Recording notes
A recording made at home is completely fine. Phone, laptop, interface — whatever you have.
These are not standards to live up to. They are the handful of things that decide whether a recording can be turned into a corpus at all. The first two matter most; the rest is housekeeping.
Let it ring. Do not trim the decay. The tail of a bell, a plate, a string is the most useful part of it — cut tails make a corpus that can only tick.
Leave silence. A second or two between events. The system slices on attacks, and events that run into each other cannot be told apart.
- Format
- WAV. 44.1 or 48 kHz, 24-bit preferred — 16-bit is fine. Mono or stereo, either works. AIFF and FLAC are fine too.
- Dry
- No reverb, no compression, no EQ, no noise reduction. Nothing that cannot be undone. If your recorder has effects on by default, turn them off.
- Level
- Peak around −6 dBFS. Leave headroom; never clip.
- Room
- The quietest one you have. Traffic, fridges and fans end up in the corpus too.
- Length
- 30 seconds to 3 minutes per file.
- One per file
- A separate file for each technique, rather than everything in one take.
- Naming
surname_source_technique.wav— e.g.kurtulus_cymbal_bowed.wav
One thing worth knowing
A sound that fades up out of silence — a slow bow, a rubbed rim, a swell — has no attack, and an attack is exactly what the slicer looks for. Material like that is welcome and often the most beautiful thing in a corpus, but it needs handling. Either start the gesture decisively, or just say so in the upload form and I will deal with it at my end.
What to record
Whatever you already do. There is no set piece and nothing to follow. If you make sound with objects rather than instruments — metal, wood, glass, paper, stone, water, springs, junk — that is not a lesser contribution, it is one of the things I most want. A corpus made only of instruments is a duller corpus.
If a blank page is unhelpful, a starting point: something struck and left to ring, something bowed or rubbed, something scraped, something with a lot of air in it, and something nobody would call an instrument.
If you play an augmented instrument — something you have extended with sensors, pickups, preparations, feedback or motors — that is a particular interest of mine and worth flagging in the form. It may turn into a longer conversation rather than a single file.
And if you would rather have something written for you, say so in the form and I will send a page of graphic notation — shapes and words, no staff, made for what you actually have in the room. It is an offer, not a requirement, and plenty of people will not need it.