the music of sound

Yes! It is Cyriak, he of the Meow Mix

Anyone who works on film soundtracks knows what source music is, but for people who don’t I’ll let George Burt, author of The Art of Film Music, explain it: “Source music is introduced into a scene either visually or by reference. We see a dance band playing in a dance hall, or we see (and hear) a radio or television. If a person is playing an instrument, singing, or whistling, we see and hear the performer. These sounds are visually initiated. In other instances, the source of the sound is not shown on screen. A disco system may not be seen, but we can expect to hear one.”

How one goes about making that music feel a part of the world in which the film lives is often the job of the music re-recording mixer in the final mix, although nowadays options are also often provided by the music editors where the source music has been ‘treated’ using tools like the plugin Speakerphone. Of course the clean music is always available too, as you just never know what shifts in perspective & treatment may be necessary in final context. Such processes can be very handy as a reference, and a huge timesaver on temp mixes where time is short & marathons must be sprinted… And pursuing that approach in its truest form involves worldizing, a subject much has been written on already

Years ago when I was working on a film called Toy Love (2002) I decided to have a play around with augmenting the inner city ambiences by worldising some beats from passing car stereos. I was more than a little influenced by having recently had a trip to San Francisco to attend AES, and while recording ambiences in Union Square I accidentally recorded this:

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I love how it feels like the sub is making the car vibrate, which it probably was!
Anyway I dug through my library & found some appropriate beats, looped them & made a CD & got my assistant to drive past at various speeds with the window down, blasting the car stereo… It was a bit hit & miss but I got some not bad results & found a few good places to use them in the film, heres a few examples (note they are only mono as I only had one 416 mic back then, but they still worked in the film okay as we panned them past & verb’d them into the environment anyway)- my crappy old Toyota, car stereo with no sub…

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It is equally interesting to see & hear examples of music videos that use the idea of source music as their creative basis, take this example:

And the original song:

Of course sometimes pre-existing music is used not as source music but as score and it can make for ‘interesting’ use of budgets since if a song is popular and/or dates strongly to a period, then chances are its licensing will be tied up with one of the big record labels who aren’t known for their generosity… Quentin Tarantino must be the grand master of the technique, in both his choice of tracks & their relationship to the film. But it can sometimes be surprising to hear music you know & love used in a film – sometimes good surprise and sometimes not. I recently watched Vertical Ray of Light and instantly warmed to the film when they used the Velvet Undergrounds Pale Blue Eyes whereas Lovely Bones use of Song for the Siren had the opposite effect on me. It’s a lottery, as each member of the audience will potentially have their own pre-existing relationship to a piece of music & if it is a well known song then that relationship may be steeped in memory & context entirely inappropriate for its new use. Do film makers worry about such things? Possibly, but mostly probably not for they are making their decisions based on their own experience. In the case of This Mortal Coils version of Song for the Siren, I felt the song had already been overused but I couldn’t remember where, turns out it was used in David Lynchs Lost Highway… Its a beautiful song but it sure doesn’t need to appear in any more movies….

Thanks to everyone who has been supportive of my little music project, the response has been fantastic! I didn’t have any short term goals other than getting it started but the project has only been online for a week and it’s already reached more people than I imagined possible. When I think back to last time I released music the only real indicator of people engaging with it was via gigs – I remember playing the New Years midnight set in the drum&bass zone at The Gathering & thinking wow there must be like 800 people in here! Having had this blog for three years now I have slowly become a statistics addict, partly because it is so easy to access data but also as it is encouraging…. so I thought I’d share a few stats with you..

So DUB45 Stats for the first week from 03.03.2010 -> 10.03.2010
Unique visitors to DUB45.com = 1,082
Hits to DUB45.com = 4,079
Soundcloud playback of DUB4501 Track B1: 397 plays
Soundcloud playback of DUB4501 Track B2: 301 plays
DUB45 Promo Video via Youtube: 2,649 viewings
DUB45 Promo Video via Vimeo: 1,164 viewings

In starting DUB45 I fully subscribe to a theory presented by Gerd Leonhard that the biggest obstacle nowadays is overcoming obscurity so these statistics are incredibly encouraging, especially considering it IS only week one, of many…. The response to the video has been the most surprising – thats over 3,500 screenings in a week! And it’s been invited to screen at a film festival, which makes me glad I finished it to 1080p resolution. And its also inspired me to invest in Dragon Stop Motion software & commission a little spaceman built on a proper stop motion armature, so expect to see more of him sooner or later..

I’ve also had some welcome emails from people interested in collaborating on tunes for the label in the future (either whole tracks or doing overdubs on mine) which I will also pursue. One of my favorite aspects of the album I released of drum&bass all those years ago was getting the hugely talented Mark De Clive Lowe to play rhodes on a few tracks, and Matt Gruebner to play double bass. Like film making, collaboration is one of the joys of the process….

And the weirdest incoming link to DUB45.com? This one: audiopr0ncentral – well I thought it was weird until I went & had a look, its actually a great site and I’ll add it to the links here…

Thanks again – I have three contenders for the next release well underway… and ideas for another short film… onwards!

>Congrats to Ray Beckett (production sound mixer) and Paul N.J. Ottosson (sound designer, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer) and all of the sound team for winning both sound Oscars last night for The Hurt Locker But the most momentus award must surely be to Kathryn Bigelow the first woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director – one would hope thats a permanently shattered glass ceiling!

> There was one weird Kanye moment earlier in the evening at the Oscars – read here for the back story to it…. yikes!

