as long as your usage remains non-commercial, you can use sound effects for free, crediting the BBC. If the usage becomes commercial - i.e. if you monetise it, sell it, or charge for access to it, or if it is advertising-funded or commercially sponsored, then that counts as commercial use, and you will need to license the recording from Pro Sound Effects.

https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/faqs

You're also not allowed to use the sounds for "offensive purposes," including "anything that would harm the BBC’s reputation," or to promote "tobacco or weapons." Huge eyeroll, this is a lame license.

Here's a crowd of people laughing at this license, hopefully this link counts as violating the spirit if not the text of the license: https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07043054

Someone please submit the sound of a gasoline or diesel engine starting!

It's perhaps more of a "deprecated" sound than obsolete, but I think it counts!

I'd do it myself but I don't have very good recording gear

Cool thing is you don't need very good recording gear, "inexpensive gear, used well" can do wonders.

I agree those sounds are great, and I even (had) about an hour of them too, to share! but they're inaccessible right now due to a combination of disorganization and bad planning. :(

And they're all 16 track recordings, so might be unwieldy ;-)

I know next to nothing about cars, but love that one can use sound to diagnose and pinpoint problems sometimes.

One audio track per cylinder is a bit of overkill... :-)

Hahaha, true, true.

(All the microphones allow me to pinpoint in where in space specific sounds are coming from. Next stop is a 64 microphone recording. ...)

These can be found on Freesound discussed elsewhere in this submission.

How big of an engine and how high quality?

Would be neat to take a lot of the submitted sounds of old machines (computers or otherwise) and write a background process that manipulates and plays them while performing certain tasks, like loading from an external drive, or using the more ambient sounds for 'idling'. Lord knows if I could make my machine sound like Nostromo's Mother, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Reminds me of this afterthetone.com

There are no "obsolete sounds".

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