It’s still Elliott Koretz’ month here at Designing Sound and here’s a story on one of his most prolific collaborations, with director Michael Mann. In this interview, Elliott shares stories about working methods, the use of music and silence and Mann’s tireless search for perfection. Enjoy!

How did you and Michael Mann meet the first time?

My association with Michael actually goes way back to “Miami Vice” the tv show. I was an editor on it for the pilot and for two seasons. But my relationship as a supervisor started with his later tv show, “Robbery Homicide Division”. I interviewed with him and ended up getting the show. I then went on to “Collateral” and “Miami Vice”. We had a number of discussions about “Public Enemies” but ultimately I had another commitment on a different film that prevented me from doing it.

How would you describe him as a collaborator and filmmaker?

I think his track record in both tv and film speaks for itself. He has been an innovator for many years. I think one of the marks of greatness is when you are channel surfing and come across a film and even though you may have seen it countless times you stop and watch it. I find I do that with many of Michael’s films. It’s very exciting working with him. I think those of us that work with him are drawn in knowing every project has that potential for greatness. Michael is the definition of a tireless worker and the challenge is to keep up with him. He works himself harder than any director I know. His demands are many and it’s important to be mentally prepared to present him your best at all times. He has many ideas about sound and expects them to be addressed as quickly as possible. It’s very important for me to be clearly communicating this information to my crew. No question it is truly challenging working for and with him but I do understand that his intensity is in the quest for his ideal soundtrack.

You’ve collaborated on two feature films. Quite often, sound can be very tricky to talk about – how did you communicate about sound and how did your dialogue evolve throughout the process of making the two movies?

That’s a good question. Before I started designing on “Collateral” Michael called me into his office one day. He was still shooting the movie and wanted me to hear the production sound on a certain scene. It was the scene in the alleyway where Jaimie Foxx is tied to the steering wheel of his taxi and Tom Cruise comes out of a building and finds that some petty criminal has stolen his briefcase from the back seat. Tom ends up shooting the guy. The alleyway was between a tall apartment building and a large above ground parking structure. The resonant sounds of the gunshots were amazing even with blanks. Michael said, “This is the sound I want here”. I did some sweeetning to the impact of the shots but the final mix contained that same production echo. It’s really cool. I think this is a good example of Michael’s clarity in certain aspects of the sound track. He will be very clear and specific about what he is looking for. To that end he has been very generous with giving me access to do extensive field recordings for his films to facilitate that and I will speak on that subject more later on. But to address the question directly, the process I found worked best with Michael was to introduce sound elements via the Avid as early as possible. I would cut sequences, crash them down to make them Avid friendly and get that material over to the picture department to integrate into their cut. I think watching the film and hearing my material in that environment got him comfortable with the sound early in the post-production process. If he embraced it in the cutting room it really helped on the dub stage later. We would also have more traditional “spotting” sessions. My crew and I would screen reels with Michael and he would give notes along the way.

Michael Mann’s films are often very dependent on music and sound for their emotional impact. How much sound is written into his scripts?

Well the scripts were a good starting point for me to start thinking about what I needed to do. They were often very descriptive about the literal sound of the film. By that I mean very specific vehicles, weapons, and devices used in the story as well as the environments of each scene. I think the subjective design aspects of each film came more from viewing the movie and getting a sense of the flow of the picture editing.

How early on were you involved in the films? And what were your schedules?

I was fortunate that I started both “Collateral” and “Miami Vice” while they were still shooting. That gave me the ability to do a couple of very important things. First, to start getting my design sounds into the Avid very early in the process and secondly to get out to sets and have access to record. Both films were long post schedules and I think I was on for just about six months on each.

Mann actually started out working in documentaries. How important is realism to the sound design of Mann’s movies?

