WRITTEN BY JEFF SHIFFMAN, CO-OWNER OF BOOM BOX POST
As a sound editor, I am constantly on the lookout for interesting material to utilize or manipulate for work. My ears perk up when I hear a particularly unusual sound.
Me at the airport at baggage claim: “That baby crying is so odd. If I pitched and sped it up, it could be an alien language.”
Me trying to purge junk from my garage: “My kid’s old plastic clock is so warped that when you turn the hands it makes a very distinct rusted ratchet loop. This could work really well pitched down as a drawbridge.”
Me at home taking out the trash: “When I drag the recycling bin sideways it makes this strange groaning sound that could be great for dinosaur calls.”
I’ve been recording fascinating audio stuff on my phone for years. I can’t help it. It’s my passion. So with that approach in mind, let me tell you a story about a rubber chicken.
On a recent vacation to Mexico while browsing a gift shop with my kids, I came across Squeeze Me Chicken. Bright pink and very odd looking, I had to give it a squeeze. The sound that came out was not at all what I was expecting. I assumed it would be a typical squeaky toy sound, but it’s so much more than that. It had an odd depth of pitch and tambour and sounded kind of melancholy. After sneaking up behind my wife to scare her half to death and showing it off to everyone in my family, I was very tempted to buy it on the spot. But I showed restraint and walked away. As soon as I left the mall I regretted it.
A few days later my mom mentioned she would be heading to the mall where I found the chicken. I asked that she pick one up for me (this post sponsored by Julie Shiffman… thanks mom). I brought the chicken back to the studio and had our interns record different performances for me to work with.
Below are the results of some experimental sound design work with the chicken. In just about an hour, I was able to come up with all sorts of cool sounds just playing around with some basic (and a few more complicated) tools. Now, whenever I use these sounds I’ll not only have something totally unique but I also have a connection to the work and the story behind it. It’s these moments that you build a career on. When you find your inspiration, grab it and make something great. Pretty heavy I know, especially for a silly rubber chicken, but it’s true.
The performances are pretty great on their own so I wanted to start with a simple pitching down to try and get more size and depth. These “Walrus Monster” sounds could work great for any sort of wailing beast or dinosaur.
Inspired by some of the other-worldly organic lifeform design in the Star Wars franchise, I next pitched up some of the shorter performances a decent amount to create some alien sounding jungle creatures. To vary the performance and give more of an organic quality to the cadence of these animal calls, I edited the order and timing of each squeeze. Lastly, I ran the resulting sounds through a nice long reverb, adding depth and texture so that these could be plug-and-play elements to any background build in a jungle or on a distant planet.
Next up was a happy accident. While working on the alien lifeform builds, I took the pitch and time compression a bit too far. The result sounded like rat squeaks. You can never have too many rat squeaks. I labeled them and added them to the library.
Having exhausted all manner of pitch and time adjustments, it was time to move on to some heavy design experiments. I first loaded up Native Instrument’s Molekular, a favorite of mine. This multi-effects module works as an ensemble inside of the free Reaktor Player. Using a combination of vocoding and delay modulators I got a great synth performance from my chicken. I then ran the sounds through Doppler by Waves to give them some motion and additional pitch manipulation. I like the idea of using the resulting sounds for magic builds or synth vehicle bys.
This time I used Molekular to run a sequenced square wave LFO in parallel to a doubler. This gave the chicken a regular and hash variation in pitch and ultimately made it very synthetic. It started to sound like a robot startup sequence so I ran with that idea. I next used SoundShifter Graphic, another Waves plugin, to draw ascending and descending pitch and time curves to achieve the power up and power down sounds I was aiming for.
I thought that the natural changes in pitch of the chicken could lend itself to some interesting performances in the static/telemetry realm. I used the design plug-in Sci-Fi which comes standard in Pro Tools. To get some feedback/static sounds from the chicken, I manipulated the Bad Radio preset. Although totally different than the original chicken records, you can still hear the originally performed change of pitch and how it influences the plug-in behavior.
Apparently I’m late to the Squeeze Me Chicken party because googling has produced some really wonderful results. My favorite of which is this cover of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On performed entirely with a Squeeze Me Chicken. I suspect some post-production pitch manipulation was employed but you’ve got to hand it to YouTuber Big Marvel for totally nailing it with this hilarious video that had me crying with laughter at my desk. And if you like that one, there are so many more Squeeze Me Chicken covers on his youtube channel. And you thought you might get stuff done today?