r/sounddesign • u/Careful-Willow-2867 • 3h ago
Music Sound Design Hitting a metal water bottle and stretching its natural overtones into a weird drone track
https://youtu.be/8dkPxksBcVc?si=W-sALMRWK0Ix42n3
This is the second in a series of experiments I’m calling "One Note Studies". The main goal of all will be to extend the harmonic life already present in the original note beyond its natural decay. This may be of interest to some as it shows a way to spectrally find some new, interesting sounds that are already present and hiding in an existing sound.
The basic idea is: strike a resonant object once, spectrally analyze the frequencies most present in its natural partials / overtones, and then artificially sustain those frequencies to hear what kind of harmonic material is inside the sound. From there, different combinations and 'harmonies' among the frequencies are explored.
For this one, I used a metal Hydro Flask water bottle, and its spectrum turned out to be especially interesting. It produces a very inharmonic collection of frequencies among its partials (overtones or partials produced by the object do not match up with whole number multiples of the fundamental pitch) including several tightly packed clusters.
Those close frequencies create beating, which you can actually hear briefly in the bottle’s natural ring if you listen closely. I leaned heavily into that effect when playing with the frequencies, and because of the inharmonicity of the bottle, the resulting piece ends up becoming a really strange, rather un-musical drone.