Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Today is my last experiment, the plan is to use my modded phone to make a call to Random's phone line, this will be our line to line call. On his side he's recording through a phone patch he made. For land to cell, I am calling with my modded phone to my cell which has a 1/8" cord jack leading to my computer. For the last part cell to cell, I modded a head set to expose the mic wires so I can attach a direct line from my mp3 player to a cell phone and use the same set up to record from my cell.

Pictures will ensue.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Expiriment 15

What's funny about this one is I skipped 13 and 14.

I am going to try distorting different recorded mediums with a heat gun in order to change the sound. My tests will be done on cassette tapes and cds. Part one was just recording the base recordings to tape. This was unnecessarily difficult due to the equipment. My first try was using a hand held tape player with the mic wires attached directly to a boom boxes speaker wires this didn‘t work because the connection was creating an awful buzzing noise which was ruining the recording. This sound was independent to volume levels and connection configuration. Second try was using a tape deck attached to a CD player. This didn’t work because the tape deck was busted. It turned out my dad still had his old tape deck, so I tried using that which worked fine. What I didn’t realize with recording to cassette is that there are several settings regarding to what type of tape you are using. The tape it’s self didn’t say which setting should be used on the packaging so I just went by ear. I chose SX(II). Recording was a bit frustrating, for some reason recording over previously recorded sections wouldn’t erase old data. This is easy to solve, all I had to do is use table later in the reel, but it’s frustrating trying to find the heat damaged part of the reel by ear. The heat damaging it’s self caused problems. For one, I was using a heat gun to distort the tape which started melting the tape casing if exposed too long. So, my first attempt melted off the stabilizers for the tape reader so I had to start from scratch. My second attempt was much easer. I kept an ice pack next to me in order to avoid overheating and took breaks between sections. The final result really wasn’t that impressive in my opinion. The parts of the tape that bent from heat warping cut off the lows which caused the sound to sound distorted. I tried distorting a cd, but this didn’t really produce results because heat warping caused the cd to bend ever so slightly which meant the cd couldn’t spin in a cd player. Chances are that the warping would have made the laser unable to bend through the plastic correctly making it