• uncle-sam-we-want-you1

    DesigningSound.org Now Recruiting Volunteers

    Wednesday, May 8, 2013

    DesigningSound.org is on the lookout for capable News Editors and Contributing Editors for our blog.  This is an unpaid, volunteer position (just like the rest of us). DesigningSound.org…

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  • martha

    Sonic/Temporal Ambiguity as Evidence of Psychosi...

    Monday, May 6, 2013

    “Where are we?” “Connecticut.” “No. How far are we?” “From what?” “Yesterday.” Directed by Sean Durkin, Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) centers around the damaged psyche of Martha,…

    Read More

  • BartonFinkBell

    Time

    Saturday, May 4, 2013

    Guest Contribution by Randy Thom I’m on a plane from San Francisco to New York, May 3, and I see that the Designing Sound theme for May is…

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  • Image from Wikimedia Commons Archive, used under CC license as specified by owner "Cannedcat"

    In Consideration of Time…

    Wednesday, May 1, 2013

    April has ended and May has begun. No matter what we do, or how we may try to control it, time continues to march forward at its own…

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  • TremAU

    A Tremolo AU plugin with Max

    Tuesday, April 30, 2013

    Last week I came across a post on the Cycling ’74 Wiki about exporting gen~ code into an AU plugin. It looked too simple a process to be true,…

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  • Part09-01

    Pure Data Wavetable Synth – Part 9 (Fin)

    Tuesday, April 30, 2013

    For those of you who just want to play around with the finished project, there is a download link at the bottom of the article. Despite all of…

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  • FLDS

    Using Max/MSP To Build a Fictional Language Dial...

    Monday, April 29, 2013

    Guest post by Naila Burney.  A major challenge in video games is to record and manage thousands of dialogue lines. In Mass Effect 3, for example, forty thousand…

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  • Wood_Grain_Crop_1

    Generating Complexity in Max

    Monday, April 29, 2013

    Guest Contribution by Mark Durham With this post I want to look at some strategies for generating control data in Max, or more specifically generating complex envelopes for…

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  • audioMotors

    AudioMotors – Review

    Friday, April 26, 2013

    Thanks to David Nichols @ Track Time Audio for reviewing this. When Varun asked me if I would like to review Audiogaming’s “Audiomotors” engine granular synthesis tool, I…

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  • UDKtoSCdiagram

    A Quick Introduction to SuperCollider

    Friday, April 26, 2013

    Guest Contribution by Graham Gatheral Let’s be honest: code can be daunting. All those words and numbers and operators and punctuation errors… For a start, there’s no GUI….

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May
23

Author:

Comment

SFX Independence – Late May 2013

There’s a whole heap of stuff going on in the independent SFX community that’s worth making note of. So, here goes…

New Libraries Available Now…

New Sound Lab’s Optical Drives

nsl010-01

This library features recordings of computer optical disc drives (two internal desktop CD/DVD-R and one internal laptop slim CD/DVD-R slot-load).

Two induction coil pickups were used to record the electromagnetic fields emitted by the drives, capturing a very unique set of sounds and textures. These range from sharp percussive bleeps, glitchy static and noise, to electromechanical motor sounds, and drones. You’ll find use for many applications, including UI interface design, transitions, sci-fi, robot/servo sounds, technology, and computer sound effects.

Recordings include all functions of the DVD drives, e.g. disc loading, reading, writing/burning, spin up/down, errors, and disc ejecting. Also, each drive was taken apart and manipulated to create additional sounds.

Check it out here! Read More

May
8

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DesigningSound.org Now Recruiting Volunteers

DesigningSound.org is on the lookout for capable News Editors and Contributing Editors for our blog.  This is an unpaid, volunteer position (just like the rest of us). DesigningSound.org has no revenue so please don’t apply expecting a 401k.

For News Editors: we’re looking for content aggregators who will keep up on interesting articles, editorials and library releases; providing “block quotes” from said content and links out to our friends and fellow conspirators in the community…perhaps with the occasional nugget that appeals to the gear lust in all of us.

For Contributing Editors: we’re looking for more people to do what we already do. News, reviews, interviews and insights into the many sorts of multimedia audio we take part in.  Contributing Editors will be expected to do much more than a News Editor and long interviews, editorials and articles which will require more effort and time.

 

Requirements:

-Reliability.  You will be expected to make multiple posts in a month (for News Editors in a week), sometimes at short notice. And you will be expected to do so *every* month. If you are incapable of this please do not apply.

-Autonomy. We are looking for self-motivated and self-sufficient audio professionals who also want to help out the audio community without being having to be poked to get work done.

 

How to apply:

-Send your portfolio (Audio and/or Writing) as well as a writing sample to: volunteer@designingsound.org

-State in the email subject which you are applying for: “Contributing Editor” or “News Editor”

If you do not have a writing sample then please make one before applying. The writing sample can be an example news post, a full article or a review of a product.

Applications will remain open for the entirety of May 2013 and we will begin selection in June.

May
6

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Sonic/Temporal Ambiguity as Evidence of Psychosis in Martha Marcy May Marlene

martha

“Where are we?”

“Connecticut.”

“No. How far are we?”

“From what?”

“Yesterday.”

Directed by Sean Durkin, Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) centers around the damaged psyche of Martha, portrayed by Elizabeth Olsen. Martha is a young woman who, through the time spent living as part of a small farm commune, has lost nearly all sense of boundaries…from social through temporal. I believe “nearly” is the appropriate term, because she leaves the commune in response to certain events. If she had lost all sense of boundaries, that probably would not have happened. Despite retaining this small level of faculty, Martha is lost. The five lines above this paragraph are a conversation between Martha and her sister, Lucy, from early in the film. In my opinion, this is possibly the most illuminating exchange that occurs in the entire piece. Martha wants a description of the distance she’s traveled from a temporal reference point. She spends the film slipping in and out of time and place, pulling the viewer into her fractured perspective of the world. Read More

Time

Guest Contribution by Randy Thom

BartonFinkBell

I’m on a plane from San Francisco to New York, May 3, and I see that the Designing Sound theme for May is time.  Two notions relating to time and sound design come to mind.  One is that fiddling with time in storytelling is always a playground for sound.  Jumps to the past or the future in a movie swing the door wide open to using sound in a subjective way, and sound is almost always most powerful in a story when it expresses or reflects subjectivity.  Our ears are subjective tools.  They are easily tickled and excited by ambiguity.  In the final version of Coppola’s rewrite of the John Milius script for Apocalypse Now the first line of description is: “Coconut trees being viewed through the veil of time or a dream.”  As he made the movie Coppola gradually turned Milius’ brilliant, but mostly objective, script into a carnival of subjectivity.  We hear and see the war through the highly filtered senses of those young American soldiers.  Walter Murch was one of the chief designers of the filters, and I had the incredible luck to be there as it happened. Read More

news

SFX Independence – Late May 2013

Thursday, May 23, 2013

There’s a whole heap of stuff going on in the independent SFX community that’s worth making note of. So, here goes… New Libraries Available Now… New Sound Lab’s Optical…

DesigningSound.org Now Recruiting Volunteers

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

DesigningSound.org is on the lookout for capable News Editors and Contributing Editors for our blog.  This is an unpaid, volunteer position (just like the rest of us). DesigningSound.org…

Blastwave FX Give Away

Friday, May 3, 2013

Blastwave FX is giving away 10 copies of the new Noizz library on Facebook this month. The winners are being selected from fans of the Facebook page. So…

SFX Independence – Early May 2013

Friday, May 3, 2013

Here are all of the libraries of note we’ve spotted since the last round-up back in the beginning of April…in the order of most recent first (working from…