Songs and Sonics

There are few greater gifts to the creative noise enthusiast than Dollar Tree.

No, I’m not being paid to say that. It’s just something I’ve grown to realize over time.

Today’s project largely consists of parts found at — you guessed it — your local Dollar Tree. I don’t know if these exact parts are available at every Dollar Tree, or even if they’re available at my Dollar Tree. Their inventory seems to change as frequently as I change shirts. So you might need to find some substitute parts. If that’s the case, don’t worry — this isn’t rocket science. It’s just another fun way to play with sound.

First, allow me to introduce this garden hose-looking toy called a whirlie (blatant CD product placement to demonstrate relative whirlie size):

When you hold the end of the whirlie with the wide mouth and spin it fast enough, this unassuming plastic hose generates some otherworldly sustained tones. I used multiple, overdubbed whirlies in this way at the end of “Freetime” (from The Simple Carnival’s Menlo Park EP).

If you spin the whirlie faster, the pitch jumps up a fifth. Spin it even faster, and the pitch will be a fourth above that, making the pitch an octave above where you originally started. Spin it even faster, and the pitch jumps yet again. You can do this until your arm falls off or you go into orbit, whichever happens first.

Whirlies are even capable of playing melodies. If you cut the tubes to different lengths, you’ll get a different set of pitches to play. Of course, this melody-playing technique works best if you have more than two arms. Australian composer Sarah Hopkins does just this, as she writes serious music pieces for… whirlies. You read that right. Check out her web site if you don’t believe me.

But this project isn’t about using whirlies for their naturally pleasing tones. No, this is all about a homemade contraption I made called the Sound Spinner:

The Sound Spinner is a whirlie with a small speaker in the wide mouth end. The speaker is pointed toward the long end of the tube. So when you spin the whirlie, it throws the sound around the room in every direction, creating what’s called a Doppler effect. Have you ever noticed how an ambulance siren’s pitch will change as the vehicle fades into the distance? That’s the Doppler effect.

Pretty much. However, I have a real Leslie speaker, and they sound significantly different, even though they operate on the same principle.

The Sound Spinner costs only a few bucks to build, sounds worse than a real Leslie, and a human can actually “perform” with it. Do not discount the Sound Spinner’s ability to do a synthesizer filtering effect (by covering the open end of the whirlie with your hand) or a Peter Frampton talkback effect (by putting the open end of the whirlie in your mouth and “speaking”). And the Sound Spinner doubles as a variable speed autopanning device, if you spin it in front of a stereo microphone.

And don’t forget the visual impact this thing has! In the right musical situation, playing a Sound Spinner in a live show could leave a lasting impression on the audience… and possibly cause unparalleled fits of laughter.

Still, don’t let the potential embarrassment of using this gadget scare you from building one. It’s perfectly usable in the studio, where nobody can see how you got that weird sound.

What makes the Sound Spinner interesting is what it does to the source material you send through it. I used the Sound Spinner at the end of Really Really Weird (from the Me and My Arrow EP as well as Girls Aliens Food album), and the source material was a bit unusual.

What is this device? The model name has long escaped me, but it’s an environmental noisemaker I found at a thrift store and then circuit bended. It plays annoyingly grating 10-second loops of cricket, bird, and ocean noises, meant to “relax” the unlucky sap who received this as a gift. I installed some glitch-inducing switches and a big knob which controls the pitch/speed (sample rate) of the noise.

Since the end section of Really Really Weird is basically the sound of my studio going ballistic, I recorded some glitchy bird noises out of this device that gradually rise in pitch and speed. I then took that performance and fed it into the Sound Spinner, spinning it in front of a stereo microphone, for an extreme as possible stereo effect. The end result is buried in the mix, so much that it just serves to “tickle the ears” a bit when wearing headphones. (The effect is even more hidden than I originally intended in the final mix, because, as soon as the Sound Spiner becomes audible, the mix is swirling around and well on the way of marching toward your right ear.)

So here’s some mp3s to show what the Sound Spinner does and where it ended up in this particular song. These clips are best listened to with headphones.

The Sound Spinner consists of the following parts (the first five can be found at Dollar Tree):

A whirlie. ($1.00)

An external iPod speaker. ($1.00)

Foam to keep the speaker in place. ($1.00)

Electrical tape. ($1.00)

A piece of cardboard to close off the foam and speaker on the wide mouth end.

A powered computer speaker.

A long, 2-conductor audio cable to go from the computer speaker’s amplifier to the iPod speaker in the whirlie.

The external iPod speaker is one of those Dollar Tree finds; not only do you get two cheap stereo speakers for a buck, but included for no extra cost is a pushbutton switch and a decent 1/8″ stereo molded jack with cable. All of these parts can be utilized in other electronic projects.

