Just had a refreshing conversation with Paul North (AKA Sunnybrook) about his job making copper microphones, where he works for a member of the Polyphonic Spree and nerded out a bit about acoustics. I had always thought it would be fun to translate sound underwater, and apparently Pauls’ boss (Mark Pirro) also felt the same way. The idea is that you’d use one hydrophone to transmit and another to receive, sending a sound (or possibly a stem from a song) from one hydrophone to the other. Any underwater sounds captured that you didn’t want you could filter out by writing some simple code in a program such as MATLAB (last year I filtered out dolphin sounds to unravel sonar pings). I honestly have no idea what kind of weird/crazy effect you would attain if anything, but hey, it’s an interesting concept to say the least. Apparently reverb sounds really cool underwater.
When Paul isn’t making custom mics for the likes of Tom Waits, he’s making music. Paul’s new material sounds really great:
Always I’ll Be by Paul Henry North
Come Through by Paul Henry North
paul north, tom waits
This is amazing. You lead a very interesting life Lou.