My God. It’s full of stars.

I found this insanely entertaining. You will most likely find it silly, disturbing and/or thoroughly uninteresting. Also I’m testing some new blog features and I had this post laying around.

Here is a WMA. Don’t play it before you turn your speakers down. Don’t play it at work. Don’t play it in the library. You have been warned. I made this file with nothing more than a cheap microphone, the speakers (which are on either side of my monitor, about twenty inches each from the microphone) on my computer, and my mouth. When I say my mouth, I don’t mean my voice. There is no voice anywhere in this recording. I also tried really hard not to breath on or into the mic.

I was playing with the settings in Steam, when I noticed that it has its own voice chat module. So I clicked “test microphone” and spoke into the mic. I heard it come through the speakers twice because there is about a half-second delay built-in. Then I tried to make a sound so loud, yet also so short, that I could make it echo a second or a third time. While I was able to achieve multiple echoes, it wasn’t with a loud sound, but rather with almost no initial sound at all.

I put my mouth right up to the mic, opened wide, as if to shout, and before I actually shouted, heard a noise start to build up in my speakers.

Basically what happened is my mouth acted like an echo chamber, creating feedback between the mic and my speakers. Mostly a lot of screeching and wind-like sounds, but I found it intriguing that all of these various sounds came from zero dollars worth of equipment. So I loaded up Sound Recorder and clicked record. Then I played around for a few minutes. Like I said: interesting to me, probably less-than note-worthy to all of you.

PS Why is receive not spelled like achieve? It must be a holiday.