Very important. And that leads to my field recording. On “Collateral” we recorded every gun in the movie. We recorded the taxi. We recorded the metro trains for the film’s ending. These all were very detailed recording sessions with many mikes and multiple recorders. They were expensive to do but of incredible value to the sound of the movie. One of the more unusual outings occurred when I went out with my assistant, Bruce Barris, for an all night recording session in downtown Los Angeles. Our goal was to get recordings of the sounds one might hear at 3am. Now let me say 3am in downtown Los Angeles is quite interesting. There are many homeless people who sleep on the streets. It is an unfortunate reality and we tried to not intrude on anybody’s dignity. We recorded at a discreet distance the voices of the night. This material was used in the movie during the scenes after the first kill when Jamie realizes he is driving around with an assassin and the tension is high.

On “Miami Vice” I had the opportunity to fly down to Miami while they were shooting and do extensive recordings. We rented an airstrip and used it to record all the major autos in the film including a brand new Ferrari that wasn’t even available in the US yet. We had a few days with the speedboats and staged our own races recording bys and onboards. On one of the days at sea the lead speedboat driver (who turned out to be a reigning world champion) offered to run the boat out to Bimini for lunch. It’s 53 miles off the Miami coast and at full throttle it wouldn’t take very long to get there. Ultimately the assistant director accompanying us said no because he thought Michael wouldn’t approve. That and the fact we didn’t have our passports ended that little adventure. We also did some onboard recordings of a unique experimental airplane used in the film.

Recording the plane is an amusing story to share. Let me first describe the situation. This plane, an Adams A-500 was a very cool looking small airplane that had a featured role in a scene where our undercover heroes are smuggling some drugs into the country. Because it was so small we couldn’t be onboard while they were shooting but we did rig up our recorders and mikes and instructed the actors how to hit record and stop on the machines. The pilot (a real pilot made up to look like one of our leads) was very impatient and wanted us off the plane so he could get going. We finished what we needed to do, though not soon enough for him, and left to get to an airstrip where the plane was to fly over at what we were told treetop level for part of the smuggling sequence. We had two positions to record from at the field. My assistant was on one side of the runway and I stood in the middle but back towards the end of it. The plane came in and headed straight towards me. I stood with my shotgun mike in hand. The plane was so low I could clearly see the pilots face. Evidently he had decided that treetop level wasn’t good enough he had dropped down and came right at me just a few feet above the ground. I held my stance for as long as possible and then hit the deck. However being the professional that I am I held the mike up and got the recording. I heard later that the radio chatter from the pilot indicated he knew exactly what he was doing.

Once I edited out the “Oh Shit” it was a great close up recording.

These types of recording opportunities do not happen very often and I benefited from the fact that both movies had pretty decent budgets. I think this gives you a little insight into what Michael prioritizes when thinking about sound in his film.

As songs and music have such an important role in Mann’s movies do you collaborate more closely with the music supervisors and editors than on the usual Hollywood films where the two departments rarely meet until the mix? I read that on Collateral the song Shadow On the Sun was used already when shooting the scene with the coyotes in front of the cab.

You are correct. Music is a huge part of the sound of Michael’s movies. There was quite a bit of collaboration between our departments.We were all in the same building actually.  It’s really critical to know where the music is working and in what frequencies. Then we can compliment each other and not fight for the same sonic space.

I’ve read that he’s really hands-on in the mixing process. What is he like on the dub stage?

Michael comes to the stage really well prepared. He has notebooks put together in preproduction and during the filming that have his thoughts behind every scene. He references those throughout the dub. He works very closely with the dialog mixer and is active in crafting the subtle nuances that a db up or down can help sell. I think it’s fair to say it’s an intense experience for the mixers because of this attention to detail.

I like the way you utilize silence or near-silence in subjective ways in both Collateral and Miami Vice. How many of these decisions are made during the sound editing and how many during the mixing?

A little of both I think. There are definitely moments that are designed up front for dramatic effect. Silence preceding a big action piece is quite effective. I think it draws the audience into the world we have created. And so some of that is indeed planned. But there is always room for experimentation on the dub stage. Sometimes Michael would have new ideas for us to pursue. Sometimes a change in music would lead to a new sonic direction with a scene.

