the music of sound

This is a bit of nostalgia for me; I remember seeing it first at Res Fest in 1999; Bryan Boyce combines footage from CNN and ABC news reports with dialogue from old scifi films synced up via some slightly weirdly keyed new mouths into something that often makes more sense than what CNN & ABC would have us believe is actually news, or reality or whatever… my favourite moment starts at 1.31 – Classic!

I love reading about unique techniques people have discovered or developed in the studio to capture sound, and it is so much more interesting than the inevitable ‘what plugins/software do you use?’ forum questions. I was watching a DVD last night called ‘Pretty as a Picture – The Art of David Lynch’ and came across this section, illustrating a technique they used when recording Angelo Badalmaneti’s score for Lost Highway in Prague:

I love the mischievous look on Badalamenti’s face as David Lynch explains what he is doing… Unlike recording music for its own sake, recording & premixing the score for a film involves a context that is not immediately apparent. Sure the composer & director (hopefully) have a clear idea about where & how the music will work in a scene, but the actual specifics of how the music balances alongside all the other elements in the final mix remains to be discovered at a later date. While flexibility is crucial (hence premixing the score to multiple stems) the idea of finding recording techniques that are worth carrying into the final mix purely as transitional or contrasting elements is very interesting.

It reminded me of a story Brian Reitzell told me when we were working on 30 Days of Night, of his working with a producer who whenever he was recording drums would put a bucket of water in the same room. In the bucket he would suspend a hydrophone & record the sound that was being induced into the water through the energy of sound in the room…

Tchad Blake is a producer with a reputation for a unique approach to recording & mixing, not the least of which involves a Neumann KU100 binaural head that he callsFritz: “Fritz is very dear to us Blakes. Between my wife (also an engineer and the PT’s head in the family) and I we have three heads. I always use one as my drum OH and have for almost fifteen years. Very balanced sounding mic. Great on piano, strings-large and small, all kinds of room setups. Good on vocals with softer acoustic instrumentation.”

And from a 1997 article in Sound on Sound magazine: “Blake is an engineer who likes to create sound effects at source, as with the aforementioned rubber tubes and binaural head, or using “mechanical filters, like wooden pipes, didgeridoos, metal pipes, tin cans and boxes, cardboard boxes and tubes, and so on. I’ll put springs in a tin can, place that in front of a drum, and put a microphone in it. I must admit that I’ve been doing it a little bit less recently, because I felt that I’d been over-using this approach, but it does have a number of huge advantages. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s very difficult to duplicate these mechanical effects. Some people see the latter as a disadvantage, but I think it’s great because it forces you to come up with new ideas every time. In my view, records that are created with a lot of mechanical experimentation tend to sound more original and unique than records that are made primarily with synths and samplers, although there are, of course, exceptions”

The use of distortion is not new, but it is interesting to hear both Tchad Blake & other mixers discuss using distortion as a form of compression and to help build ambience without using reverb. From an article in Mix magazine, Peter Katis explains: “I am not as much a fan of compression as I am the distortion that a cool compressor can bring. In addition to the parallel-compression technique, where I blend certain overcompressed tracks, lately I’ll overdrive the entire drum bus and you’d never know that it’s distorted; it just sounds cooler. Drums (not cymbals; this only works if there’s not a lot of cymbal action) love to be overdriven—you’ll get all sorts of tone out of them that otherwise you’re just not hearing.”

Plugins like SansAmp & Speakerphone emulate the effect of worldizing, where sounds are replayed through a speaker & re-recorded thereby capturing both the ambience of the room they are in & the distortions of the amp/speaker, the actual process of doing this in the real world provides unique results and is still used by many producers, including TV on the Radios Dave Sitek, as described in a Rolling Stone interview: “There were times when I set up a shitty 1980s Sharp home stereo out in the hallway and then a microphone clear at the other end, and I blasted the song out of the shitty home stereo and recorded it through the home stereo. There was a lot of that kind of tomfoolery.”

Electronic Musician magazine has some examples of creative ‘rule breaking’ with mixer Michael Brauer, including translating some of these techniques to mixing ITB….

In another Mix magazine article someone mentions using an acoustic guitar as a resonating microphone for a recording & it reminded me of a story a friend told me. He is a fairly avant garde guitarist & back in the 90s was playing in a more normal rock band, adding his unique elements as the second guitarist. The band went into a fairly traditional recording studio to record an album & when he came to overdub his guitar part on one song he had a plan to record his guitar via lieing his guitar amp on its back underneath the baby grand piano with it’s damper pedal released, & mic up the piano as it resonated to the tones of his guitar. Sadly the engineer at the studio was a bit closed minded about the idea & an argument ensued, at which point the engineer had to be gently reminded as to who was paying for the session. Of course when the track was mixed the effect worked beautifully in context… & the engineer then proceeded to rewrite history & own the process!

I just finished watching a truly fascinating BBC documentary from the Imagine series called Let there be Light which is about artists who work with light as their primary medium. Now of course every visual artists involves light in some form but for these artists light & perception of light is the very essence of their work. Artists include Dan Flavin, James Turrell, Liliane Lijn, & United Visual Artists.
Heres a link to the video in four parts – I tried embedding them but it seems impossible to disable autoplay, so all four videos load & start playing as soon as this page loads!?!

In doggy heaven I bet these two hang out:

Thats Laika on the right, the first animal to ever go into orbit and on the left? Thats Nipper, famous as an advertising icon associated first with ‘His Master’s Voice’ & later for RCA. Nipper was an internet meme back when the internet really was a series of pipes, steam filled pipes at that!

Nipper was born in Bristol, England in 1884 & was owned by struggling painter Francis Barraud who noticed how the dog often sat by his phonograph & listened, apparently puzzled as to where the voices & music were coming from. But it wasn’t until three years after Nippers death that Barraud painted Nippers iconic portrait, appropriately creating the artwork from memory…

Barraud attempted to have the painting exhibited but there were no takers, it seemed Nipper was ahead of his time, but when someone suggested the painting be updated with the more modern brass horn found on phonographs by then, he finally found success. As soon as the local manager of Berliner Gramophone saw the painting he offered to buy the updated version. When Emile Berliner, owner o the company, saw the painting he commissioned another copy & then proceeded to trademark it. Barraud received 100 pounds for the two copies while the copyright of the image eventually passed to EMI and continues to be used by the HMV chain stores…

Next time I see a dog shaped cloud…

“This is a rock” – brilliant!

Sound Designer Barnaby G. Price (Bill Hader) discusses his methods for recreating the audio for the 30th anniversary of The Sting in this parody of DVD featurettes, directed by Nicholas Jasenovec. Hilarious, thanks for the tip Glen! And nice work Jake Riehle – the robot sounds cracked me up!

/end irony

Relatedly, Bela Tarr is currently making a film called The Turin Horse: ‘freely inspired by an episode that marked the end of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s career. On January 3,1889, on the piazza Alberto in Turin, a weeping Nietzsche flung his arms around an exhausted and ill-treated carriage horse, then lost consciousness. After this event – which forms the prologue to Tarr’s film – the philosopher never wrote again and descended into madness and silence. From this starting point, The Turin Horse goes on to explore the lives of the coachman (Krobot), his daughter (Bók) and the horse in an atmosphere of poverty heralding the end of the world.’