the music of sound

Buying Christmas presents for people obsessed with their own particular music or sound related art form must be a nightmare, and I suspect many people just give in & buy vouchers or ask… but there is nothing better than receiving a well thought out present from someone who knows you & your obsessions well enough to find something truly applicable – its the thought that counts after all.. So heres a few suggestions for presents that don’t cost a fortune & probably will be appreciated…

For Sound Designers/Sound Editors: a book is maybe the best bet, here is a a list of my favourite relevant books & chances are they wont have the excellent Soundscape book of lectures from the UK School of Sound.

For Musicians: a 20 note Mechanical Music Box and order 10 extra blank music strips while you are at it…

For Directors/Animators/Graphic Designers/Editors: a Moleskin Storyboard notebook or for Musicians (who can write & read those funny squiggles) a Moleskin Music Notebook

Or a synth/audio related T shirt? Hoody? Mug? Notebook?
Check out Gear Addict Clothing

A flatpack cardboard boombox for your ipod

Feel free to add any other suggestions in the comments….

Every time I start a film project, in the back of my mind is the eternal question; in hindsight, and five years from now, how will I reflect on this project? Its a hard question I know, but the older you get the more important it becomes….

The ideal answer is obvious: I was creatively challenged, I learned a LOT, as an artist I grew by the experience, there was minimal stress (unless it served to push creative and/or deadline boundarys), and the project was successful. And thats where definition of terms is most crucial – exactly how do YOU define success?

I have met many people that spend a lot more time thinking about how their project might well crash & burn, meet critical death or even worse; never be started let alone finished. I always then ask them, “So given all that, what is success for you?” Internally I think they have obviously invested a lot of negative thought on the worst case scenarios, but how will you know when the reverse is true: “please, PLEASE, define sucess for me?”

And you know what? Nine times out of ten they havent even thought about how or what it would mean to be sucessful, on their own terms let alone anyone elses… oh the dichotomy! They who are their own worst enemies…

So where am I going with all this? Well I have a theory. When I meet most directors for the first time I always think to myself, “so this is your first, second or nth film… and for me this is number XX – the last one, 30 Days of Night, was number 17 (where I have been autonomous in running things) and number 26 in terms of just being involved… and if you count all the short films, TV series & documentarys the number is probably getting upwards of 50…

My point is not too brag with how old/experienced I may or may not be, but to try & draw some kind of conclusions as to the personality types attached to the creators of those 50+ projects & how, by identifying their personality types & modus operandi early on I might well be better equipped to help make the project run smoothly…. a worthy aspiration if ever there was one!

So I presume anyone reading this is already picturing the last five ‘clients’ they dealt with – the good, the bad & the latent three year olds… By the time i write the conclusion/part two of this little proposition, if you feel where I am coming from please email me with your observations. And note, the point here is not to be critical, god knows some of the best art is made by the most tortured souls… but if you have to help that tortured soul express themselves sonically, best not confuse them with a first timer/eyes wide open type, or the genius/positive-encouragement-while-getting-exactly-what-they-want-types…

I know you know what I mean!

And as with reviews, you will always learn the most from the best 20% and the worst 20%, so let me have it, vent away!

If someone told me this was fake I would believe them, but with David Attenborough involved it would have to be a serious injoke to warrant the effort… best you decide; are you a cynic or a believer?

Have you ever had to record screams? We needed some for a film a few years back & for the same film needed a female loop group, so at the end of the ADR session we asked each woman to step up to the mic & scream… and it was weird but only half the actors present could really truly scream! I had always thought everyone can scream, but apart from it being a truly flight or flight reaction, at our request it was not the case.
The one bit of sage advice I have for recording screams is this: never rely on just one mic. We used four mics for this session: a Sennheiser MKH70, a stereo pair of Oktava mics and a EV27 dynamic mic as our safety… and as it turned out on a number of occasions the dynamic mic was the only mic to not distort! I am not talking about preamp distortion ie where too hot a singal is arrving at the preamp input stage, I am wise to that problem with pads etc, but I am referring to actually overloading the SPL rating of the mic itself… I am most familiar recording with shotgun mics such as the MKH70 or the Sanken CS5 stereo mic (or previously the 416) but these are sensitive mics that will clip when SPLs max out & so I say again – if you are recording screams run a dynamic mic alongside your usual favourite & rest assured you won’t lose a great performance to mic distortion ever again…

Relatedly I always presume everyone knows about the Wilhelm scream, but just incase you have no idea what I am talking about, read this and/or watch this:

To be honest I prefer to make my own little Wilhelms, as in using & reusing screams that have relevance to me – a certain dialogue editors scream has been used in many films now… But I do have to confess to there being two films that I have worked on that contain the Wilhelm; Black Sheep and 30 Days of Night… anyone spot them? I guess that means theres 142 films with the Wilhelm in them now, if this list is correct!