At the opposite end of silence, Miami Vice had some of the most intense, hefty gun sounds I can remember – actually one of the few other sequences that equal those is the shootout in Heat. What is it about Mann and gun sounds? And how did you get those Miami Vice effects?

The guns in Vice were actually a blend of production guns, library fx and a reworking of the Collateral gun recording sessions. For the big shootout scene near the end of the film our assistants went through every production take from the shootout and build a cutting library. That is what the bed of o/s shots were made from as well as some of the close up weapons. The design was inspired by the sounds of the news footage of the North Hollywood shootout. It was very much a news/documentary type feeling. The close up guns also had some layered library sounds. Then add the ricco’s, zip bys, impacts, debris and it’s a really effective sequence.

Both Collateral and Miami Vice are very nocturnal movies. Did that influence the use of sound?

Yes. We were extremely specific with every sound in both movies particularly with the night sequences. What I mean by specific is each sound cut in these scenes was really thought out. No background recordings just rolled in. Nothing superfluous. We would ask ourselves what was the motivation behind each of these elements? What really happens at night? With the long schedule we were able to fine tune and really think out what was important. I think this process is a great way to design in general, and certainly for the night time scenes the spare nature of the tracks added a great deal of suspense to the overall mood.

Has Mann mentioned some specific inspirations for his use of sound?

Not really. I know he is quite a student of film history but our conversations were much more directed to the specifics of what he wanted for the particular film and not so much about his motivation behind it.

He seems to be extremely committed to his work. Inspiring or scary?

Yes.

Seriously, as you may have gathered and to repeat what I said before, he is most definitely a challenging guy to work for. I think he is always searching for perfect moments. He pushes himself extremely hard and you as a supervisor have to understand how to keep your crew sharp through the long hours and through the pressure packed needs to feed the stage with up to the minute conformed materials. It’s a pretty relentless pursuit for long stretches of time and you really need to be psychologically ready to be onboard for the ride.

I am very appreciative of the opportunities Michael has given me. I am very proud of the work we have done and I leave open the door to possible future collaborations.

Ultimate Snow 2 is a reissue of Snowfall HD and Snowballs HD Ultra together in one collection with a few new sounds included. Recorded over the 2010-2011 winter season here in beautiful North Idaho, this 24-bit 96kHz collection contains 94 multi-take Broadcast WAV files totaling 425 individual snow sounds.

Boom Library releases Micro-BOOM – Black Powder

BLACK POWDER makes the walls shake! Massive cannon shots, ancient hand mortars and large saluting guns let you revive the old days of gun battles. You’re looking for a huge cannon shot to end a sea fight? That big explosion at the end of the movie is missing that one amazing crispy impact sound? Use BLACK POWDER and your search is over!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Affordable Audio 4 Everyone releases Heavy Armored Factory

The heavy Armored Factory features sounds you would expect to hear from a massive mecha or walker styled Machine. The library was built around Metal, Tools, and heavy processing. Perfect for building your mech sfx needs, or adding to various types of games built around a futuristic setting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Arrowhead Audio releases Rivers

A pack containing 11 recordings of different sections of the River Aled in North Wales and features Gurgles, Pools, White Water, Trickles and more. AAS-005 offers subtle but noticeable variations over each file to allow the sounds to be blended and evolved using the different sections of the river.

New article at AudioMedia magazine about the sound of “Uncharted: 3″. John Broomhall talks with audio lead Bruce Swanson and senior sound designer Derrick Espino.

Read it online

“When I saw it, I was amazed how old-fashioned it felt, in a good way,” comments Gary Rydstrom, who was co-supervising sound editor (with Richard Hymns), sound designer and FX re-recording mixer for the film. “So many modern movies tend to have more edge or sarcasm or self-awareness, and this is telling a very big story in an episodic way. It’s traveling long distances and meeting a lot of different characters. It has a David Lean grandness.

