Throughout my latest road trip, about 5 weeks long around North-East America, I did take with me a conch (sea shell) which I brought from Peru.
I experimented and recorded from inside the shell in various settings as the busy city streets, cafes and restaurant crowd, nature, train, rivers, sea.
Natural Resonator
Approaching our ears close to a shell will make us hear the ocean. Only poetically this is true, the reality is that it makes our surrounding sounds resonate in a filtered way, the same as when we put our hands around our ears.
I found it fascinating to listen to ambiences from this perspective.
The sounds is somewhat occluded and some frequencies are amplified at the same time. It makes the reality distorted in an interesting and organic way.
I recorded around the water, with the sea waves and river wavelets; but also the city traffic, pedestrian street, room tones. But I think crowd wallas was the most interesting recordings.
This seashell has also the specificity to be a traditional musical instrument, used by the Incas. It is called ‘Pututo’ and by blowing into it like a trumpet you get a nice loud and low note.
Get all the sounds recorded from sea shell in the articulated library:
https://articulatedsounds.com/audio-products/sfx/seashell-resonance
It would be interesting to create impulsive responses out of your recordings to use them later with convolution reverbs.
Yes, sounds amazing, contact me private to see how it could be done.. cheers
That’s an interesting challenge, because the recording inside the shell is already an impulse response of its ambience. Since you cannot pop a balloon/fire a gun INSIDE the shell, you have to do it outside so that you are inevitably picking up the room it is in. So: record the impulse outside in an open field? You can’t record underneath blankets for a baseline, because then nothing activates the shell’s resonance. Record simultaneously inside the shell and outside the shell with identical microphones, then subtract one from the other?
Hi there. I know this sounds mad and it probably is. I want to make a shell big enough for me to sit in. I have had several bereavements recently and I am fed up of locking myself in a bubble in the hope the world goes away. In this giant shell I want to hear the sea but don’t know how to achieve it. I paint, am artistic and want to embellish my shell with beauty. How can I naturally hear the sea by making to the acoustics right??
Above
what microphone did you use, and recorder?
In this particular case I needed small microphones, I used the Clippy em272 plugged into a small Sony A10