I rarely get to experience live gigs these days, but last Friday night I became part of a fascinating auditory experience that is vaguely pedal related, so I thought I would pass it on in case it provides amusement or inspiration or a warning to avoid hanging around with odd people with electronic devices in a dark field at night. My son wanted to go on a bat walk run by a conservation group he belongs to, but because it started late and went on to midnight in a dark filed in the middle of nowhere, anyone under adult age had to be accompanied by a parent. So I got to go too (normally I would be fine with this sort of thing, but it had been a hell of a week and I was exhausted and not feeling like walking around a field in the dark). It was quite an odd experience, and felt like some strange cult - parking our cars in a corner of a deserted nature reserve as darkness fell and each being given a small handheld bat detector (which you will no doubt be glad to hear look like effects pedals with two knobs (volume and frequency) a speaker and even an output jack... hell they even run off 9V batteries. They work by pitching ultrasonic frequencies down to human auditory levels - so they are the heaviest octave pedal you can imagine - they drop the frequencies from 45kHz to about 3kHz! Suddenly things looked a lot more interesting
We had to process in a line down a dark tree covered lane, in silence (so as not to upset the bats) while waving the detectors about and adjusting the frequency controls until we hit a frequency that a bat was calling at - at which point as the bat flew over us, each detector would let out a variety of weird shrill chips, blurts, squeals and other noise like utterances, but with the sonic effect of it all being delayed as the bat moved down the line of people, and then doppler shifted as it flew about or changed it's calls! So I wasn't expecting to be part of an ineractive noise performance that night, but it was great fun! The detectors will pick up all sorts of ultra sonic sounds (did you know that walking through long grass generates ultrasonic sounds? And crickets and grasshoppers also sing ultrasonically?) and if you fiddle with the frequency knob while aiming at a bat (easier said than done in complete darkness) you get a filtered phasing effect as well! Bat detectors are the new Fuzz pedals - you heard it here first folks!
We even got to see a glow worm (first time for me) and a weird variety of moths in a moth trap. All in all, I have to recommend bat walks and bat detectors as a fun noise experience. I'm now looking into how to build my own one, because I would love to see what acoustic instruments generate ultrasonic sounds and then what those sound like when pitched down many octaves.