“It’s a story about humanity surviving in the midst of war, told through how people relate to horses, really,” he continues. “It has a beauty to it that’s fitting and also a real emotional power. I had never worked on a movie quite like this. For me, it felt like I was able to get into a time machine and do a movie in 1960, but with Pro Tools and digital consoles.” [Laughs]

Continue reading…

SPRINGS is a diverse new library of sound design source material released by HISSandaROAR and recorded by Tim Prebble.

Traversing from literal & very powerful trampoline springs & impacts through very strange bowed & manipulated extention springs all the way to abused outboard hardware (AKG BX5, Vermona Retroverb, Doepfer A199 with an Accuphonics tank) and of course, the classic slinky – but in this case stretched across a room and recorded with a contact mic at each end! Three sizes of thunder drums (long flexible springs attached to a drum resonator) were also hit, bowed & scraped to capture physically useful sounds as well as more evocative abstract material. This library is a diverse and inspiring collection of material that is incredibly fun to play with!

Available at $79 until December 25th (Regular price $99). Delivered at 24bit 96kHz. Includes 1,100+ sounds (6.9GB).

Below is a q&a with Tim, talking about the springs and some HISSandaROAR news:

What inspired the library?

Tim Preble: Being a bit of a dub-head I’ve always been into spring reverbs – I bought an AKG BX5 off ebay a decade or more ago, and I always remember almost blowing my speakers when I had it cranked up & accidentally moved my rack! But it was when I was working on the Cirque De Soilel 3D film that I had an epiphany. There is a scene in the film with some super hero characters doing totally outrageous moves on trampolines and despite being told the scene would be a music montage, I decided to try augmenting the rhythm with trampoline sounds. Next door to my studio is the rehearsal space for local circus group Fuse Circus, so I borrowed a small trampoline from them and recorded it using contact mics as well as normal mics. As soon as I listened to the contact mics I realised it was basically a large scale spring reverb – every hit made the all of the springs resonate! We did end up using some of the recordings in the final mix, and after I uploaded a video of recording those effects a few people contacted me, wanting access to the sounds. I couldn’t give them those particular sounds as they were specifically for the film, but I made a mental note to revisit that particular prop. And as always I started researching other elements I could record….

Click here to view the embedded video.

What else did you find?

TP: Good characterful springs are not actually that easy to find, but one source that proved useful was from exercise equipment – I disassembled a few chest expanders, and spent a bit of time attaching them to objects in ways that would encourage resonance… I also bought an old kids toy – a ride on horse, that was suspended by nice creaky springs. I explored other spring reverb outboard effects – I also own a Vermona Retroverb which is great – it actually has a ‘crash’ button on it that sends an impulse to the springs, but it also has a really nice resonant filter. My modular synth has a spring reverb, a Doepfer A199 module, so I bought an old Accuphonics 3 spring tank and used the module to get clean audio output from it, and I beat the hell out of that tank! I’m surprised it survived, but it was worth it. Some of the short sounds make me think of retro weapons, but some of the flickery sounds I got from it by applying friction along it, I have never heard before!

And of course I messed around with some slinkys – I hunted for the biggest/longest one I could find and then tensioned it horizontally across my studio, with a contact mic at each end, 20 feet apart. Another device I messed with are called Thunder drums – I bought one when I was in Bali a few years ago, its basically a long small tightly wound spring that is attached to the skin of a drum. If you shake it, it makes a sound a bit like thunder and hitting the spring has an almost flangey tone to it, but I discovered a few other interesting ways to extract sounds from it. Bowing the spring while varying the length created some really interesting pitch bends, but so also did rubbing or scraping your hand along the spring. A few times I’ve had to make sounds for someone suddenly abseiling or lowering down & I’ve always struggled for source material with that constant descending friction, but I’ve found a great element now!

