Windchime Experiments
Friday, June 17th, 2022 07:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudioOne night last July I went to take out the garbage and was stunned by the silence outside. So quiet I could hear my ears ringing. It was late enough that everybody was asleep, and traffic just happened to be at an absolute lull.
But the air was also dead still.
It can get pretty damn windy around here from October through into June, but in July and August, the air gets amazingly calm. So, when I'm recording crickets, wind is never a concern. I just leave the S8 outside on a tripod and let it roll for 60 to 90 minutes.
But on the few occasions where there have been some slight breezes... they can really distort the microphones.
One phenomenon, I call, vacuum mute. It's where a slight breeze won't ruffle the mikes, but it will kinda... suck the sound away. And it's actually a neat effect, if it's not too pronounced, and makes it seem as though there are spirits drifting nearby.
But there's also the regular wind ruffling, which is just bad, and not fun at all.
And for a couple years I've been trying to figure out a way to screen the mikes that isn't silly or cumbersome. These are tiny openings on a smart phone, so I can't exactly cover them with rabbit fur. I bought a dome shaped grease guard for cooking... a stainless steel screen you can put over a frying pan to keep the grease from flying out and burning you... and I thought I could put it over the phone, if I could cover it in some kind of cloth.
But I've never figured out an easy way to cover it with cloth that would be any different from just... wrapping the phone itself in, like a shirt.
------------{=0=}------------
The big idea, that started me toying with this problem, was the idea of recording late at night in the dead of winter, to see if I could capture train horns in the distance.
But then I thought, if I could take care of the wind issue, and was recording in the dead of winter... it might be nice to have a wind chime or two out there, to liven things up a little bit.
And that, in turn, got me thinking about key chimes.
------------{=0=}------------
Back in the 1990s, thanks to a chain of circumstances too ridiculous to get into here, I came into possession of a box of keys. Not old skeleton keys or anything. Just normal keys... no longer in use.
And, because I'm a weirdo, I figured out that if you suspend a key from a string and strike it, it rings! Keys make high pitched little dings! So I strung a bunch up around a wire ring that was suspended by string, and made a crude wind chime.
It sounded nice, but there were problems. The keys had to hit one another to start ringing, because I didn't understand the concept of a clapper on a sail, and they kept getting tangled up with each other.
------------{=0=}------------
Twenty five years later, I decided to revisit the problem. I found that you can order bags of assorted, used keys, on Ebay... because of course you can!
My experimentations took a while, but I finally figured it out this spring.
The ring has to be small... like three inches in diameter. That's enough room to suspend eight keys, evenly spaced. But the keys have to be suspended with fishing line, because anything thicker will mute their ability to ring.
The trouble is that fishing line, tied around a brass ring, doesn't stay put. It slides around.
The solution for that, is to first coat the ring with cloth tape.
But the ring has to be suspended, and for that I use twine. The cloth covered ring is first put over a template that divides it evenly into quarters, and those quarters are marked on the tape with a paint marker. Those marks are where the twine gets tied.
The next step is tricky. The four lengths of twine, now 90 degrees apart, have to get tied together, but we also need a fifth length of twine to hang down through the center of the ring, for the clapper and the sail... and you've got to try and tie all five together, with the ring still hanging level!
So I used a zip tie to hold all five lengths of twine together temporarily, as I made slight adjustments to get the ring to hang level. Then I tied them off permanently.
For the clapper, I used the ceramic handle from a lamp's pull chain. But the hole through it is rather large, so I used small wooden beads, at the top and bottom, to narrow the hole enough that the whole thing could be held in place by a few knots in the twine.
for the sail, I used the plastic lid of a small Folgers coffee can. I drilled a small hole in the lip and suspended it at the bottom of the string, with another knot. The sail, of course, catches the wind, and moves the clapper around to tap the keys.
Suspending the keys is kind of the easy part, but also kind of difficult, because I'm old and blind, and it's tough to tie little knots with invisible fishing line.
Also, the lines suspending the keys have to be short. I made them too long the first try, and they all got tangled up together.
In the working model, the're only hanging 3/4 of an inch from the ring.
The final, working model was hung outside, from the jungle gym, back in April. And since then we have had some crazy ass windy days and nights. Trees bending over. Lawn chairs flipping over. Garbage cans rolling down the street. But that damn key chime's been fine!
------------{=0=}------------
And today I think I also found the solution for wind-screening the mikes of the S8.
The phone has a case, so... I took an old micro-fiber thermal undershirt that doesn't fit anymore (because I'm too fat) and cut out a big square of the cloth. It's the super thin, stretchy stuff, kinda like spandex, but it breathes better.
I took the phone out of the case, then draped the cloth over the case, and snapped the phone back in, so the cloth is now a layer on the inside of the case, and it covers the microphones! I used a brand new shiny razor blade to carefully cut off the excess cloth and... presto!
At least I think it's presto. Now I have to test it out. The key chime's already out there, so I'm gonna do a test recording tonight and see how it goes.
------------{=0=}------------
Below, I'm gonna embed the one recording I did, in October of 2020, of the bamboo wind chimes on my front stoop. That track, WindyOct 02, has actually done well, despite not being part of a playlist. There seems to be an audience for this type of sleep/meditation recording.
