the music of sound

In this digital world you are only as good as your data & the difference between backup & archive slowly becomes crucial…. but if only we got paid by the file! I went to do a backup using Folder Syncronizer X on a third clone drive today (it hadnt been updated in two weeks) and after some number crunching & a few comparisons it concluded I had 51,087 files to backup! Ayekarumba – they can’t all be ProTools fade files!

‘Sound Art’ is literally sound as art, in its purest form… cinema with your eyes closed, sonic expressions of a creative mind, none of these descriptions go even half way to expressing the perceptual impact of walking into a gallery & encountering an artform which employs sound as its primary means of expression. The first time I visited London back in 2000, aside from seeing every relevant gig I could, I noticed an exhibition in the gig guide of sound art by someone called Carsten Nicolai… So after visiting the Tate Modern I wandered along to this gallery & witnessed something quite profound, incredibly beautiful & oddly resonant to some of what I had been working on in film sound, the LFE channel of 5.1…

These photos do not do justice to the experience & it is a fundamental issue with Sound Art; how to document it? Its even more ephemeral than Video Art and as experiential as it is experimental…
Sonically this installation involved a number of subwoofers emitting modulated subsonic sine waves, which were exciting the room tones of the gallery both visually & acoustically. Sitting on top of the subwoofers were trays of water which were physically vibrating to the soundwaves, and with spotlights angled to bounce light off the surface of the water the projections of the interference patterns played beautiful synchronised projections on to the walls of the gallery…
40 minutes went by in three slow deep breaths and two blinks….

& today via vvork i saw this (& wished i was where it is, or vice versa)

Sustainable a dynamic robotic sound installation; mp4 video

“The metaphoric use of sound is one of the most fruitful, flexible and inexpensive means: by choosing carefully what to eliminate, and then adding back sounds that seem at first hearing to be somewhat at odds with the accompanying image, the filmmaker can open up a perceptual vacuum into which the mind of the audience must inevitably rush.
Every successful reassociation is a kind of metaphor, and every metaphor is seen momentarily as a mistake, but then suddenly as a deeper truth about the thing named and our relationship to it. The greater the stretch between the “thing” and the “name,” the deeper the potential truth.”

I’m quoting Walter Murch from a very interesting article called Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See – but exactly what is a metaphor & how are they created? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary a metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them…”

This article Pay attention to the world by Susan Sontag helps explain metaphors in reference to their most common application, in the fields of poetry & literature;
“The dimension of time is essential for prose fiction, but not, if I may invoke the old idea of the two-party system in literature, for poetry (that is, lyric poetry). Poetry is situated in the present. Poems, even when they tell stories, are not like stories. One difference lies in the role of metaphor, which, I would argue, is necessary in poetry. Indeed, in my view, it is the task – one of the tasks – of the poet to invent metaphors. One of the fundamental resources of human understanding is what could be called the “pictural” sense, which is secured by comparing one thing with another. Here are some venerable examples, familiar (and plausible) to everyone:
time as river flowing, life as dream, death as sleep, love as illness, life as play/stage, wisdom as light, eyes as stars, book as world, human being as tree, music as food etc, etc
A great poet is one who refines and elaborates the great historical store of metaphors and adds to our stock of metaphors. Metaphors offer a profound form of understanding…”

As applied to the use of sound in film, the concept is really about the psychology of an audience, as illustrated in this writing/storytelling guide: “a metaphor provides…a cue to what kind of thinking should be done…Metaphors act as shepherds to lead the audience onto the correct path of thought and mindset.”

food for thought…

ok, your mission should you choose to accept it is to identify the sound!

I am prepared to answer yes/no questions but I will try & avoid providing any clues… So the question is specifically how was the sound created? It was recorded in real time & hasnt been processed or manipulated at all:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I remember when i was a kid they used to have something like this on the radio. (And yes there is a prize, although i haven’t decided what it is yet)

In film sound editorial one of the most important people we deal with, aside from the director & producer, is the picture editor and their assistant/s… they are our conduit into the project & I have been lucky to work with some very talented picture editors over the years. With the ever changing workflow involved with recording sound on Hard Disk recorders, metadata & the various ages of the NLE workstations it is also very challenging territory for assistant editors. The skills they must possess are a critical mix of technical & creative – this video goes a little way to illustrate the fundamentals, heh heh

Recording ADR can be tiring at the best of times, but this recording of Orson Welles voicing a commercial is hilarious. Never have I heard such succinct putdowns as he struggles to read a script obviously written to be read & not spoken aloud….

‘crispy crumb coating!?’

but you know, i like the sound design of this one more….

“My feeling is that if somebody has got the imagination, they’ll figure a way to do something no matter what the limitations are. As I was saying before, when David (Lynch) and I worked on The Grandmother, we had nothing like we have now, and we still got what we needed, sometimes just out of junk lying around. For Eraserhead, we floated a big five gallon bottle in a bathtub with a microphone inside. We recorded the innards of an old Bell & Howell movie camera as it chugged away. David blew into an old metal heater and put a microphone in the bottom of it and got some kind of weird sounds, and then we altered them and slowed them down. You can do all this, and you don’t need a big budget or thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Sometimes that stuff just gets in the way. You just need to use your imagination.”

This quote is taken from an interview with Alan Splet, an eternally inspiring sound designer, published in a Americ@n Cinematograph3r magazine, December 1984. Sadly he skipped off this mortal coil back in 1995 but his creative spirit & unique sound library continue, thanks to his partner & sound recordist Anne Kroeber, who runs Sound Mountain. When I was working on the film The World’s Fastest Indian we needed to recreate the sounds of classic land speed racer cars & Anne provided us with some fantastic sounds that were both unique & perfectly suited.
The rest of the article about Alan Splet & his work on Dune is available here (apologies for the scan quality) and below is a list of films worthy of careful listening, thanks to imdb

Alan Splet Filmography

Rising Sun (1993) (music editor) (sound designer)
Wind (1992) (supervising sound editor)
Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (1991) (sound editor)
By the Sword (1991) (sound designer)
Henry & June (1990) (sound designer)
Mountains of the Moon (1990) (supervising sound editor)
Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) (supervising sound editor)
Dead Poets Society (1989) (supervising sound editor)
Winter People (1989) (sound editor)
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) (supervising sound editor)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) (sound designer)
The Mosquito Coast (1986) (supervising sound editor)
Blue Velvet (1986) (sound designer)
Warning Sign (1985) (supervising sound effects editor)
Dune (1984) (sound designer)
Never Cry Wolf (1983) (sound)
The Elephant Man (1980) (sound designer) (special sound effects)
The Black Stallion (1979) (supervising sound editor)
J-Men Forever (1979) (sound effects)
Days of Heaven (1978) (special audio assistant)
Eraserhead (1977) (location sound and re-recording, sound editor, sound effects)
The Grandmother (1970) (sound editor) (sound effects) (sound mixer)

why is this video out of sync?
the 2 pip feels 10 or 15 frames late!?!
W T F ?

its a standard 24fps SMPTE leader with a 1 frame beep on the 2 flash
or it was before i uploaded it….

‘hello, youtube?’