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Space Pigeons In My Attic

OneWingedBird

Beloved of Ra
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Aug 3, 2003
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I'd heard this sound a few times over the last few days, a couple of years back the house at the back of mine had a hole in the roof that had pigeons roosting in it and this sounded so similar I just assumed at first, something did seem a bit off though and today I started to suspect it was coming out of the speakers that my computer and a couple of synths are connected to.

Managed to hit record in audacity (recording software) when it happened earlier and captured what you hear on the video below, a bit of compression on it to level off the volume, otherwise unedited.


Not suggesting a paranormal origin, just something very peculiar I haven't figured out yet, best guess is something is intermittently pushing up the noise floor just enough to give one of the effects processors just enough to chew on... still quite odd and surprisingly irregular.

Much more pigeon like towards the end where there is a relatively quiet but sustained sort of cooing.

Picture mostly unrelated, it's a stalagshite from a nearby train station, made from pigeon shit that had deposited where the rain drips off the bridge.
 
A couple of queries for clarification ...

- Did you confirm that the sounds were coming through your speakers (whether or not they were separately audible)?

- What've been the environmental conditions at your location over the days during which this has happened? For example - is there snow on the roof that's melting off?

- I'm picking up what sounds like a faint tinge of reverb / echo giving the sound a feeling of 'space'. Was there anything in your recording setup that would account for this?

- Were you using a mike to capture the sound? If so - has that (or any other) mike been 'live' during the time you've been hearing the sounds. (Edited out now that I've seen OWB's latest post)

- Do you have any vacuum-tube equipment that's been active during the time you've heard the sounds?
 
A couple of queries for clarification ...

- Did you confirm that the sounds were coming through your speakers (whether or not they were separately audible)?

- What've been the environmental conditions at your location over the days during which this has happened? For example - is there snow on the roof that's melting off?

- I'm picking up what sounds like a faint tinge of reverb / echo giving the sound a feeling of 'space'. Was there anything in your recording setup that would account for this?

- Were you using a mike to capture the sound? If so - has that (or any other) mike been 'live' during the time you've been hearing the sounds. (Edited out now that I've seen OWB's latest post)

- Do you have any vacuum-tube equipment that's been active during the time you've heard the sounds?

There has been snow here though haven't seen any since yesterday, can't see all the roof space to check.

There is a reverb in the signal path so that part is know, it's also a little exaggerated as compressing the audio tends to do that.

No vacuum tube kit in the signal path at the moment, there is a tube phaser that's powered on but not connected to anything right now.
 
Creepy. Is it definitely coming from the speakers?

edit - sorry somehow I missed ll the other posts answering this.
 
... No vacuum tube kit in the signal path at the moment, there is a tube phaser that's powered on but not connected to anything right now.

Just for the record ...

I asked about vacuum tube equipment because ... Decades ago, when I was an active rock (etc.) musician, there were a set of telltale sounds that were symptoms of a tube going bad in one or another of our many amps. One of the less frequently heard such symptoms was a random series of bubbly / plopping sounds similar to what I heard on the video.

If you've had recent snow, I'd say dripping from snow melt might be among the credible suspects.
 
Mystery possibly solved though I still need to test this out to verify.

It's been suggested to me that this can be a form of cellphone interference, which makes a bit too much sense, I do have an older Nokia phone which normally I wouldn't take into the attic with me, as I'm jobhunting though it stays with me and on at any time I might get a call.

That would explain why it's only started recently, and also why it happens less or not at all later in the evenings, as phone is more likely to be off then or downstairs.
 
Now figured this out, it wasn't the cellphone after all.

First guess was more or less right although it wasn't the effects pedal I was suspecting the most, turns out it's this little bugger:

dFoxz6p.jpg


There's quite a lot of gain boost when the formant filtering kicks in, origin is probably just a dirty potentiometer or something on what it's connected to, once the noise hits a certain level it gets boosted and filtered into quite an organic sound.

Tracked it down my playing with the mixer settings every time the sound happened until I managed to isolate which channel it was coming in through.
 
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