A new plugin from AudioThing and YouTuber and electronic musician Hainbach captures the sound of "moon bouncing", a technique in which sounds are transmitted into space via radio telescope, bounced off the moon and captured on their return, only to be warped by the process.
In the video above, Hainbach visits the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands and experiments with moon bouncing, reflecting the sound of a soprano vocalist and double bassist off the moon to create a spooky, lo-fi-sounding delay effect coloured with some interesting sonic artifacts.
In collaboration with AudioThing, Hainbach used these recordings to develop a free delay plugin that recreates the effect produced by moon bouncing, producing "crunchy and lively" echoes that sound as if they've been reflected off the moon's cratered surface.
Like any other delay plugin, Moon Echo offers controls for delay time and feedback, along with a few controls you probably won't recognize. Tweak the Doppler dial to introduce a modelled Doppler effect, which mimics the changes in frequency produced by the difference between the earth and moon's movement as the delay returns to earth, like the pitch change heard when a vehicle sounding a horn approaches and recedes from a listener.
Moon Echo has accurately modelled the sound of the moon-bouncing process, right down to the specific types of noise introduced by the vintage radio equipment, which can be dialled in via the Moon Dust control.
Use Moon Echo in Duplex mode, and it'll act like a conventional delay, but switch over to Simplex mode and you can recreate the unidirectional transmission Hainbach experimented with at the Dwingeloo Observatory, hearing a single copy of your transmission bounced back to you. Hit Ping Moon and the plugin will even pull accurate data from NASA regarding the moon's distance and use this to adjust the delay time - pretty neat.
Moon Echo is available for macOS, Windows and Linux in VST/AU/AUv3/AAX/CLAP formats.
Download the plugin at AudioThing's website.
