Ever wondered what it sounds like when you close the door of a 11 metre wide, 9 metre deep, & 16.4 metre high concrete chamber?
Wonder no more – my Test Centre colleague, Jan Demming, demonstrates the ~20 second reverb time of the Large European Acoustic Facility at ESA's ESTEC today 🙉
Normally used to test satellites under the enormously loud conditions of launch, we were in the LEAF today for quite a different purpose 😉
And here's the reason we were in LEAF today: to help award-winning film composer, multi-instrumentalist, & performing artist Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres with her latest album.
Alex's grandfather, Jean-Pierre Bolland, was a key figure in early Belgian space endeavours, & her new album will focus on space.
She brought pre-recorded "dry" music to play back in the LEAF & re-record with its enormous reverb added.
With the doors closed, LEAF is a very challenging environment to work in, even without the giant facility speakers pumping out 154dB of sound to simulate the acoustic load experienced by a satellite during launch.
The incredible reverb of the room makes it a hard place to focus when there's any sound including talking. When it's quiet, it's very quiet, but when it's loud ... 😱
We took a lot of video of Alex's music playing back in the LEAF, but you'll have to wait until later in the year when she's fully mixed & produced the well-recorded sounds & her album is released.
But as ever, it's a privilege & honour to help bring our musician friends one step closer to space 🙇♂️🎻🎹
@DanadasGrau It’s an amazing space. When it’s quiet, it is ridiculously quiet. Not anechoic chamber dead, as you can “feel” the air, but still silent (although I sympathise with the tinnitus 😬).
But make any noise in there & it just builds up endlessly & it can be hard to think 😱
@markmccaughrean impulse response. It was infrared for me as well for a long time, but after I picked guitar it got confusing :D Naming things is hard.
@TheBreadmonkey I also took a couple of videos of me coughing loudly in there. Scary enough that apparently it violated some cosmic censorship laws & my iPhone deleted them 🤨
But the main endeavour of playing back & recording Alex’s lovely music in there went well & will sound brilliant on the album when released, I’m sure 🙂👍
@legocas Thing is, you need to be extremely parsimonious with the sounds you make, to avoid everything crashing by together over many seconds. It doesn’t so much have an echo as an endless reverb, so it can get very confusing.
Alex was constantly riding the levels of the microphone signals to slightly damp down the reverb of loud points in her music: it was very much an artistic “performance”, not just a recorded playback.
Very cool though & a privilege to have been there.
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