WRITTEN BY JEFF SHIFFMAN
CO-OWNER OF BOOM BOX POST
A while back, I had the pleasure of mixing an incredible short film called Deep Rooted from Director Duncan Rudd. Having seen some of my work, sound designer and composer Max Brodie reached out, interested in having me mix the film in Dolby Atmos. The finished work was entered into the relatively nascent Short Film Audio Awards and took first placed. Along with the win came a modest cash prize. Why am I telling you all of this? Well, Max had the brilliant idea to send me a gift in lieu of my share of the take. He asked if I was game and I happily agreed. A few weeks later, a small black enigma arrived in the mail.
The little box that Max sent was Ether by SOMA Laboratories. According to their website, SOMA Laboratory is a boutique experimental electronic instrument company best known for its unconventional synthesizers, sound machines, and audio exploration tools. Fun! So what is Ether? Well, after a lot of trial and error as well as some creative googling, I found this: ETHER is an electromagnetic field receiver — essentially a wide-band “anti-radio.” Rather than tuning to one radio station or frequency, it captures a huge swath of the electromagnetic spectrum (from very low to very high frequencies) all at once.
Essentially, you turn Ether on, wave it around, and it picks up all of the sound we can’t hear with the naked ear - WiFi Signals, radio transmissions, power lines, lighting. It brings magnetic fields and radio waves to light. WILD!
I can’t explain how odd it is to wave this thing in the air, picking up all manner of insane sounds in every corner of my daily life. To get an idea, check out this video by SOMA Laboratories of Ether out in the wild.
Now comes the fun part. I could have spent all day recording with Ether (and I’m sure I will). But for the purposes of this blog post, I confined myself to just my office, located on the second floor of Boom Box Post. How much variety could I get in one small space? It turns out, quite a lot! Here’s a small sampling:
It just goes to show you that creative sound design opportunities are literally all around us. Some of this stuff was revelatory - who knew that a Mac Mini makes sounds like a screaming banshee?!? Others were more pedestrian, but still useful, like simple radio static and interference sounds. But it’s what we choose to create with this source material that is the real gold. Now that I had the raw material, I thought I’d take some time to play around with it in more practical terms. Below are snippets which I processed in ways that seemed useful for my sound effects library.
The SOMA Ether doesn’t seem to be available from the original manufacturer, but you can still get them used from retailers like reverb.com and other second-hand sources. Who knows what invisible sounds you may encounter? It might just be worth playing around with. I for one am extremely grateful to Max for helping take off the blinders and expose me to the invisible world of sound around us all!