Sound

[fool]

I am trying to build an electronic metronome. I would like it to make the sounds of "tic toc", "click pop" or something other than a pure tone. What are the frequencies, harmonics, decay, etc. to duplicate such "simple" sounds? Beep and Boop sound more like a warning than a rhythm. Thanks for helping with a fool's idea.
Fool.

 

[vozgul]

If you can't find anything from literature just find a signal processing software which performs FFT or use MATLAB with Signal Processing toolbox. Attach a microphone to your sound card. Record a mechanical metronom sound in time domain and transform it to frequency domain. Just take its plot and refer to the peeks of its first 7 or 10 harmonics.
By using these peeks you can adjust the function you want. If you don't know anything about signal processing and/or related stuff, I just advise you to take help from a student dealing these or a specialist. Infact it's realy an easy process for the one who knows signal processing and related tools.

Good luck

 

[MDMarcel]

Hi Vozgul!

I was just curious by chance do you know how to transform the time domain of a certain input sound to frequency domain.

Thanks!

 

[GregLocock]

It's called an FFT - Fast Fourier Transform. Excel can do it, in rather a clumsy way. A ggogle search should lead to many tutorials on it. Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[IRstuff]

The PC comes with a plethora of .wav files with different sounds. The Windows Explorer "Start Navigation" sound is a pretty good facsimile of a tick sound.

TTFN

 

[vanstoja]

Here's another anti-fool who who has an interest in the inverse problem of connecting frequency amplitude signals with audible sounds coming from rotating machinery that may reveal ongoing damage that might progress to failure of vital components. We have heard supposedly non-musical machines making all kinds of audible sounds some of which approximate to real music while others are of the annoying and even threatening kind. Among the long list of our turbomachinery tunes are wind chimes, chirps, clicks, whistles, squeals, creaks, barks, water sprinkler, washing machine, card-in-a bicycle spoke, stick-in-a-picket fence,brush-on-a-snare drum, knocks, static, etc....etc. Many attempts to fathom the cause of these "symphonies" using high resolution signal analyzers has failed to fully reveal the physical state of the machines producing these sounds. However, we are inclined to believe that you need many harmonics of a particular kind of source along with plenty of modulation sidebands. If you could control the relative amplitudes of the various harmonics then, perhaps, you could produce many different sounds using the same source ingredients. Unfortunately, it is the machine that controls the waveform distortions that vary the modulated harmonics that make the sounds and if you've got a very "loose" rotor inside the machine you have infinite possibilities for musical or non-musical concertos. I'm looking into the internet "music" world and finding much good stuff that may eventually help. I'll have to look up my music sources further to contribute to your metronome problem. vanstoja

 

[GregLocock]

The best tool for investigating this sort of thing on the PC is Goldwave - it's a download, and it is shareware, and it puts many commercial packages to shame.

http://www.goldwave.com.

It is nearly as good as my BAS system from HEAD Acoustics, which costs about $50k.

One of the more interesting jobs I had a slight involvement with a long time ago was to synthesise the noise a V8 makes. The spectrum they ended up with bore only a casual resemblance to the spectrum of a V8.

Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[electricpete]

cool edit is another pretty darned sophisticated sound processing program available for free. The free version has a few slight handicaps that will slow you down but not prevent you doing the job. I think you will pretty quickly decide it is well worth the small fee (unless you are one of those folks who finds shareware passwords on the internet).

It works with the wave format. You can record, play, add signals. You can add digital effects (reverb). You can generate tones from building blocks like sin waves, triangle waves etc of multiple harmonic frequencies, and these can be modulated in quite a few fancy ways. In short just about anything you can do with a synthesizer. I built a pretty mean flute sound that would put Jethro Tull to shame.

So in summary you can either start from electronic building blocks to build quite a real-sounding or electronic sounding sound. Or you can start with a real-world sound and modify it if desired.