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The Beautiful Tones of Gigantic Sewer Pipes

Benn Jordan | October 11, 2025



It can take up to 21 days for symptoms of tetanus to appear 😬🤞
Support me/music/socials: https://linktr.ee/BennJordan

Thanks to Blackmagic Design for the massive quality bump on this channel as well as tools that inspire me to make bigger and better videos.

Gear used (indoors):
ATEM Mini Pro
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/prod…

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6k
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/prod…

DaVinci Resolve 16 (100% FREE!)
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/prod…

Timespamts:
0:00 – Hello
1:04 – Tubes and music
2:30 – Maths and physics
5:20 – “Stealing” reverb
7:50 – Transducing/Resonating
9:19 – Editing IRs, etc
15:38 – All the tubes together!
16:45 – Outro, Patreon?

#sampling #ambient #acoustics

Written by Benn Jordan

Comments

This post currently has 40 comments.

  5. @KOSMIKFEADRECORDS

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    why does IR reverb sound shit to me… like almost (almost not entirely) unusable. why? metalic ring.. unlike the real room or bathroom or pipe… if not metallic ten abbrasive… unlush.. unnatural. yet i see it rated by the best.. does this mean i suck? More context: I love AW reverbs, Supermassive and FLstudio reverb WITH mod.. also used to love a reverb called arts acoustic… Hope that helps.. ill also ask my enhanced and super powered AI (yes its gemini with some very specific tweaks or "memories")

    Go for it Ben.. you are the one to answer. Its okay if its just me and im crazy… getting used to that too..

  6. @theowl84

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    I don't get why people feel about asking for money on Patreon. Turn around your point of view! I love to support people who do cool stuff that I do not have the time or resources for – and get it all packaged up in a great video + extra perks. This has some value.

  8. @chrismerklin8460

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    Benn, I’m guessing you haven’t come across the published scientific article on culvert whistlers by my physics professor and personal friend, the late Dr. Edwin Karlow. Hopefully you can look it up and enjoy it!

  14. @RoskoTwang

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    I used to work at a place that made these, but plastic. We had stacks of em, between 1 and 4 feet wide. On windy days, it made the most angelic ambient sounds.

  16. @KalanSorion

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    Fun video! The music at the end sounded awesome. It felt very organic, like you're immersed in an environment. Kinda had a "breathing" quality to it too. Also, a question: any recommendations on a transducer for this sort of sampling? I've been using a percussion massage gun to do something kinda similar – I can't tune it to match the physical resonance of objects, but shaking the shit out of random objects at audio rate makes for some neat results in it's own right! haha

  23. @JINX_ZIRS

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    Dude every video on the science of audio helps so much even before your video has begun I start thinking 🤔 😂 thanks for all info. Edit so technically you can do this any sound then?

  25. @05degrees

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    8:41 BTW when you have reasonably good equipment you can make an IR in a more robust way not having to rely on birds stopping chirping—deconvolution. First you prepare a sine sweep, the longer the better, over all frequencies you care about, then you play it into an environment you want an IR of, record and then do deconvolution using the original dry sweep (there’s some software to do this with no problems). And you get an IR which is a bit better because the wet sweep had all the noises averaged out and they got less influence on the resulting IR. But of course the speaker you used has its own IR imprinted quite heavily here. But that shouldn’t be a problem (claps and balloon pops have their similar problems here) unless you’re using a phone speaker like I did when I tried to capture IRs of my cupboard. 😁 I had nothing better. Low frequencies were almost absent, and I think airy stuff above 10 kHz was damped if not absent either.

  27. @spehnke

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    Benn.. great video! Thanks! Love the music you generated too with the pipes. Interesting about the natural resonation overtones (?) of the pipe and their relationship to the western scales.
    Thank you personally for a later video you produced on sounds possibly emanating from natural gas pipelines. In our case it solved a mystery that was driving my friend nuts. Investigating it with my recording devices I found a constant prop airplane like hum. I eventually came across your video and then investigated that an interstate gas pipeline ran within a couple hundred feet from my friends house. Thanks again for your passion and your channel. I hope you get the support to keep it going.

  30. @atomicreptiliascreator738

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    Try buying a corrugated sewage pipe of specific lengths and diameter. It’ll probably be a bit expensive, but arranging them in a tubular bell formation (preferably that of a grand clock) and striking them in a specific order might make a good-sounding melody.

  34. @CM_CM_

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    I could 100% see this being sold as a sample pack on sites like splice or lander or one of the other many sample sites – is that something you might consider for a source of income? I'm sure no other person will have such a unique sample from sewer pipes! Also very disappointing to hear about Curiosity and their lack of support – really bizarre on their part to be so dismissive of such an easy and important ask, to not only make your urls more credible to the people on your channel (not that I personally see an issue with a random URL, but I guess older viewers may be skeptical) as well as a code for your continued collaboration and loyalty. If they ever change their mind I'll follow one of your links/codes to sign up but I'll hold off for now 🙂

  35. @petrparizek9945

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    Not sure how large the loudspeakers were that you had taken with you back then. But it would be an interesting idea to run a long sine sweep through some loudspeakers located in the tube and then "deconvolve" the recording actually by convolving it with an inverted sine sweep. This way, you should be able to amplify the impulse response enormously, without amplifying the surrounding noise.

  39. @OOF_MUSIC

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    Loved this! Going back to the tuning of the pipe – was it just pure coincidence that it was 440 HZ when you banged it? Is the tuning not a function of it’s length / width etc?

  40. @eday1451

    October 11, 2025 at 2:55 am

    cheering Benn on in their field adventures, so impressed that you cover everything from this to geek-gear reviews to socio-political analysis of music industry. respect only grows for your explorations and offerings. thank you!

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