What makes this particular model desireable is how the internal speaker fits perfectly within the whirlie’s wide mouth end.

The iPod speaker does not require external power, and it’s not loud enough to sufficiently force meaningful sound waves down the whirlie tube. I ended up using an AC-powered computer speaker as the “amplifier.”

So instead of the powered computer speaker sending a signal to one of its speakers, one speaker is eliminated entirely, and the other speaker’s signal is re-routed to the external iPod speaker.

Note that I don’t recommend working with AC power if you don’t know what you are doing with electronics. Heck, I don’t know even what I’m doing with electronics, and here I am writing an article about it. In my defense, I was scrounging around the house for a cheap amp to sacrifice, and this is what I found. So re-read that disclaimer a few paragraphs back and make sure you know what you’re getting into if you build one of these things.

You’ll want to wedge the iPod speaker in the one end of the whirlie (don’t glue or tape it in) then pack in some foam to keep the speaker in place.

Finally, you’ll need to cut a piece of cardboard and seal the end of the whirlie with electrical tape. The goal is to keep all of the sound from escaping the end that you hold.

And that’s it. Happy noisemaking!

Charles Schultz was my first childhood idol. I wanted to draw cartoons when I grew up.

There was only one problem with this rather lofty career plan.

I couldn’t draw.

Still, my lack of ability never stopped me from trying. I made a number of cartoon projects in grade school in preparation of my future non-career. Flip books. Stories on adding paper rolls. A paper-and-cardboard nickelodeon which worked only one time before falling apart.

But my most ambitious childhood cartoon experiment was the animated film I made in the second grade. I borrowed my dad’s Super 8 camera and shot hundreds of stick figure drawings in sequence to make three minutes of cinematic… incoherence. I always had to tell the audience what was going on in the film as they were watching it. From an aspiring cartoonist’s viewpoint, this was not a good sign.

The film’s plot could be summed up as, “A guy has very bad day.” Coincidentally, that same theme continues to weasel its way into my creative endeavors over twenty years later.

Case in point: Really Really Weird. This song is from the Simple Carnival EP Me and My Arrow and debut full-length album Girls Aliens Food.

I won’t be focusing too much on the song itself or how it was recorded, other than saying that, on the surface, it’s about a guy who has a very bad day. Instead, I’d like to turn your attention to its accompanying video, made with $7.25 in office supplies and two weeks of free time. It should be obvious from the video that my drawing ability hasn’t progressed much since I was in the second grade.

Creating a music video might seem only tangentially related to songwriting and recording — the two things this blog is supposed to be about. But I think the method in which this video was put together is a good example of acknowledging one’s limitations and finding creative ways to work within them. Or around them. After all, that’s essentially what making music is about, too.

I wanted a video for the same reason that any recording artist wants a video: to get people to check out the music.

I couldn’t justify paying someone a lot of money to make a “real” video. Given that CDs and music downloads have an embarrassingly slim profit margin to begin with, I wasn’t convinced that a real video would be worth the return on investment.

That is, unless the video cost less than ten bucks to make.

I figured I could rig some Monty Python-ish animation with a few photos taken by Pam Neill, a terrific local photographer. I wanted to start this project while the idea was still fresh, so I used the tools that I was already familiar with, like Paint Shop Pro, instead of a real animation program. As far as drawing, I had already commissioned the very talented Missy Kulik to draw the cover artwork to the Girls Aliens Food album.

Without hearing the album herself, Missy successfully captured the vibe of the songs. And unlike me, Missy can actually draw. So I slavishly recreated her designs using construction paper, glue, and a black magic marker. I also made additional cutouts with my own meager drawing skills. Here’s all of the construction paper cutouts used in the video.

Really Really Weird is, at its core, a story song. And a story song seems to be a straightforward choice for a music video, because the lyrics are already stating what needs to be shown on the screen.

So I put on my headphones, got some blank paper, and listened to what Really Really Weird’s lyrics were saying. Then I sketched out what needed to happen visually.

Remember English class? Remember dramatic structure? The video is set up like an onion. It starts with the minimum of what can be shown to get the point across, and as things progress, the layers are peeled away. And then all heck breaks loose at the end. The song is structured in the same way.

Making art isn’t much different than the way a child plays with blocks. As adults, we attach all sorts of social significance to art. We buy into the mythology of artists being mysterious conductors of inspiration. We read biographies and eat up every word about how artists pour their personal demons into their work, how they wear their heart on their sleeve. And these things can be true.

But when you break down the actual art making process, it’s nothing more than taking a set of blocks and arranging them in interesting ways.

The Really Really Weird video was an experiment in using the minimum number of “blocks” for the maximum effect. There wasn’t a noble artistic ambition behind this. Animation — especially without any proper skills or tools — is hard. So out of sheer laziness, I looked for ways to reuse construction paper cutouts and animation sequences, yet still keep the viewer engaged.

