I’m currently in the process of building a new noisebox for music production. If you don’t know, what a noisebox is or does, let me explain: a noisebox is a box (meh) that you connect to your DAW of choise and generate vibrations on the outer surface of the box which are then transmitted to the audio input of your music software. That was the simple explanation …
… and now the more detailed one:
Let’s say you take a box and into the box you place one or more piezo sensors. You might know piezo sensors if you play an acoustic guitar and want to record the audio. And like the strings of said guitar, the noisebox features a lot of stuff that can vibrate (ideally in different frequencies for more variety). The piezo sensors are converting the vibrations to an audio signal and this audio signal gets recorded or played live on a track in your DAW (digital audio workstation) like Ableton Live.
I just finished assembling the box itself and installed the electronics. As you can see besides the audio output, “r’lyeh 1.0” features a potentiometer to manipulate the gain of the signal. I installed three piezo sensors, one in the center of the top plate, and two evenly spaced on the bottom plate.
Now comes the fun part: You can now take off the top plate and drill holes in it to stick through small threaded rods. You can then use the rods to attach rubberbands of different lengths or to screw a sound bowl on top of it. Gluing sandpaper of different granulation is a great idea, too. Using springs in various sizes is a classic.
If you now use a brush, your fingers of anything else to brush over, tap on or hit the different elements of the case itself generates the vibrations, the piezo sensors process. The signal can then be modified by several effects, either hardware like you would use for your guitars, or digital in your DAW. Long reverbs are very suited for this job. I particular like Dawesome Love or Valhalla Super Massive, and then combine it with a built-in looper or the awesome Enso Looper from Audio Damage.
If you are interested in how a finished noisebox performs, here is a video of the ingenius Mark Farrelly …