Were they difficult to record?

TP: Some props really took some thinking about, because the sound they produced was acoustically very quiet but attaching a contact mic to the primary vibrating element meant the mic itself would absorb and/or stop the resonance. I think there is a concept in physics, where the act of making an experiment alters the circumstances or environment to such a degree that the experiment itself is no longer valid – it was a bit like that! I also soon learned that it is difficult to keep a contact mic attached to moving objects, so it took different setups and strategies depending on the specific sound I was after, even within the same prop. That little wood block with the tiny spring at the start of the video is a good example. I could get tone from it but I couldn’t record it – it just didn’t vibrate enough to excite the wood it was attached to. It was only when i clamped it down & actually attached the contact mics between the wood & the spring itself that I got interesting results. But, as you see (backwards) at the start of the video, it eventually flew to bits!

What are your favourite sounds? Any happy accidents?

TP: This library is full of happy accidents! Someone on my blog asked how I go about choosing what sounds to record, and I had to confess its half intent and half happy accidents – experimenting & being curious. The last prop I recorded for the library was when I revisited that trampoline, and having spent so much time recording other springs I had a few more ideas about how to get some new sounds from it. One aspect I now know is that to get ‘big’ dynamic sounds often requires gentle technique and hitting that trampoline gently with a gong beater, and being mic’d up and gain staged accordingly allowed me to get some huge subby sounding impacts, which feel more powerful than the hardest hits that I did later. But going back to that tiny spring, I now knew that attaching the contact mics on to the spring itself led to interesting sounds (it just couldn’t be the spring that was doing all the work, or the mic would detach) So the last sound I recorded was one of my favourites: attaching the contact mics directly to the springs and then very gently hitting other springs & elements of the trampoline. I swear there is an entire gamelan orchestra inside that trampoline when it was rigged this way – I could have sat & played it for hours. Over-recording was actually a real problem with this library, not over-level but content. I’d find a sound that I loved, that was really evocative or interesting and I could easily keep playing with it for hours! Must. Stop. Recording.

It’s been a great year for independent sound libraries – do you think its reaching saturation point with all these boutique library start ups?

TP: To be completely honest I think we’re barely scratching the surface. If you combined all of my libraries with all the great libraries released by Frank, Michael, Chuck & all the new sites, we would hardly match 5% in terms of quantity of the old school libraries such as Sound Ideas CD collections or whats on the Sound Dogs site. But in terms of quality, resolution and providing unique, characterful and interesting sounds I think at times we surpass them… Every time someone releases a new collection of recordings, whether you buy them or not, you know they are a resource waiting to be called upon. I sometimes dream about the huge library resources studios like Skywalker Sound must have, and while we’ll never get close to that, at least we’re slowly providing more diverse options, and they are options available to anyone.

Whats next for HISSandaROAR? Are you having a holiday??

TP: Indeed. This is my last library release for the year. As 2012 is a busy year with films for me I’ve deliberately been recording as much as possible and I have another couple of libraries recorded. The last task for me for the year is to finish the HISSandaROAR Christmas present, which is a free 24bit 96kHz collection of Tortured Cymbals, a preview of a library for next year. It will get sent out to everyone on the mail list next week, as a small gesture & to say a huge thank you for all the support this year. And thanks to you, Miguel and everyone at Designing Sound for an inspiring year!!
Happy Holidays!

We got to sit down with Ren Klyce, Oscar-nominated sound designer (Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), to ask a few questions about the technical and creative sides of the sound design process for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

We learned how Klyce (pictured below) and his team created the soundscapes of freezing cold and blind terror for the film. Here’s how it went

Continue reading at Post Magazine

I wanted to write a different kind of article, one that indulges my more geeky-tech side. While the main source for material remains great recordings, there are lots of times when we find solutions to problems in processing; these days that mainly means plug-ins, but that was not always so.