What I’ve observed with video — or with music — is that setting audience expectations is important. If the video began with the rich detail of a Disney cartoon, there would immediately be an expectation to maintain that level of quality for the next three minutes. If, on the other hand, the video were to start off with the cheapest looking spaceship in the history of animation, the bar has been set at precisely the right level for someone with my particular drawing ability. Things can only go up from there.

And that’s what I tried to do for the end alien abduction sequence — bump the amateurish artwork up to a near-Hollywood special effects level. Because the expectations were set so humorously low from the start, the intended audience reaction when the spaceship begins sucking things up is, “Wow, this video seemed so cheap that I didn’t expect that to happen!” Again, it’s onion peeling.

There’s a curious effect this video seems to have on people. I’ve seen an audience laugh and feel schadenfreude at the construction paper guy’s misfortune. On the other end, I’ve seen an audience feel sorry for him. And then I’ve seen a kind of interesting middle ground, where there’s laughter but a sense of uneasiness over who you’re supposed to root for. Like, the audience might subconsciously realize that by laughing at the construction paper guy, they’re aligning themselves with the aliens and thinks, “No, you’re not supposed to do that.” That’s like watching Jaws and cheering for the shark.

So at the end of the video, when the sets themselves are getting sucked up off the page, it was an attempt to break the fourth wall. It was to remind the audience that, despite whatever emotional investment you’ve placed in this story, it’s all construction paper, folks. And you are watching something deeply absurd. I’m only playing with blocks, and this is the part where they get knocked over.

I suspect that viewpoint makes me no better than the aliens, though.

All of the construction paper was scanned into Paint Shop Pro. The images were then carefully separated onto layers. (If you’re not familiar with photo editing software, “layers” in a paint program are like a stack of clear plastic transparent sheets.)

Then it was time to animate the action. Animation was created by tweaking an image in Paint Shop Pro, and saving it as a new file. How many files were there? Well, there 30 frames for each second of the video, and the song is almost four minutes long… Although I repeated some sequences, it should go without saying there were a lot of files.

Sometimes the animation was as simple as turning a layer on or off, like the alien mouth movement, as shown above. Sometimes it involved Paint Shop Pro’s drawing functions, like the closeup of the fish smiling when he receives a hat. Other times it involved rotating the construction paper cutouts.

Hold on, let’s back up to the fish with hats thing.

Out of the dozens of events that occur in this video, the fact that fish wear hats seems to have hit an unusually strong nerve with people.

Why fish? Why hats? I don’t know why there are fish in the video, but I can explain why there are hats.

The Simple Carnival isn’t above being deliberately cheesy. I take my kitsch seriously. To me, a lightweight ’70s AM pop radio hit can be just as satisfying as a “serious” piece of music. Since this video is supposed to be entertaining, what better way to project that intention than to feature a bunch of Fred Astaire-like top hats? Might as well have a little fun before Armageddon.

I used a free application called VirtualDub to stitch all of the image files into AVI movie files. I used another free (but buggy and unfinished) program called ABC Video Roll as the video editor. This is where I synchronized the AVI movie scenes with the music soundtrack.

There were a couple of “special effects” sprinkled throughout the video. The shot where the camera zooms into the restaurant silhouettes was actually my home video camera zooming into a construction paper picture I had taped to the wall.

When the construction paper guy wakes up, it’s a video of the guy glued to a piece of cardboard, and my hand flipping him upward. It is also perhaps the most boring thing on YouTube.

You’ll notice that this shot was performed in front of a “green screen.” It’s green tagboard from Wal-Mart. And it’s not even cut right. I’m not sure why.

If the computer programmers who worked on ABC Video Roll had actually finished writing it, I would’ve been able to seamlessly superimpose this footage in front of a Paint Shop Pro background. Instead, I discovered that, despite claims to the contrary in the manual, ABC Video Roll just plain couldn’t do this. So I used Paint Shop Pro to manually “scrub out” the green in each frame. And if you look carefully at the finished video, the green is still there around the edges of the cardboard guy. I wasn’t able to remove it all. Oh well. On the other hand, it’s not as though it makes the video look any cheaper.

For the ending alien invasion, I needed an “earthquake” effect. VirtualDub has many great plug-ins, but I couldn’t find something that would simulate a shaky camera. So I used an excellent automation utility called AutoHotkey to control Paint Shop Pro and make a random earthquake effect for thousands of frames that I had already hand-animated.

Not anytime soon. This project was exhausting. I’m a songwriter and a musician, not a video director.

I’d spend seven dollars on the video and pocket the rest.

See the previous question about the half million dollar budget. If you can meet that criteria, then let’s talk.