Wish me luck, and I'll let you know how it goes tonight!
°¦}
But the air was also dead still.
It can get pretty damn windy around here from October through into June, but in July and August, the air gets amazingly calm. So, when I'm recording crickets, wind is never a concern. I just leave the S8 outside on a tripod and let it roll for 60 to 90 minutes.
But on the few occasions where there have been some slight breezes... they can really distort the microphones.
One phenomenon, I call, vacuum mute. It's where a slight breeze won't ruffle the mikes, but it will kinda... suck the sound away. And it's actually a neat effect, if it's not too pronounced, and makes it seem as though there are spirits drifting nearby.
But there's also the regular wind ruffling, which is just bad, and not fun at all.
And for a couple years I've been trying to figure out a way to screen the mikes that isn't silly or cumbersome. These are tiny openings on a smart phone, so I can't exactly cover them with rabbit fur. I bought a dome shaped grease guard for cooking... a stainless steel screen you can put over a frying pan to keep the grease from flying out and burning you... and I thought I could put it over the phone, if I could cover it in some kind of cloth.
But I've never figured out an easy way to cover it with cloth that would be any different from just... wrapping the phone itself in, like a shirt.
The big idea, that started me toying with this problem, was the idea of recording late at night in the dead of winter, to see if I could capture train horns in the distance.
But then I thought, if I could take care of the wind issue, and was recording in the dead of winter... it might be nice to have a wind chime or two out there, to liven things up a little bit.
And that, in turn, got me thinking about key chimes.
Back in the 1990s, thanks to a chain of circumstances too ridiculous to get into here, I came into possession of a box of keys. Not old skeleton keys or anything. Just normal keys... no longer in use.
And, because I'm a weirdo, I figured out that if you suspend a key from a string and strike it, it rings! Keys make high pitched little dings! So I strung a bunch up around a wire ring that was suspended by string, and made a crude wind chime.
It sounded nice, but there were problems. The keys had to hit one another to start ringing, because I didn't understand the concept of a clapper on a sail, and they kept getting tangled up with each other.
Twenty five years later, I decided to revisit the problem. I found that you can order bags of assorted, used keys, on Ebay... because of course you can!
My experimentations took a while, but I finally figured it out this spring.
The ring has to be small... like three inches in diameter. That's enough room to suspend eight keys, evenly spaced. But the keys have to be suspended with fishing line, because anything thicker will mute their ability to ring.
The trouble is that fishing line, tied around a brass ring, doesn't stay put. It slides around.
The solution for that, is to first coat the ring with cloth tape.
But the ring has to be suspended, and for that I use twine. The cloth covered ring is first put over a template that divides it evenly into quarters, and those quarters are marked on the tape with a paint marker. Those marks are where the twine gets tied.
The next step is tricky. The four lengths of twine, now 90 degrees apart, have to get tied together, but we also need a fifth length of twine to hang down through the center of the ring, for the clapper and the sail... and you've got to try and tie all five together, with the ring still hanging level!
So I used a zip tie to hold all five lengths of twine together temporarily, as I made slight adjustments to get the ring to hang level. Then I tied them off permanently.
For the clapper, I used the ceramic handle from a lamp's pull chain. But the hole through it is rather large, so I used small wooden beads, at the top and bottom, to narrow the hole enough that the whole thing could be held in place by a few knots in the twine.
for the sail, I used the plastic lid of a small Folgers coffee can. I drilled a small hole in the lip and suspended it at the bottom of the string, with another knot. The sail, of course, catches the wind, and moves the clapper around to tap the keys.
Suspending the keys is kind of the easy part, but also kind of difficult, because I'm old and blind, and it's tough to tie little knots with invisible fishing line.
Also, the lines suspending the keys have to be short. I made them too long the first try, and they all got tangled up together.
In the working model, the're only hanging 3/4 of an inch from the ring.
The final, working model was hung outside, from the jungle gym, back in April. And since then we have had some crazy ass windy days and nights. Trees bending over. Lawn chairs flipping over. Garbage cans rolling down the street. But that damn key chime's been fine!
And today I think I also found the solution for wind-screening the mikes of the S8.
The phone has a case, so... I took an old micro-fiber thermal undershirt that doesn't fit anymore (because I'm too fat) and cut out a big square of the cloth. It's the super thin, stretchy stuff, kinda like spandex, but it breathes better.
I took the phone out of the case, then draped the cloth over the case, and snapped the phone back in, so the cloth is now a layer on the inside of the case, and it covers the microphones! I used a brand new shiny razor blade to carefully cut off the excess cloth and... presto!
At least I think it's presto. Now I have to test it out. The key chime's already out there, so I'm gonna do a test recording tonight and see how it goes.
Below, I'm gonna embed the one recording I did, in October of 2020, of the bamboo wind chimes on my front stoop. That track, WindyOct 02, has actually done well, despite not being part of a playlist. There seems to be an audience for this type of sleep/meditation recording.
Wish me luck, and I'll let you know how it goes tonight!
°¦}