Sometimes, looking back, I see creative sound design moments as being more like a place you might visit, as opposed to a method you might use over and over. Time has shown me that the tools will constantly change around me. My main editing platform has changed three times during the course of my career. And so, some great tools become obsolete or unavailable. For this reason, I always encourage designers, when they find their way to an interesting combination of source/processing, to keep going and record lots of material; the next occasion you may want to repeat the process might not be so easy to get back to !  Some examples from my past follow:

The Ionizer

This was a great, if somewhat hard to master, plug-in. It did lots of stuff, eq-wise. One of its tricks was to be able to analyze the frequency profile of one sound, and then to impose it on another. I used it in the film “Wanted” to make some design-ey glass breaks in the convenience store scene by imposing the frequency spectrum of glass windchimes on some explosions:

The Ionizer was so widely cracked that its makers decided not to carry it forward to OS-X; so it has become inconvenient to use, to say the least.

Vokator

While the NI vocoder Vokator still works, I notice that NI no longer sells or supports it, so it is only a matter of time before it too, becomes unavailable. I have had great luck in using it for creatures. In short, I like to put a series of animal sounds on a software sampler, under different keys, put some under midi fader or foot pedal controller, feed that into Vokator as the carrier, with a mic as the modulator. Set up so you are listening on headphones to your output only, and using lots of gestural control on the faders and pitch wheel, while making ridiculous sounds and screaming into the mic, start to work your way towards interesting sounds. Record your output so that you only have to get it right once, for any given moment ! Record lots of stuff, go through it and pick out the good bits, then edit it together as you would for any creature.

Synclavier

Ah, the synclav. While I have so much to say about how the interface on this wonderful machine shaped the outlook of so many sound designers, for now I will mention only one detail. There was a button combination that would allow you to use the big wheel control to change the octave ratio of the keyboard tuning. This meant that on each side of a breakpoint, as you turned the dial, the sound would pitch up to the right of the breakpoint, and pitch down to the left, by as much as hundreds of semi-tones. It was useful for making some sci-fi type turbine sounds; like this Minbari engine made for the tv series Babylon-Five.

Hyper-prism

It’s not that the plug-ins in Hyper-prism did things other plug-ins don’t, it was more of the interface it presented you with. In particular, the pitch-time widow let you move a dot around in a 2-d box in a way that made interesting ‘warpy’ sounds; here is some warped out bg vocal stuff from “Exorcist the Beginning”

PCM 80 Doppler

Once upon a time I actually made doppler bys by waving a mic past a speaker. Then came the Lexicon PCM-80 with a pair of doppler algorithms that could be mapped to a mod wheel controller. While not as realistic as say the Waves or Grm plug-in, it was much warpier. This is some warped out metal used in “Spawn” made with the PCM 80

Sound Hack

This program is still available, though I find lately that it has problems with the headers on lots of my sound files. While not real-time, I found that I could still have some ‘lucky-accidents’ with the convolution and mutate functions. Here is a bit of screeching metal mutated with a slow masking tape-pull, used as the antennae freezing in the Super-Freeze scene for “The Day After”.

Max-Msp

This wonderful program is very deep, and I will never totally master it. But it does unheard of things with sound. There is a free-ware player only version available, but it is hard to adjust your inputs and outputs on the free version. There is also a freeware language called Pure Data (PD) that has the same functionality; but MAX is the one I was introduced to and became familiar with. Here is some granular type stuff made with MAX, for the smash movie hit “Apollo 18″

There are tons more to list. While there are more plug-ins for Pro Tools than I will ever have the time to truly explore; it’s good to remember that there are lots of other interesting platforms and programs and hardware to check out when looking for sound solutions to design problems.

Over the years, transformation of sound has become a giant field that barely touches the infinite. Sounds can be manipulated in a lot of different ways, using a lot of different things. Besides that, the different ways sounds can be recorded, and the variety of tools that allow us to gather sonic information from the world evolve so fast that we can never stop to find new ways to generate, listen, record, and process sound.

