Sound Experiments

Handcranked Wobbulator

Well, it was this picture that got me thinking back of when I made my own hand-cranked music maker.
Went through all my boxes looking for that old hand operated generator. Found it. It's from an old army style telephone system. The operator would wind the dial and it generates about 60V ac. More then enough to have a bell ring at the far end of the line.

Now, the frequency of the signal is very, very low. So in order to make it into a perceivable sound, I hooked up the output, via a step-down transformer to a low-frequency speaker. At the low frequency of the generator and it's high power, the cone gets a life of it's own. Like striking a drum. The result I recorded with a microphone, up close:

Also I recorded a segment with some rubbery things in the cone, to get the sound more lively.

In itself the sound is rather bleak, but when you feed it to a soundprocessor!

Try it!

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poesboes 19-01-2007