Water Bird Whistle | FRMS Granular Synthesis Tutorial
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Today we bring you an exquisite Portuguese craft tradition: The water bird whistle! (It might sound cuckoo to you, (figuratively, not literally) but we promise we’re not making this up, they do actually exist!)
This week our surprise special guest, source of the sample, and star of the show (in addition to Lucas of course) is the aforementioned, water bird whistle. So just what is this water whistle all about? Well, it’s pretty much the same as a regular whistle, but as you might have guessed by now, with added water! (Which might explain why the one Lucas uses in the video is shaped like a jug) “But why isn’t it called a water jug whistle then?” we hear you ask rhetorically. Well everybody knows that the bird is the word, but in this case, it's also the sound.
A simple but effective bit of ancient engineering, this little wonder of a wind instrument does a pretty good impression of a bird, and the use of water whistles to attract avian attention goes back hundreds of years. A well-known and much loved traditional handcraft of Portugal, we sought out the finest purveyor of authentic ceramic bird-based ‘instruments’, to see if Lucas was up for the challenge of working his granular magic with FRMS Granular Synthesizer, or whether he would chicken out and tell us to cluck off.
To chick out how he did, watch this week’s ‘FRMS From Scratch’ granular synthesis tutorial and find out what crazy, bizarre sound he has come up with this time, in under 10 minutes!
Now that’s what you call swift sound design,
Team Imaginando