gestlings/twilight_mushroom_forest

twilight_mushroom_forest

dz / gestlings / twilight_mushroom_forest

Summary

So you want to build a forest? Notes for the constructing of "twilight in the mushroom forest", a forest soundscape I synthesized in October 2023 for the Elmet Brae Merveilles compilation. Someday this might turn into a blog post.

Node Tree

Nodes

core_ideas
content Core Ideas
children forest_ir (The forest IR simulates the space), pitch_unreasonably_effective, sound_objects_mixed

forest_ir
content Forest impulse response by phonophilist
children kookaburra (The Kookaburra-ness of Toni emerges when put through the,forest reverb), reverb_hides_artificialness, sound_objects_mixed (Mixed together and thrown into the forest), blurs_imperfectsion
parents core_ideas
remarks I one time was curious if there existed any forest impulse-responses, and it turns out there are quite a few! I liked the samples of this one the best.
hyperlink https://phonophilist.com/product/ir-forest-reverb/

blurs_imperfectsion
content Blurs imperfections
parents forest_ir

pitch_unreasonably_effective
content Simulating pitch curves is unreasonably effective
children loon_warble_model, loon_yodelling, peepers_pitch_model, soundshader
parents core_ideas

critters
content Critters
children loon, peepers, toni_bird, crickets

loon
content Loon
children freesound_canadian_loon, loon_cry, loon_warble
parents critters

peepers
content Peepers
children freesound_peepers, made_mix_humid, peepers_pitch_model
parents critters

crickets
content Crickets
children farnell_designing_sound (Andy Farnel has a great chapter on cricket sound design), AM_modulation (Core technique for making cricket sounds. There are some,good magic constants to start with, and then the rest is,building an interesting pattern from it.)
parents critters

ambience
content Ambience
children pads, recording_noise

recording_noise
content Simulated Recording Noise
children handling_noise, noise_floor, simulating_field_recording
parents ambience

pads
content Pads
children paulstretch, soundmantra
parents ambience

toni_bird
content Birds Generated from Toni Physiology
children kookaburra, most_complicated_sound, whistling_bird
parents gestlings/toni_vocab_taxonomy/top, critters

soundmantra
content SoundMantra: a series I did for looptober in 2023
children paulstretch (SoundMantra Day 20 was put through PaulStretch to make the pads)
parents pads

paulstretch
content PaulStretch (via Stretcher)
children stretcher
parents pads, soundmantra

freesound_canadian_loon
content Canadian Loon Freesound
children loon_cry, loon_warble
parents loon
remarks I just adore the loons in this sample. I did my best to imitate two of the calls here: the cry and the warble.
hyperlink https://phonophilist.com/product/ir-forest-reverb/

loon_warble
content Loon Warble
parents freesound_canadian_loon, loon

loon_cry
content Loon Cry
children loon_yodelling
parents freesound_canadian_loon, loon

loon_yodelling
content The Loon's cry was done by thinking about the pitch in two parts, a rising pitch and a jumping pitch, working together. To my ears, the jumping pitch reminded me of voice cracking and yodelling.
parents soundshader, loon_cry, pitch_unreasonably_effective

loon_warble_model
content The pitch model for the Loon's warble was mostly built out of an LFO oscillator and envelope as signal primitives. The hard part here was getting the timing and the tuning right. I don't think I did a great job, but the reverb hides the mistakes quite well.
parents reverb_hides_artificialness, pitch_unreasonably_effective, soundshader

reverb_hides_artificialness
content Reverb hides artificialness
children fog_graphics (Reverb masks artificial sounds the same way fog and shadow,in games and computer graphics hides unrealistic models), loon_warble_model
parents forest_ir

fog_graphics
content Fog in Computer Graphics
parents reverb_hides_artificialness

soundshader
content Soundshader: high-resolution spectrogram software I used to analyze pitch contours of various bird calls.
children loon_warble_model (The pitch range was obtained analyzing the spectrogram), loon_yodelling (The rising pitches and the jumps were obtained through eye-balling the spectrogram), peepers_pitch_model (Analyzed peepers pitch model using soundshader)
parents pitch_unreasonably_effective, tools
hyperlink https://soundshader.github.io/

farnell_designing_sound
content Andy Farnell, Designing Sound
children AM_modulation
parents crickets

AM_modulation
content Sinusoidal AM modulation
parents crickets, farnell_designing_sound

stretcher
content Stretcher: a simple implementation of PaulStretch in C
parents tools, paulstretch
hyperlink https://github.com/paulbatchelor/stretcher

freesound_peepers
content Freesound: Peepers in Bog
children peepers_pitch_model
parents peepers
remarks Reference I used for making the Peepers. I'm not actually sure what peepers are, I just know what they are called and that they make this sound.
hyperlink https://freesound.org/people/bone666138/sounds/653525/

made_mix_humid
content I was impressed by how humid my mix got when I added these peepers, even at a low level.
parents peepers

peepers_pitch_model
content I was expecting making peepers to be much more complicated than it actually ended up being. Turns out, you just need to get the rising pitch right, and from there it's just mapping that to a sine and having a bunch of them. I did put some effort into timing so it would maximize the density. I may have taken a production trick from the claps in "We Will Rock You" and used prime numbers.
parents peepers, freesound_peepers, pitch_unreasonably_effective, soundshader

most_complicated_sound
content The most complicated sound, mostly because it was taken from a pre-made sound model I built for the Gestlings
parents toni_bird

whistling_bird
content Toni does a fair bit of whistling calls which can be heard as one kind of creature.
parents toni_bird

kookaburra
content Toni can do a sort of gutteral "laughing" sound that's very similar to a Kookaburra. I wasn't consciouslly going for this when I built those calls, but it really comes through in the space.
parents toni_bird, forest_ir

simulating_field_recording
content I wanted to simulate a field recording of nature, not necessarily the nature itself. Not only do we tend to be more familiar with the sound of field recordings, but it's also a bit easier
parents recording_noise

handling_noise
content Handling noise is basically any sound that the physical recorder makes. I tuned a set of filtered random impulses to get something like this and mixed it in at a low level
children noise_floor (Mixed together with handling noise to make one sound object)
parents recording_noise

noise_floor
content I added in a bit of a noise floor. It's a little ambiguous. Is it wind? Is it water? Who knows?
parents handling_noise, recording_noise

sound_objects_mixed
content Sound Objects created separately, then mixed together and thrown into a space (the forest reverb).
parents core_ideas, forest_ir

elmet_brae
content Elmet Brae: EB01
remarks This is the album where my track ended up.
hyperlink https://orllewin.github.io/elmet_brae/EB01/

tools
content Tools Used
children lua, mnolth, soundshader, stretcher

mnolth
content Mnolth: my own software computer music ecosystem
children lua
parents tools
hyperlink https://pbat.ch/wiki/mnolth

lua
content The lua scripting language was mostly employed as a frontend to mnolth. Mostly everything was done using offline rendering
parents tools, mnolth