New Site

Yeah, I'm done with this blog...already.
I've got a new site where this will continue and, hopefully, allow me to do some bigger things.
So, head on over to http://www.dynamicinterference.com/ and check it out.

Thanks.

RIP Sean Newman

About a week and a half ago, we lost a good friend and coworker. Sean was always excited about something, and always trying to make everyone around him just as excited as he was. If he couldn't do that, he'd be finding some way to at least make you laugh. This is video is one of the last things he produced before he passed away.

He wanted to test a car mount kit for the Canon 5D. In his usual fashion, just slapping it on the car and driving around was too simple, so he created this. I'll let the video speak for itself, as it's really very characteristic of what he was like in life.

We all miss you, Sean.

Canon 5D MarkII / Car Mount Test from Sean Newman on Vimeo.

Night and Day

I went to see Toy Story 3 yesterday with some friends. As usual, Pixar puts together some awesome flix, but I was more impressed with the preceding short than the feature. Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie; but that just goes to show how much I enjoyed the short "Night and Day".

There was some truly excellent story telling done through sound effects. This was also something that was planned out that way from the get go, which (as an audio nut) really makes me smile. If you haven't gone yet, I highly recommend it.

What the sun sounds like

So, a group of scientists have released an audio clip of what a solar corona sounds like. I haven't found a lot of information as to how they've put this together, but it remains interesting none the less.

I've got my wife to thank for this one. She forwarded me the link, which I now post here:

Sound of the Sun (courtesy Richard Morton) by University of Sheffield



If you'd like to check out the (what I think is) original posting, head here:

http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/listen-scientists-record-sound-sun/

Fun with electronic interference

I went around my apartment a few weeks ago recording electronic interference using a super cheap unbalanced microphone/pickup. I got a couple of interesting sounds, and I need do it again to see what other unique sounds I can grab. I've got a really interesting sound from a digital cable box. I think it was the power supply, and I was hearing the alternating current relay. That's one I've got to go back to, and see if I can hold the correct position a little longer to get something a bit more usable.

I loaded a couple of them into Pro Tools to toy with them a bit, and wound up layering two very different sounds. (As a side note, it's interesting just how varied electromagnetic interference can be.) They turned into a pulsating sci-fi sound. Admittedly not hard to do (it only took about 5 minutes), but I was just messing around anyways. The two sounds are the interference caused by a power LED in a computer monitor, and the interference picked up from a cd player's drive.

Here's the result.

Phasey electronics by spfarley

Doors done!

So, I finally finished all the work for my contribution to the DOORS collection for Tim Prebble's Hiss and a Roar library.

It was an interesting task to complete. I won't say it was fun right now (probably will with some more time behind the project), but that was mainly due to trying to finish it before going out of town while trying to restore my audio computer from catastrophic failure. Things got a bit tight because of that, and I'm just happy I was able to get it done.

Thanks for the chance to contribute, Tim. I'm looking forward to see what everyone else's work inlcudes.

Preverbs/Reversed Reverbs

One of the go to tools in sound design is a good reverb. We use them a lot not just to put them in a space, but to change the characteristics and presentations of a sound. DesigningSound.org had a nice little tutorial up recently from Jim Stout on how to make the creepy voice sound from Poltergeist.

In it, he uses a process that involves reversing an audio clip, applying a reverb to this new backwards clip, and then reversing it once more (now with the reverb). The result is that the tail of the reverb builds up to where the initial attack of the sound occurs and smooths it out. This is great for creating a sound that sort of slides into existence. Here's an example of the final product of that process, I used a layered effect of metal bangs that I built for a recent project:

Reverse reverb by spfarley

Like I said, this can be a great method for creating a sound that slides into existence. It also gives the sound a nice sense of movement. What happens if you want to preserve the sound of the attack though?

In that situation, I like to do an internal bounce to a separate track that has a reverb plug-in instantiated. So, my original clips place on one track, and feeds a second via an internal bus. I set that second track to record, and capture the reverb at my desired wet/dry ratio. Now, all you have to do is reverse the new clip, and line up what was originally the attack of the reverb clip with the attack of the original dry clip. It will give you something that sounds like this:

Preverb by spfarley

If you want, you can add a reverb to the the original dry clip to locate the entire clip within a space. I didn't do that here, as my original clip already had some reverb in it; and I didn't want to overdo it.

