The Beautiful Tones of Gigantic Sewer Pipes

hey there i'm currently walking through the woods north of atlanta georgia and if i keep walking down this trail i'm going to reach some sort of area where they store a bunch of unused construction materials and i believe it's stored by the state or the county i'm not really sure this is also an area where they store a bunch of vehicles and stuff and you might remember me and richard devine walking around sampling a bunch of things with polly and perks kind of the same area this time there is no really nice camera or camera person either i'm just bringing my vlog cam and a little mic and a selfie stick and the reason for that is because not long after i published that video they put no trespassing signs over the place so it is definitely illegal for me to be doing this ben why are you even including this part in the video you're incriminating yourself but the thing you don't know is that i'm actually in front of a green screen in my studio none of this is actually happening it's all fiction at this point in the video you're probably asking yourself why i'm here in the first place and it's because i want to do some really weird audio experiments with giant corrugated tubes [Music] if you've ever played with one of those toy whirly tube things you spin them around and it creates the first couple notes from the jeopardy theme song well why is that it wasn't designed to do that it just naturally does so he set out to prove something that he already knew that if you held a giant tube outside of a speeding vehicle it would resonate in fifths it's actually not a coincidence that this channel occasionally gravitates towards tubes tubes are extraordinarily significant in the way that we tune and listen to music today at least in the west i'm gonna have the ben who is not running out of sunlight explain it to you hey ben good luck out there so like i mentioned in a previous video our western tuning system actually didn't come from some sort of council that met up and decided that god wanted us to write and listen to music a certain way actually the opposite nature had a lot to do with the pythagorean standard of tuning and in early western religious music something as simple as a triad was seen as dissonant or even heretic i'm talking to the camera while sitting on some giant concrete tubes here and i bet that if i pick up one of these rocks here and bash it against the tube a tone will come out with a pretty even timbre and i bet that tone is strikingly close to a note that fits within western tuning corrugated pipes are especially interesting because if you pass air through them these ridges work as almost a resonant oscillator and the faster the velocity of the air that you push through the tube then the higher the harmonic of the fundamental pitch of the tube you get to hear now if you or i were to pick up a little ridge tube or pipe and swing it around the lowest note that we would likely be able to hear would be the fifth of the fundamental pitch and that would be a three to two ratio of the fundamental pitch now the ratio between the second highest note and the third would be four to three if you spin it even faster you'll hear a higher note and the ratio between the third and fourth note is five to four and so on hey that's a pretty weird coincidence the mathematical model of just about everything in nature lines up perfectly with how we listen to music back to tubes now i know that some of my viewers have smarty pants on and you're getting ready to comment hey my acoustics professor said that you actually can't hear the fundamental of a tube by pushing air through it and he or she is wrong you actually can it just isn't that practical i know some of you are just watching this to hear some cool tube music and i realize that this gets pretty thick but you know what else is thick air air stick that's how planes fly they literally glide on the thickness of air so let's pretend that we are driving a car and the car is air and we're driving over some speed bumps and those will be the little bumps in a corrugated pipe now if we go over the speed bumps very very slowly we will just go up and down and it'll barely make a noise and that is laminar flow but if we go through those speed bumps at 100 miles an hour it's going to go like that and it'll actually go so fast it'll probably oscillate and make a tone and that is turbulent flow you could actually calculate exactly when air becomes turbulent if the value of reynold's number goes above 2000. what is reynold's number d is the density of air v is the velocity of the air flow through the tube in meters per second the small r is the radius of the tube and h is the viscosity of the air i'll be the first to admit that much like the earth's atmosphere i am a bit thick so i might be missing something and i probably am but it also is easy to understand how this could be a mystery to somebody involved in acoustics and this could just be an obvious answer to somebody involved in i don't know aerospace engineering yay we're all done with the physics part and the reason i'm even touching on that will make sense in a future video but hopefully it won't matter in this video because hopefully the wind won't get strong enough to make these pipes howl themselves otherwise i'll have a very bad time out there but there is something we could do we could brute