Changing Noise into Music Real-Time

The overtone series of a 12 foot long tube is in the key of "F" as shown above. Busses and SUV's activate the first 3 or 4 overtones, cars motorcycles, voices move into upper notes. The result is like a digeridu played by a city, a shifting chanting sound which organically changes with whatever is going on around it. People tend to find listening to the harmonically altered traffic less fatiguing even meditative.

The position of the microphone within the tube is of importance. It can be used to defeat certain overtones, and bring others into prominence. Pythagoras mathematics for overtones on strings can be effectively used to predict mic positions. Our favorites tend to be 2/7 3/7 and 3/13 the length of the tube.

To the left you can see a spectrographic image of traffic passing.Far left, is the microphone in the open air, on the right is the microphone at that same moment in the tube. The bands of color represent the overtone series in the tube. Time passes from right to left, the virtical axis represents the range of human hearing.