Album Track Preview, with a Twist…
Ochre – Lunar Suburbia on a HDD Speaker from Ochre on Vimeo.
The track is ‘Lunar Suburbia,’ taken from the next Ochre album, ‘Like Dust of the Balance,’ playing through an old hard disk soldered up to the headphone outputs of my sound card.
Yep, it sounds terrible. But looking at the little drive head vibrate and bob in time with the music perhaps redeems it a little.
If you fancy making your own hard disk speaker, there are a few articles dotted around the net documenting the process, step-by-step, such as the one at the ever-handy Instructables.
15 Responses to “Album Track Preview, with a Twist…”:
Hah! What a thing to do! Just goes to show how fantastic the manufacturing on those things is. Aside from the rather amazing HDD arm hack, you’re a big tease Chris, you know we’re all aching to hear that in higher fidelity
Can’t wait to buy your new album, keep up the good work…
Took about two minutes until it started to get to me. The beginning sounded halfway decent, in that I could see you setting up some dry/wet action with the actual mix to fade things into clarity.
Seriously.. a huge tease!!! I check your feed like twice a day for new release info. Meanwhile money is fermenting in my bank account until I see ‘New Ochre Album, Out Now!’, at which time fermenting will cease and evangelism will begin (at least that’s the picture I have so far).
Now I have to go make a hard drive speaker… grrrr
It is a bit of a tease, isn’t it? Sorry! Just thought it’d be more fun to play something new through this than something you’ve already heard a few times.
It’s fun to do though, and straightforward — as long as you can solder something, you can put a cable and jack plug on a hard disk. I did find the contact points a bit different on the hard disk I used, compared to those used by some of the instructional websites though.
Might be fun to try and develop the sound of one of these though, either through contact mics or some sort of acoustic focusing/coupling. It sounds much nicer when sat on the wooden desk than in my lap, for example, as you might expect.
Nice one, I’ve just been pre-ordering Christ.’s Live and a bunch of other stuff which will be sent when Live is released. Will have to buy this one too, looking forward to hearing it.
I even found a brand new Lemodie on an online-shop today which I’m now waiting for to be shipped, but I suspect they have messed up the stock status… but my hopes is up! I’ve been slapping myself for not buying it in time before it got sold out everywhere =|
Which camera/lens did you use in this one? …and what are we looking at in the reflection of the disc? =>
@swi
Fingers crossed for the new copy of Lemodie!
The vid was taken with my webcam, a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000. It seems pretty good at focusing on close objects, doesn’t it? No doubt there’ll be a QuickerCam MegaPro 10 Billion out now though. That’s probably what you can see reflected in the disk — the HAL 9000-esque red ring (oh, the penny’s just dropped on the product name!).
Heh, cool. Did you see the radiohead nude remix already?
Hey Dave,
Yeah, I had seen that when it was doing the rounds — very nicely done, with a lot of careful attention to detail, which I appreciated. So many of these proof-of-concept electronics projects are rushed out to Youtube with a shaky vid of the author’s workbench, with scant regard to aesthetics; it was nicely to see something carefully staged and shot like that. And colour-corrected!
Just tested putting a high-pass over the output from 300Hz upwards — really cleans up the sound quite nicely, though you lose quite a bit of the head movement energy, obviously.
dude that is really really cool!
Argh, as suspected they didn’t have it after all. =|
Wow, not quite the image you expect from a webcam. I really thought it was filmed with something more fancy, cool.
Btw, do you know what’s up with the benbecula forum nowdays? It has been down for months.
@swi
Damn, that’s a shame — I hate it when retailers can’t keep their inventory updated.
About the Benbecula forum — I don’t know what happened to it; it wasn’t particularly busy, so perhaps that’s why it was taken down (though the link could do with being removed in that case). I must admit, I didn’t really frequent it as much as I could’ve.
Well, I hope Lemodie gets a repress at some point in the future. I guess it’ll depend on the demand set by the next album.
where’d the video go? :C
Sorry—I thought it was a bit too much of a tease, what with the poor audio quality and all, so I deleted it.
Okay, put it back up now the album's out.