force that resonant frequency with a massive face transducer and that is contingent on if ben could get the impulse responses recorded before the sun goes down ben how's it going with that so the first order of business is i'm going to take my rusty old zoom h6 here and i'm going to record some claps in this crazy tube which sounds like a comb filter and then i'm also going to record a balloon pop for those of you who don't already know what i'm doing that's obviously going to create a bunch of echo and reverb and we could actually take the tail of that echo and reverb and create something called an impulse response and essentially steal the reverb from this tube and use it in the studio [Music] by the way i'm recording at 96 kilohertz at 24 bit and i'm just using the zoom xy mic with 120 degree separation [Music] there are a whole lot of tubes over this way and i think they're way longer than that one and if i have time i kind of want to go back to that tube and hit all these tubes i have a transducer and a massive amp and battery in my backpack here that's really heavy and i'd really like to turn these tubes into oscillators today i keep looking at the sun and getting really nervous i'm gonna have to hurry up and make this as efficient as possible because i'm not gonna be able to come back for at least four or five days because if you follow the news there is a hurricane coming it'll be a tropical storm most likely when it hits this area but everything is going to be really rainy and windy and unfilmable for a while i forgot that these were really sharp oh i have tinnitus wait for that bird to be quiet [Music] now i've reached the point of video where i'm climbing on top of jagged metal tubes so wish me luck as i place this one in here so this is a giant battery by a company that probably doesn't even exist anymore and has started a new name to sell things on amazon and give themselves fake reviews for the battery works fine but that's just how things are these days this is a 4 ohm 50 watt transducer and it is really powerful it's like a jackhammer and this is just a dirt cheap 100 watt amp i'm really only looking for vibration not audio quality so i could go as cheap as i could there and i'm only using one speaker so 50 watts 50 watts we're good i think i'm just going to be using a tone generator app on my phone i brought my ipad but it's kind of funny the tone generator selection on android is like all these really scientifically accurate 100 free tone generators and on apple it's all these like binaural beat healing tone generator for 9.99 a month and it's just kind of i guess that's what you'd expect one question i have after climbing around in these tubes for about an hour is when was the last time i got a tetanus shot [Music] [Music] [Applause] unfortunately not only is the sun going down i'm also running out of camera battery the crickets and the wind are kind of giving me some issues with the audio but i'm going to continue recording into the night and i guess we'll hear whatever i record on the pc session which should start right about now all right so we are in adobe audition here and this is the first balloon pop apparently and this would be it right here copy this to a new file and let's hear it [Music] all right so we have crickets clearly and let's just hear those yeah so we could just delete that we still have that annoying little bird here so looks like nothing else is occupying the spectrum here so we could actually remove the bird all right now let's hear it i'm going to call this corrugated pipe large real time and then i'm going to save it as a 4816. okay so this original file i'm going to copy to new again and then i'm going to take this and interpret the sample rate down to 48 and it will be much slower and we won't really lose any quality [Music] and that'll actually make a nice more reverbery comb filter some of these claps actually sound really good copied anew i think anybody watching this understands what i'm doing here so there's no need for me to continue doing it through every single file i will see you in the daw alright so here we are in just fl studio i opened up fpc and made a super sick beat if anybody wants to buy it from me and use it in their rap track they can i just use the default drum kit all right so there's a million different vst plug-ins that load impulse responses and do convolution some are really amazing some are not so amazing i'm just gonna use the fl studio one and maybe the melda one i really haven't opened that bell studio one in a while it should be under a reverb yeah convolver there it is you could do a lot worse than the fl studio one they make it pretty easy to understand exactly what's going on so like here is just the original sample that is in this impulse right and so you can actually play with it in real time and i'm just gonna load up one of mine um let's load in the corrugated pipe real time all right there we go so now let's pump the drums through it there we go now we're playing drums in a [Music] pipe [Music] and there's also an eq [Music] you can also add in delay so uh here i'm going to bring the beat down to 120 bpm and then the delay time we could go up to 500 milliseconds um the reason i'm doing that is 500 milliseconds is a quarter note at 120 so let's hear that [Music] yeah let's try this crazy one [Music] this one actually has a nice base note to it [Music] another thing that you can do that is completely ridiculous in this setting is self-convolve that kind of makes everything more intense however if you're doing it with a resonant tone that's like a comb filter like this then the self-convolution is going to sound it's just going to create feedback in that tone and so it'd almost be as if we were to play this inside that same pipe from the exact same location all right let's do this [Music] most convolution reverbs come with somewhat of a library and so you can do a lot of stuff like here's a church um i'm gonna lower the volume here so yeah playing in the church and that actually sounds like a really good reverb and it is it's actually a reverb from a real place like ride cymbals and stuff like that and it'll sound almost as if you have a ride playing along with the beat just automatically it's like a good way to just fake that um it also some symbols also have some really good reverb to them if you take off the high end [Music] yeah if you play around with cymbals and the eq long enough you could actually make it sound like one of those old-school radio shack spring reverb units or something similar to that or you could just you know use an impulse from one of those devices which i'm sure there are plenty of one thing that i spent way more time doing was putting a transducer on all those pipes and getting the resonant frequencies and now it's time to play with that alright so back in audition i believe that they're both in these two files here they're going to take a minute to open because they've been recorded at 24 bit all right so this is the first one [Music] oh that's so creepy i was doing a lot of weird fm modulation stuff with the resonant frequencies in this file i spent about 15 minutes trying to make a cord and so here i saved a bunch of frequencies and then i just sort of scrolled through them on my phone and tried to make a base loop [Music] all right so let's pick out the notes for chords and then we'll just find that loop later so the notes uh [Music] [Music] you [Music] i could be a lot less satisfied with the way that that turned out i think it sounds really cool particularly when wearing nice headphones what do you think every time i hike back to this place more and more of these giant corrugated sewer tubes are showing up and they are just begging for more audio experimentation and i really want to get a camera person richard devine down there but first i need some sort of official permission and yeah i emailed some people from my county and i never heard back i called somebody from a park district because there's a park very nearby and this guy didn't even know that the park existed so i'm gonna keep trying hopefully but you know all right partner i reckon that's enough if you like this video subscribe the channel if there's anything you want me to cover in the future let me know in the comments if you want to support this channel you can check out my bandcamp in the description below i have like 25 hours of music that you could buy and uh hey you know what the video's done let's sit around and rap for a second just you and me obviously the band camp thing isn't making me that much money youtube advertising doesn't pay barely anything i had the curiosity stream affiliate partnership going for a little bit and i really do love the curiosity stream network but it was just kind of hard to deal with it was these like ominous urls and they wouldn't give me my own url or a code or anything like that and then they went ahead and gave one of my competitors a custom url and a discount code a really good discount code where you could get it much cheaper through his channel i don't think that this documentary network that i brought hundreds of subscribers to could possibly send a message to me that would tell me that they value me any less so as i'm starting to find my own path and making more sciency and sound scapy videos and also spending money on making these videos patreon is starting to make a little bit more sense because in a video like this you could actually download all the content that i sampled and this is just a fundamental quirk with me i completely support the patreon economy everybody who uses patreon patreon itself i think it's a great idea and i think it's produced a whole bunch of amazing stuff but for me personally i almost feel like it's too close to asking for donations musically i've always looked at it this way like if i make an album and it doesn't make money then i failed at making an album and then i'm not a professional musician anymore and the same thing with this channel like if i'm not making enough money to keep this channel going then i've failed and then the channel's over and i move on to the next thing but that's such a boneheaded way of looking at things so let me know what you think i want to hear your opinion what do you think of patreon are there any other competitors or any other things that you could think of that might be better how much would you pay for your tier with patreon should i do it per month or per video i want to know what you guys think alright thanks for watching bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 18,948

Rating: 4.9752779 out of 5

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Id: 7TnP2av1smo

Length: 19min 35sec (1175 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020