Making The Best Out Of Something Broken

It is fitting that with our theme of “Broken” this month I would accidentally wash my Zoom H1 Handy Recorder in the washing machine. I had taken the H1 with me to GDC just in case any cool sounds popped up for me to record (they didn’t). So when I got home and tossed the backpack in the wash to get the San Francisco grime off of it I completely forgot the very light H1 was inside! Fast forward to me opening up the washing machine and finding the H1′s body sans-capsules and the capsules and their housings in various places in the machine.

The H1 Aftermath

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MASTER CLASS: Skip Lievsay, Academy Award-Winner for Best Sound Mixing on GRAVITY

Bit short notice but if you’re in NYC on April 19 there is a pretty cool master class happening:

“On Saturday, April 19th, come join us at the Media Center to watch the Academy Award winning film GRAVITY with master sound designer, Skip Lievsay.  We’ll have lunch together and Skip will walk you through his experience working on GRAVITY.  Skip Lievsay has an outstanding history of collaborating with major American filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, the Coen Brothers, and John Sayles. “

You can check out the details and register here.

“Skip Lievsay has an outstanding history of collaborating with major American filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, the Coen Brothers, and John Sayles.  He served as sound editor for the Coen brothers on Blood Simple(1984) and was their sound editor supervisor on Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990), and Barton Fink (1991).  The frequent Coen brothers’ collaborator received two Academy Award nominations for Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing for his work on NoCountry For Old Men (2007) and was nominated in the same categories for True Grit (2011).  For Spike Lee, he provided sound design for Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues (1990), and Jungle Fever (1991). Lievsay began an extensive collaboration with Martin Scorsese on After Hours (1985), continuing through The Age of Innocence (1993). For John Sayles, he worked on Matewan (1987) and City of Hope (1991).”

Sonic Movement

An interesting investigation into how cars ‘should’ sound.

While our cities are in continuous visual and tactile evolution, our sonic landscape is primitive and disordered. With the dawn of silent electric vehicles comes a need for pedestrian warning sounds. This represents an opportunity to reflect upon the noise of our streets today and fantasize on what the future of our cities could sound like.

Semcon, in a unique collaboration between its Design and Acoustics divisions, with pioneering music/art duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, invite you to experience the project initially premiered as an installation during Frankfurt Motorshow 2013.

The result of this innovative fusion, SONIC MOVEMENT imagines a new paradigm in the audible character of the city.

The Most Powerful Tool in Your Toolbox

Image by Alisha Vargas. Used under Creative Commons license. Click image to view source.

Guest Contribution by Richard Gould

…and a hold-over from last month’s “Voice” theme

I didn’t realise it until recently, but I’ve been a sound designer for most of my life. I may have only discovered the term “Sound Design” a few years ago, and I may have just graduated from studying the craft of sound design itself, but like most of us, I’ve been designing sounds since I was a kid, I just didn’t know it. True, I wasn’t sitting behind a console discussing aesthetics with directors, nor was I packing up my gear for a field recording session, but just as I might find myself today making sounds for non-existent worlds, beings and spacecrafts, I was doing the same thing when I was six years old.

I would run through the woodland up in the valley near my house, only it wasn’t a woodland, it was an alien landscape on a distant planet, or a medieval forest where a beastly dragon placed me in mortal danger. I could see these creatures, I could hear them (and I wasn’t afraid to let others hear them either). I was using the two most powerful tools in my sound design toolbox to realize the sonic sources of these worlds; my imagination and my voice. As I grew older however, I had less and less time to go up to the woodland, less time to visit these other worlds, and as a result, my first career as a sound designer came to an abrupt end around the age of eleven.

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