Incase you were unaware, as I too was until ten minutes ago, today has been No Music Day – so forgive me Father for I have sinned, such is life in the early part of the global time zone. But as with the equally admirable Buy Nothing Day the concept alone is worthy of consideration, even if it is too late to partake this time round – if nothing else it might just make you consciously observe & reconsider the role music plays in your daily life.. Personally music is a fundamental part of my life, but it also makes me acutely aware when I am being exposed to ‘bad’ music. Oddly I find muzak in shopping malls less offensive than commercial radio, if only because I am already well aware shopping malls are a site for putrid overload of most of my senses, whereas commercial radio often finds a sneaky way to infiltrate your hearing eg how many times have I jumped in a taxi & had to suffer the mindless agendas of radio stations such as Classic (S)hits!?! I am not a violent man, believe you me, but when I see a Classic (S)hits promo vehicle driving around town I really have to focus on something else to avoid going & sharing my views with them…

And as we approach that most crass of marketing exercises otherwise known as Christmas, I hereby remind myself not to venture anywhere retail without an ipod already glued to my head. Lets face it, Christmas carols may ahve been lovely when they were written but to hear intensely bad MIDI versions of them leaking out of EVERY shop for weeks on end is enough to make me do all my shopping online…

But I guess drawing attention to No Music Day late is at least better than never ever being aware of it & best you consider it a very worthy early warning for next year! Why? Well here is what the instigator has planned for 2008:

“Next year I would like to focus No Music Day on film. With so many films I feel that the soundtrack music just gets in the way. It is used to lend drama and emotion but so often it just cheapens and allows for lazy film-making.”

Amen Brother!

Ok this post comes with a warning: if its your first sound post gig & you want to be overtly, obviously, naively stylistic then please go ahead and misuse/abuse what I am about to suggest; use it on every whip pan, vaguely extreme picture cut or action-based movement, but please, do it knowing you reside in the land of Sound Design 101. Its like saying “Kanicha Wa! I am fresh off the boat, I dont understand the language or culture quite yet but I’m not going to let that stop me from doing things that in hindsight & with a bit of maturity I might well cringe at, at a later date… but now is now… and here I go….woosh… woosh woosh…. woosh”
More than enough said… but just incase, what am I ranting about now?

The (semi/un) technical term is ‘Woosh’, or maybe ‘Whoosh’ if you are American – i’m not so I don’t know, but hey i’ve seen a few files labelled as such, so call them whatever you like but they are those swishy, wooshy movements of air sounds that are often used as transitions, or to create the aural illusion of movement, or to simply compensate for something the director wishes was onscreen & isn’t….

As with most cliches, they exist for a reason – at the best of times they work & evoke much more than mere existence should allow…. and at the worst of times they are lame as the worst metaphor you could possibly come up with… but as with all art, its a matter of taste and as many rich people indicate without even trying, budget does not equal taste – often it is inversely proportional, but as with anything creative it is up to the depth of the creator to reveal whetehr that depth is from the shallow end of the pool or the divers end… In the end this rant is to hopefully provide a few starting points in terms of making wooshes of your own (and thereby avoid commercial librarys of genericized woosh fodder) but to also think & think again about whether a woosh is actually needed… maybe the ultimate woosh is in fact a silent one? The sound of one woosh, wooshing?
anwyay let me just say this: Death to the Woosh/Long live the Woosh!

Ok, so please excuse the guy in that video (me) – I wasn’t quite in character that day and my trailer & the per diems were all a bit small & the shasimi wasn’t as fresh as i’d like, but it serves a simple purpose of illustrating how wooshes came to be….

Woosh revelation 001: Wooshes are directly related to the physical world!
If some geezer comes at your with a lump of wood & swings it, just missing your head, you will hear a woosh. It won’t be some cliche filmic artefact but a real physical phenomena. And at that point, best you run like stink in the opposite direction! But if it wasnt a bit of wood, but instead a samurai sword (in which case dont run, just say your last prayers) or as in the video, a length of vacuum cleaner pipe, the sound will vary accordingly… ie the physical sound of the physical event will vary. In the end, just like the wind we perceive outside, it is the sound of air molecules being cut by a surface. If its a fat, flat surface then it will sound a certain way whereas if its a thin sharp surface cutting the air then it will sound different…. and this leads me to my second conclusion;
The best lessons are those learned from reality/nature
So get a length of string or rope, attach various objects to it & swing it around your head & listen (preferably also have a stereo mic recording at this point) Try a cheese grater, a tennis racket, a TV aerial – each will sound uniquely different & should go into the sound FX library labelled as such. I have natural wooshes in my library created by pool cues, golf clubs, vacuum cleaner pipes, cheese graters, tennis rackets, radio & TV aerials, swords of many varieties, sticks, canes, fishing rods, bird cages, kites, wood saws of many varieties & any number of obscure things I can’t even remember & didnt label properly…
Until I get around to writing Wooshes 102, please, go generate a library of your own! Just remember the object is moving air, so use a Rycote & fluffy on the mic… and also that way if you hit the mic with your cheese grater it hopefully won’t destroy it!

Not sure I could ever call speakers sexy – whatever cranks your dial I guess – but many of the speakers featured in this rant definitely wouldnt look out of place in an art gallery… and given the price tag thats probably the only place I’ll ever see or hear them, take these for example:

cute? yes, and just perfect for my ipod in the kitchen (except they cost US$150,000 a pair!)

Grotrian are a company who make pianos, real ones, not ROMplers or whatever… but that doesnt preclude them from engaging in a bit of beautiful interactive work, which in this case involves an algorthymic pianola, which utilises physics of gravity and impact detection to create lovely auto-composition…
Sound a bit like marketing hype? Well ignore me & go have a play yourself!
Suffice to say if it was available as a MIDI sequencer and I could trigger my own piano notes or whatever I would have boght it 30 seconds after first encountering it…. especially after clicking on the GROTRIAN preset!