Some sound from Cairo

A few months ago, I got to go to Cairo, Egypt, for work. Needless to say, I was recording stuff everywhere I went with a small Sony PCM-D50 recorder.

One of the things that really struck me in Cairo were the Call to Prayers. I know a lot of us have heard them in television shows or movies before, but they're always carefully placed in so that they're really the only thing you hear. That doesn't really give you a sense of how ingrained it is in the daily life over there. Not that everyone stops what they're doing right then and there and disappears. To the contrary, much of what's going on continues without pause. Hearing it mixed in with the rest of the sounds of the city was a strange counter-point and really unique experience for me though; and that context made the sound more beautiful than it already is.

I haven't bothered editing it down yet, so you'll hear some handling noise right at the beginning. Enjoy.

Evening call to prayer by spfarley

They continue...

Still working on collecting audio for the Doors collection for Hiss and a Roar, as organized by Tim Prebble. I'm gonna have to go in to the office this weekend to get the other doors I want to record when everything is a bit quieter.

Dolby-E workflow development continues, but is just about wrapped up, which will be nice. As a side benefit, I've now got a much clearer picture of 23.98/24P/24PfS frame rates (and no, they're not the same), and workflows that center around them.

I don't want this to blog to be just me rambling about work. So, I'll post an actual sound here in a bit. It's not exactly anything I've been working on presently, but I think it will be fun to share.

Working on this week - Hiss and a Roar, Dolby-E

I'm working on collecting some sound effects for Tim Prebble's "Hiss and a Roar" sound effects library. He's put together a great workflow idea for this kind of thing using over 100 recordists. We'll each be contributing 10 different doors to the library. That's still a fair bit of work, but easily manageable. Thanks for putting this together, Tim!

You can visit his sight at musicofsound.co.nz

I've been doing a lot of systems engineering work lately, which is funny. Specifically, I've been working on getting our Dolby-E workflow up an running. This is a new capability for our company, and unfortunately has been sitting there in an unused state for too long, as I hadn't had the time available to do the necessary testing. I've had a bit more time lately, and I've gotten a lot of work done in that direction. Normally, this isn't an overly complicated idea, but our facility is multistandard; and I don't mean simply SD or HD. We're working in NTSC and PAL, with all the flavors of SD/HD you can shake a stick at, not to mention 24/24P frame capabilities. That's no simple idea that. Even the systems integrators who installed it have scratched their heads a couple times. Right now our issue is an unidentified 2 frame offset being added to the signal on top of the 2 frames that are introduced in the E encode/decode processes. The systems integrator is going to be coming in with a Dolby DM100 to help us get that sorted out. It' nice having the right tools to diagnose a problem.

If you're curious, our systems integrator is Diversified Systems, Inc. I highly reccommend them. You can check them out at www.divsystems.com/

What am I doing here?

I'm a sound engineer; not in the science sense, in the listening sense. I work in television production doing location audio, dialogue recording and editing, effects recording and editing, sound design, music editing, and mixing. What's great about my job is that I get to do all of these things for nearly every project I work on. What's bad about my job is that I HAVE to do all of these for every project I work on.

There's one other audio guy at the company I work for, and he helps out with these things as he can, but his primary responsibility is to compose the music for each of these productions. Anyone who's done music before knows what a beast that can be.

The fact that I do all of these things actually isn't a bad thing. I like it, I really do. It keeps me well rounded. I guess the real problem is that I always feel so crunched for time, that I have to pass over cool ideas or don't experiment enough because I've got that deadline ahead; and know exactly how much time everything else is going to take me. It's a constant stream of attrition across all of those areas.

I feel like I'm being lazy about further developing my skills, and I'm tired of it. So, I'm giving myself more tasks outside of work. Tasks that are just for me. I want to experiment with ideas again, and I'm going to. Here.

I'm using a public forum to give me the impetus to keep going and push myself further along. Even if all I do is occassionally come on and write out an idea or two, at least I'll have followed it a little further than I've been able to recently.

I don't know how many people will actually see this post, or even read all the way through it, but thanks for visiting.