better mo_Re: sound injury

january 12, 2005.

ub - one of the sound_recovery list members, also known as b0mbhead, znrk5, and more - mailed me just before the dawning of the new year. In fact, ub kept an archive of pretty much all of the sound files that were posted to the sound_recovery group. A very nice surprise, as most of these are missing from Joachim's collection... Therefore it seems that little by little we do seem to have gotten together almost of all the group's material. Great! I'll be adding ub's collection to the Raudio Sound Injury Special (which, as with Joachim's collection, is a bit involved, because of the many different formats in which the files com; many of which need resampling, et cetera ... bear with me! Or, alternatively, assist me! ... :-) ...)

All of ub's files are (for the time being) publicly available for download at soundfreak.de ... What's so great about this collection, is that we do not only have the sounds, but also all of the corresponding messages,which are kept in the sound_recovery list's messages archive. Even though the sound files that were attached to the messages are no longer there, the name of the original attachments is still included with them. So, with some effort, it is possible to assign dates and aliases/names of the posters to the files in ub's collection.

Last week I spent an afternoon gathering all this information for the sound files posted in may 2003 to the sound_recovery list, and used (almost) all of that month's sounds in chronological order of their posting in a 'sound injury' podcast ... We have been experimenting a bit with this 'new format' at Park lately. At heart, a 'podcast' is nothing more than an audio file, that you can listen to on your personal digital audio-player. Instead, though, of downloading such a file manually, and then transferring it, again manually, to your player, a 'PodCast' enables you to automate this process. A link to the audio file is added as an enclosure to an RSS feed. You next need a PodCast Aggregator, which enables you to subscribe to such feeds, and which will automatically download the enclosed files for you, store them wherever you want to have them on your hard disk, and, eventually, load them into your docked digital audio-player, ready to roll ... [Popular PodCast Aggregators are iPodderX (Mac) and iPodder (Mac/PC). Also the developers of many of the 'usual' News Feed Aggregators, like NetNewsWire, have announced that they will add 'podcasting' as an option to coming updates of their software.]

Even though I do not myself (yet? --> here's my amazon wishlist! -- ) own a such 'personal digital audio player', I do think podcasts are an interesting idea, and - in view of the quickly growing number of users of such devices - an easy way for any one creating audio content, to smoothly deliver their valued products to pod-users.

Of course I used a sound editor to make the PodCast (I actually use Sound Studio, on MacOS X, a very basic and very simple (one track editor) that I like working with a lot). While doing so, I did not only listen to the sound files, but also was looking at their wave forms, as I opened them in the editor. And indeed, I could not but be reminded of velvetdoug's observation that to him (as probably to several of the other participants) it was not only important how a sound sounded, but also what it looked like... I think you may enjoy the following handful of screen shots that I took from the files in the podcast, such as they appeared in my editor ... :

[The Sound Injury PodCast is a downloadable addendum to Raudio's Sound Injury Stream Special. The participants in may 2003's 'game' were bombhead, m mouth, eva-revox, tofu, pun_c_k, mark m, Paul Savage-Wroth, velvetdoug, juanjo, Björn Eriksson and azerty. In the PodCast you also hear part of Mark Mclaren's explication of the injury-process, taken from his 'Down with the chairman' Sound Injury program, as aired dec. 23th of last year on ResonanceFM. The other voice announcing is not Mark's ; it also isn't mine :-) ... Here's a direct link to the podcast's (20.5 Mo) mp3 file: RaudioPodCast #02]

[ Earlier related SoundBlog entry: pure sound injury ]