ilovefuzz.com

Hello everyone

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.

Seems like an amazin' time, moid!

Apparently, there's a species of bat around here which can be heard unaided by the human ear. They're kinda rare though. So, I've never heard 'em.

That’s so cool!

that sounds sick as hell! i have a bat nest that i built in middle school that i still havent put up. though i dont know how much bats there are here were i live. please do tell about building the bat detectors! how do they do it? is it just dsp or do they use dividers and shit? sounds really cool. would make for a sick album

That's really cool, thanks for sharing.

Not electronically associated but it reminds of an experience I had touring a lumber mill once. There was a large covered open space with seemingly endless conveyor belts sorting different dimensions of lumber and this lumber would be falling from one belt to another and eventually into a pile and a seemingly random but almost discernible rhythm thundered everywhere. I really wanted to go back and record it but, you know, life.

Found this: https://www.travel4wildlife.com/bat-detector-kit/

fuck yes this rules

Fabulous tale!

Though now, all I can think to myself is, "Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"

Chankgeez wrote:Seems like an amazin' time, moid!

Apparently, there's a species of bat around here which can be heard unaided by the human ear. They're kinda rare though. So, I've never heard 'em.

Yes, we have them in the UK too - the bat lady (Ok I've forgotten her name, but the lovely person who took all of us on the walk through the reserve) said that there is a species in the UK whose calls are audible to those with really good hearing. And now I've forgotten their name - noctules? maybe? She was talking quietly so as not to disturb the bats and I did crank my hearing aids up to max but still didn't hear everything she said. It's probably a different species in America. The bats we were listening to were common pipistrelles and they call at 45kHz.

Blackened Soul wrote:That’s so cool!

Thanks - it was definitely worth going - if there is such a thing as bat conservation groups where you live look up to see if they run these events. And they occur at musician friendly time schedules - bats don't get out of bed before 9PM Sensible animals.

qersty wrote:that sounds sick as hell! i have a bat nest that i built in middle school that i still havent put up. though i dont know how much bats there are here were i live. please do tell about building the bat detectors! how do they do it? is it just dsp or do they use dividers and shit? sounds really cool. would make for a sick album

Regarding bat detectors, I've yet to build one - I've been looking at a kit recommended by a bat conservation group tha they said was the same thing as a detector that costs twice as much assembled:

https://www.magenta2000.co.uk/acatalog/ ... _Mk_2.html

Simply because in the last year I've built 3 pedals, none of which have worked and I'm beginning to doubt my ability to build things, so I might start with a proper PCB and not some odd vero board thing I've botched together. The other (rather important) reason for looking at this kit is the frequency range it can scan: 20kHz - 110kHz. There are some really cheap bat detector kits that just snap fit together (no soldering) but they can't get above 40kHz, and the most common local species to where I live calls at 45 kHz, so if I'm going to make one of these I want to be able to hear bats with it!

This device uses heterodyning (no DSP) to achieve its affects, but don't ask me what that is or how it works; electrical things are voodoo to me! The main person giving the talk about bats had a really swish digital detector that plugged into her phone and could scan multiple frequencies at the same time (the kits above, like the one i was using on the night can only scan one frequency at once) and displayed that as a sonogram and even told you what bat each noise was... but they are £200.

manymanyhaha wrote:That's really cool, thanks for sharing.

Not electronically associated but it reminds of an experience I had touring a lumber mill once. There was a large covered open space with seemingly endless conveyor belts sorting different dimensions of lumber and this lumber would be falling from one belt to another and eventually into a pile and a seemingly random but almost discernible rhythm thundered everywhere. I really wanted to go back and record it but, you know, life.

Found this: https://www.travel4wildlife.com/bat-detector-kit/

That lumberyard story reminds me of a factory that my dad repaired the air conductioning units for. In the ceiling space (which was large, at least 2m tall) were loads of fans arranged next to each other in a row with a gap between them, all of which were spinning at similar but not quite the same speeds, so if you ran past them you heard this wonderful weird phasing steam train kind of sound... how I wish I'd had some way of recording that in the early 1980s!

friendship wrote:fuck yes this rules

Thanks

Heraclitus Akimbo wrote:Fabulous tale!

Though now, all I can think to myself is, "Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"

Good lord I bought the 7" of that when it came out! I don't think I've listened to it since... it's nowhere near as good as I remembered... it's quite irritating now! I don't think it was Prince's finest moment.... how much money did they spend on that video? The budgets then were absolutely ridiculous!

Yeah, moid, I keep listenin' at night when I walk in hopes of hearin' the bats. Not quite sure what I'm listenin' for though.

As far as things that fly in the night, I see owls fairly frequently. Never heard one however.

manymanyhaha wrote: Found this: https://www.travel4wildlife.com/bat-detector-kit/

That looks pretty awesome!

Very cool! Sounds like these ultrasonic detector thingies would be a really fun noise source. Sounds like a really fun experience too! I will look out for one near me.