Dubstep is a very popular genre of music, created electronically with lots of grinding and screeching sounds. You hear it a lot in video game commercials like this one for Borderlands 2. Two students from the University of Nottingham in the U.K. have made a track with noises similar to those heard in dubstep songs, but not with just any simple sound effects you can make on a computer.
These guys wanted to make something unique. So they set up microphones in a chemistry lab, brought a video camera, and recorded the sound effects from the scientific experiments to use in their song. Hearing the song is one thing, but seeing the explosions, flames and lids popping off beakers make the song even more interesting to watch.
Good thing they were wearing safety goggles.
There are music festivals and concerts that pay tribute to dubstep's popular ranking in the music industry, such as "Dubfest," which recently took place in Colorado. Perhaps they will join the headliners next year with their chemically created tunes.
In a behind-the-scenes video posted to his Youtube page, Dave explains the process of how they recorded all of the sounds and edited them together to make the song. After recording the sounds from each individual experiment, they had to go through and listen to all of them to name each one. Then they filed the named sounds into categories such as percussion, sound effects and "tonal stuff."
The song is made entirely of the audio they recorded in the various experiments conducted in the lab. After naming and categorizing all of the sounds, Dave (who is also a music producer) then organized and layered the sound clips to create the song.
All of the experiments were recorded with a video camera, so the audio clips Dave used in the song were linked to the video of which experiment the song came from. That helped Adam edit the video clips together to show every experiment used to get the specific sounds.
Slap! Crack! Whack! Boom!
Okay, using onomatopoeic to describe the sounds hardly compares to the audible sound effects that were created in the chemistry lab, so watch the video and experience the song for yourself.