> Also film related, here is a great infographic: film by the numbers

> A theory about how Hendrix’s talent may well be related to his dual-handedness (not that he has two hands silly, its that he could use both with similar dexterity!) and how that may relate to inter-hemisphere traffic in his brain…

> A site that busts Advertising creatives for stealing ideas…

> A great thread at Muffwigglers: how on earth do people with HUGE (modular synth) cases decide what modules go where?

> Vague terrain discuss electronic music performance interfaces

> I came across the vinyl of this the other day – ode to a foley artist?

This isn’t a movie but its kinda cute, so you should watch it anyway…

I think my favorite appearance of a piano starring in a film is in Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep – the first film he wrote & directed and in my opinion his best film so far… Have you seen it? Do you remember the piano scene? Well there were two scenes, first when the new neighbour (Charlotte Gainsborough) is moving in & the local police help out getting the piano up the stairs, but the scene I am really referring to is the brilliant scene where Charlottes character throws handfuls of cotton wool at the ceiling and Gael García Bernals character tries to find the right chord on the piano that will make it stay up there! Absurdist, surrealist genius! If you haven’t seen the film go rent the dvd, it is really great!

On a much more sombre, introspective note, Jane Campions film The Piano obviously features a piano and there is a beautiful, tragic moment where the piano expresses intense emotions without anyone playing a single note on it…

Goddamn that voiceover is dreadful… nice work by Michael Nyman though…
What other films involve a piano onscreen, as a character or as part of the action?

ProLoop by Trapcode is available for iPhone
via CL516

“ProLoop comes bundled with many professional loops by Mokira (Andreas Tilliander), Håkan Lidbo, Kymatica and others. It also includes some demo sessions to get you started. But the real power comes by the fact that you can upload your own soundfiles to ProLoop through your web-browser!”

the manual for ProLooper is here

Tectonic is a sound sculpture created in real time by earthquakes as they occur across the globe. A tightly integrated system between Max/MSP, Google Earth and Ableton Live processes a stream of real-time data that is translated into synthesis and sample playback parameters.

Braun Tube Jazz Band at the Japan Media Art Festival

I’ll definitely get this DVD – I went & saw the show when they were in Wellington & it was brilliant! So great to hear some of the older songs too! Heres the info from the vimeo page:

“RIDE, RISE, ROAR is a David Byrne concert film directed by David Hillman Curtis that blends riveting onstage performances with intimate details of the creative collaborations that make the music and show happen.

Shot with multiple cameras over several concerts during the 08/09 tour, the film blends the energy and charisma of classic Talking Heads with the heartfelt pathos of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s most recent collaboration.

Between the 14 live songs, the film achieves an unprecedented intimacy with David Byrne and the band, documenting behind-the-scenes auditions, rehearsals, and interviews with key players while revealing the creative process that led to the show’s unique fusion of pop music and modern dance.

RIDE, RISE, ROAR celebrates Byrne’s extensive career as a musician and testifies to the creativity that keeps him going today.”

This is the video Ok Go’s label didn’t want to make embeddable due to screening/royalty issues but they obviously resolved that debate or it wouldn’t be here… Wonder how many takes it took?

Reality huh? You don’t have to move too far away from it to start generating ideas… I came across a few sounds I recorded & messed with years ago for a scifi TV series which I did some of the weapons design for. One of the weapons was a laser that was worn on the wrist – small in size but lethal in use…. one of the elements I made sounded like this:

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How did I make it? Well, I started hunting for source elements to manipulate and my bass guitar happened to be sitting by the couch, so I grabbed it & tried doing that classic guitar sound of scraping a pick along one of the strings, but thinking about the sound as a possible weapon when I got to the end of a scrape I did a rapid acceleration – it sounded like this:

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Reasonably identifiable, but any potential? Hmmm I tried reversing it:

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Now its got some propulsion! As I was addicted to Metasynth at the time (this was back in 1999) I processed it with some of Metasynths time stretch algorithm:

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Reality, two steps removed!

Not wanting to get political but one aspect of film making which I believe is important is the idea of film as cultural identity. When I look at the list of films made in New Zealand there are some that could have been made anywhere, but there are many that could only have been made here – they are our stories, our culture, our landscapes, our environment and our characters. And as someone interested in other cultures, a means of travelling without leaving home is via cinema – the list of films that I see at the NZ International Film Festival each year is a direct reflection on my interest in the culture of other nations. I didn’t watch eg Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon & then expect to be experiencing it in the streets of Beijing when I went there, but like all art forms film does reveal aspects of culture. So it got me thinking, if someone who had never been to New Zealand was to watch ten films in an attempt to experience some of our culture, what ten would I recommend? What ten would you recommend from your country?
The idea of globalization is often equated to Americanization, and with its all-pervasive marketing power one could easily misconstrue the motives & cultural impact of Hollywood… But it is every persons responsibility to decide what they see and hear and how they interpret it. So I am interested & I would appreciate if you were to comment as to what ten films I should see from your country?

Heres my selection of ten New Zealand films:
1984 Vigil by Vincent Ward – trailer
1987 Bad Taste by Sir Peter Jackson – trailer
1989 Kitchen Sink by Alison Maclean – watch it here
1993 The Piano by Jane Campion – trailer
1994 Once Were Warriors by Lee Tamahori – trailer
2000 The Price of Milk by Harry Sinclair – trailer
2002 Whale Rider by Niki Caro – trailer
2003 Perfect Strangers by Gaylene Preson – trailer
2005 World’s Fastest Indian by Roger Donaldson – trailer
2010 Boy by Taika Waititi – trailer

Your turn?