My friend got me a discount on the new airpods - I mean AirPod Pros â„¢ (felt like he got me a new lightweight wallet too though).
They're so small and discrete, and have noise-cancellation!? It honestly took my ears a hot minute to get accustomed to the lack of noise on every bus ride into Uni. My confused brain couldn't reconcile the near-silence with the still-existent jarring vibrations from the back seats.
I seem to have them in constantly nowadays, always blocking out reality and trying to live life with whatever soundtrack seems appropriate for that day. They're even jammed into my earholes when I'm sleeping, not for music but for ASMR videos.
Autonomous sensory meridian response has captured a huge global audience with the uniqueness and variety in its relativity recent explosion in pop culture relevance. In very basic terms, ASMR is a physical sensation that is often triggered through soft sounds such as crinkling paper, whispering, and tapping nails on bottle lids. The feeling may be relaxing (great for sleep) or even euphoric!
So here I am, lying in bed, with a red-haired lady whispering about what decorations she had bought for Christmas, lightly tapping on each item. Typical night then.
And yet the physics and technological marvels which have led to this rather unusual routine are absolutely fascinating.
It all starts with her vocal folds, rubbing lightly against each other as she whispers. The vibrating air from her mouth comes out as sound waves and is captured by a microphone which, through the magic of science, transforms the analogue signal into a digital one to be stored, edited. and played back.
She doesn't use just any old microphone though and as this week's seminar revealed, there is a very good reason why she uses that particular microphone.
The Rode NT1 are condenser mics. This means they use very sensitive pressure plates to capture the sound waves. Great for ASMR where all the sounds are really soft but can often times lead to picking up unwanted background noise. Pop shields are usually standard practice when using these type of microphones to reduce the plosive which come from pronouncing words with 'p', 'b','d', 't', 'k', sounds. AMSRrtists may sometimes actually scratch on these pop shields to create triggering sounds.
In our seminar, we got to experiment with a more budget condenser mic, specifically the Blue Snowball. Like the Rode, they are directional meaning they can receive sound signals from specific directions. We got to borrow one to take home and experiment with. Here's a little something-something I made the other day out of Coronaboredom:
There are lots of different types of microphones like dynamic mics which use a thing membrane to create voltage signals through electromagnetism. Less sensitive than condenser mics, less expensive too, and so much more suitable music classroom environments.
In the end, we take a lot of the technology in society from granted. It's just cool to see how some mad geniuses a long time ago were able to come up with ways to make sounds recordable.