Actually I wanted to build a hydrophone, but making a stethophone is just too easy. Besides: I gave my niece a stethoscope for Christmas, because we happen to play doctor fairly often and she has two “fake” stehoscopes for children that actually serve no purpose but being an ugly dummy. I got myself one, too, the price is 15EUR, not really cheap, but at least it works. First, I removed the rubber earplugs, they’re not fixed with glue or anything else, you can just unplug them, then I attached an old pair of diy microphones at the ends with hot melt adhesive. The microphones are cheap mic capsules each soldered to an old earplug wire. The capsules are actually quite good, I used electret mic capsules for 1EUR each, they record ferquencies from 20HZ to 20kHz. I then just plugged the mics to my Edirol R09HR (actually i plugged them into my altoids battery box because the power supply of my R09HR seems to be broken).
My recorded samples are somewhat disappointing, I expected some kind of super effective James Bond like gadget, but the sounds you get are very very quiet, and the background noise after normalization/amplification is very dominant. Nonetheless the mic capsules prove to be extremely precise. Here’s a sample of my heartbeat when i put the bell on my cervical artery. It’s the exact up and down movement of the skin induced by the rush of blood.
I experimented with recording the purring sound of my cat, but i only got garbage. The noise of the fur swishing against the bell’s membrane was very dominant and my cat wasn’t really cooperating.
2 Comments
Hey there, I am an art student in Edinburgh and am looking to make a piece of work using a stethophone… I want to record rain as it hits an umbrella (so the mic bit of the stethophone would be attached to the underside of an umbrella) and then PLAY the sound live through an amp or headphones? Is this possible? If so, could you tell me how to make/buy a stethophone from??
Thanks,
Sarah
Hi Sarah, of course it’s possible and as you can read above, I did it just the way you want it: attach microphones to the ends that you’d put in your ear and record it. It’s actually pretty simple. There’s a very descriptive image how I built mine. In fact there are a lot of ways to do it, I just did it as cheap and simple as possible. I’m sure you can buy professional stetophones, but I’m sure that making your own is sufficient for your purposes.