mounting homebrew contact mic

[James Husted]

At school once (in the dark ages - just after stone knives and bearskins)
we made a 'reverb/echo' with a small transducer and contact mic with a 20
foot slinky strung between.  Very dense and low bandwidth sounds.  Also an
experiment with transducers and pianos with the pedals held down - very
cool.  The transducers we used were these things made to be mounted to
walls to turn them into lo-fi speakers.  They were like horn drivers with a
bolt instead of a cone.  We got ours from a radio-shack like electronics
house that's no longer in business.  It is allot of fun to slap contact
mics to almost anything - especially when you lower the recorded sound down
a couple of octaves.  Try an oven grill with the tines cut at different
lengths.  The guy wires from power poles to the ground will make the
classic Photon Torpedo sound when hit.  Great fun, but not without the
occasional stare from the public.
-James

At 1:42 AM -0500 9/7/99, Christian Oncken wrote:
>All this talk about contact mics got me thinking... would it be possible to
>create a strange reverb/delay system using 2 contact mics?  These things are
>transducers, capable of making noise as well, no?  If so, use one as a
>"driver" and the other as a "pickup", with appropriate circuitry to drive
>the input signal and amplify the result.  With this arrangement you could
>connect them both to opposite ends of a suspended spring, send a signal to
>be effected to the driver, receive it at the pickup and have the equivalent
>of a spring reverb, right?  How about sticking them to the pipes in your
>house, or to a huge concrete floor?  Could you turn anything into a reverb
>this way?  It would work better on some things than others I suppose... how
>about a tree, or an antenna tower?
>
>Sorry if this is a little bit out there... its late and I'm tired, but am I
>crazy?  What do you all think?  I thinking miking a tree would be cool.

James Husted
Art Director, Web Master, Symetrix Inc/Lucid Technology
jhusted at symetrixaudio.com
jhusted at lucidtechnology.com
jhusted at halcyon.com