I’m not sure if it’s right to call this a golden era for sound transformation, or a saturated culture when the possibilities control us. Although, technological evolution represents new frontiers for what we can imagine and create. When it comes about transformation of sound, I immediately think about Trevor Wishart, composer and author dedicated -between many other things- to explore sound morphology and its transformation. In his great book “Audible Design”, he says that “the ways in which this sound can be transformed are limited only by the imagination of the composer.” (Suggested reading: Red Bird, Interview @ USO)

And that’s the point. Technology evolves and give us new ways of transforming sound, but there’s also a parallel evolution on the way we imagine and the sounds we know we’re able to create. However, many things remain fresh and undiscovered. Technology has risen the possibilities for creating and transforming sounds, but hasn’t changed too much things in the way we percibe sound and how we define the aesthetics of our work. I remember an interview Matteo Milani had with sound designer Richard Beggs and Matteo asked him about the impact of the technological evolution on his artistic approach, to which Richard said:

No, there isn’t any. I could speculate on how my work has been affected by new technologies, but I don’t think it’s that interesting. I feel my approach has always been fundamentally the same. It’s been the same as my approach to painting. My interactions with the track and the process by which ideas occur and develop is very similar to my interaction with the canvas as a painter. Light, dark, mass, line, contrast, color, texture, objects advance or recede, these visual properties all have sonic equivalents. These qualities, when used successfully, contribute to an emotional or expressive state that advances the story.

Let’s say a transformation is any kind of variation applied to a sound, in order to obtain a new object. It can be because of the narrative, because of the different qualities you attribute to it, its meaning, its emotional or musical characteristics, its context, etc. In the world of sound design, we could say sound effects are almost always transformed with the story in mind. Field recording material is processed and transformed in order to achieve sonic metaphors, create tension, put questions to the audience, change realities, influence the qualities of a character, recreate an era, tell a story. All these decisions create a fascinating link between technology and the storytelling; and the evolution of the tools, also gives more opportunities for discovering new flavors that can not only enhance the sound, but the story itself.

So today we’re going to focus on sound effects transformation, from the recording process to the extreme processing. The material to be used is the just released library of Twisted Tools, called Transform. Quite unique library created by sound designer Jean-Edouard Miclot and perfect for today’s our experiments, since it includes a wide variety of sounds material. It’s a gold mine; useful, inspiring, full of great sound ideas to learn from and also to use and re-transform in many different ways. Sounds are delivered at 96k and have a great job on the metadata, which is Soundminer friendly.

The library is composed by a diverse gallery of sounds, intended to be used as part of music and sound design compositions. The package is about layers, textures, and flavors. Tasteful pieces of sound created in a line between the organic and synthetic worlds, and developed with the goal of being used alone or inside a combination with other different elements.

Preparing Ingredients

This analogy of flavors and ingredients its actually something that Jean-Edouard uses as an inspiration on his approach to sound design and the creation of the library, whereas each sound is created as an ingredient, as Jean-Edouard explains:

We always tend to make an analogy of what we hear with something we know. Some people like using painting and colors as a representation for composing sounds, either it’s musical composition or sound editing. Being French, I prefer talking about cooking and ingredients :-) Imagine that you have to cook for all your friends coming over to your house. You can simply buy a frozen meal at the closest supermarket and it won’t take you too long to prepare it, but you also know that there’s a chance they bought the same one before. Or you can decide to surprise them buying all the ingredients you need to cook a unique meal. Would you be more interested in this meal or in the one that everybody can find in the frozen aisle of the supermarket?

I think of editing like cooking. You blend an ingredient with another one in order to create a distinct flavor or texture. But if you inappropriately mix too many of them, your taste buds won’t be able to distinguish anything and your meal will start to lose of taste. Ingredients can also be processed by crunching, scraping, mashing, steaming, heating, freezing or fermenting them. It just transforms a matter into another one like we do with sounds. Tasting is also very similar to hearing. It is just another kind of information that your brain can interpret. A wine for example is a complex combination of tastes and dynamics that change over time.

