Reverb FX

Following on from last week’s post concerning our attempt to approximate the experience of hearing a famous fart from different locations in an acoustic space, this week we’ve decided to continue this exploration by experimenting with an open source digital sound manipulator called Pizzicato.js. The following is from Pizzicato’s documentation:

The reverb effect is similar to the convolver effect in that it allows the sound to be heard with a certain ressonance or repercussion. This simulates a particular physical environment in which the sound could be played (e.g., an auditorium, a concert hall, etc). Unlike the convolver effect, the reverb can be adjusted programatically without the need for any external elements.

https://github.com/alemangui/pizzicato#reverb

What this means for our purposes is that we can simulate reverb electronically in real-time (employing audio signal processing) using farts from our database as sound inputs, and set the parameters of the effect to approximate the experience of hearing the fart in different kinds of environments. Our plan is to run some initial experiments with this tool to see what we get, and then pursue our real goal of simulating farts in famous locations (e.g., the Sydney Opera House or the Berliner Philharmonie), as well as in locations specifically designed for high-quality sound or that feature naturally extraordinary acoustics.

After some experimentation with Pizzicato’s reverb effect we discovered, and perhaps not surprisingly, that not all farts sound particularly interesting with digital reverb. Record producers and sound engineers have long used reverb when recording music to improve the depth and quality of the material, but there are a number of mistakes, tricks, pitfalls, and best-practices that come into play. In short, there is a real art & science to getting reverb to perform optimally, and we will certainly have our work cut out for us as we fine-tune our approach.

One quick discovery is that TwoTone‘s farts seem to perform quite well. Here’s a selection for your consideration (reverb time of 3, reverb decay of 2, mix of 50%):

Here’s an interactive demo where you can randomly play farts from our database, adjust reverb settings, and hear the result:

Fart Reverber

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Finally, dear reader, if there’s a special place you have in mind and are interested to know what a fart might sound like there, please get in touch with us in the next couple of weeks and we’ll see what we can do.

Stay tuned for follow up posts on this very-intriguing topic.