So, this library is about ingredients which can also work as a full meal if you like, but these sounds are mostly transformations for recordings that are intended to be part of your meals. We’re going to explore the whole process. From gathering the initial elements, to the process of combining and cooking the final meal.

Let’s start with the initial sound collecting. This library is a perfect example of how important is not only the process of alterations you can do to your recordings, but the experimentation and research on props, tools, places and objects to record, as well as knowing how to perform with them in unique ways, meaning that great transformations or sound not only depend on the process applied, but also on how the material is performed and recorded.

I think that knowing how to transform sound is important, but knowing what to transform is even more important, since the greatest sound effects comes from great recordings and disciplined recordists which are not only interested in the act of recording, but listening, researching and being aware for the accidents the real world always have. On the foreword of “The Sounds of Star Wars”, Ben Burtt comments something about this topic:

Many of  the sounds have stories behind their origin that I love to recall for fans. Some of the most famous sounds were thoughtfully imagined and slowly crafted. However, many of them were surprises, “accidents” that came about during research and trough discovery. Some of the most famous sounds were discovered during the course of daily life. Most often, a successful sound came from an object with no real connection to the film object it meant to portray aurally. So I learned to record and stockpile anything that caught my attention-and, ultimately, I found a use for just about every noise in the collection.

In the case of the library, Jean-Edouard shared a fantastic video for the article, showing different examples of recordings, some of them used in the library.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can watch more inspiring videos from Jean-Edouard on his blog.

Combinations

Jean-Edouard’s recordings passed trough a wide variety of processes and editing, and ended grouped into 10 categories of ingredients for all kinds of recipes. Below you can hear two examples of sfx I did by just editing and combining sounds from the library. No plug-ins were used, just common editing processes that pretend to transform the original material into new one, by making a fusion of elements.

Hits - Created by combining sounds of the whoosh, impact, mecha, and crunch categories.

Transformers - Sequence of sounds from the Mecha, FX, Impact, and Bass categories.

Now let’s try with another method for combining the sounds, not depending on the timeline of the DAW and having the opportunity to perform and modulate the sounds in real time. I’m using Alchemy for that, blending several sounds with different sampling engines and modulations. Here are some quick creations with FX and organic categories of the library, layered and mixes in real time.

Extreme shots – Several LFOs and envelopes modulating the pitch and stretch parameters of the sources. There’s also a lot of movement in the main tuning control section. Four sources were used simultaneously.

Alien delays – Variations/repetitions created with modulation and filtering plus two delays and camel reverb (alchemy bulti-in effects). Four sources used.

Going to the Extreme

It’s fascinating to hear the amount of variations generated by the combination of devices. Effects chains that allow us to discover new sounds, most of the time suppressive. Sometimes I feel like the computer is actually designing the sounds for me, giving me ideas or even “finished” results that I never thought about making, similar to the approach of generative music and how the creator is put in the audience role, as Brian Eno said on a recent talk he gave (via musicofsound), using an analogy on composers as gardeners:

About 20 years ago I came up with this idea, this term, ‘generative music,’ which is a general term I use to cover not only the stuff that I do, but the kind of stuff that Reich is doing, and Terry Riley and lots and lots of other composers have been doing.

And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. And that life isn’t necessarily exactly what you’d envisaged for them. It’s characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I’m really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound.  So in fact, I’m deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well. And indeed, I often am.

What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.

For sound effects experimentation, we can also setup systems that allow us to generate a new world of sound just by transforming another source and experimenting with it in many different ways. Not thinking about what we’re going to get, but creating and then listening for finally deciding what to use. Let’s put it in other words, from the composer Christian Zanési, who told the following in an interview at PRESENCES electronique 2009:

I don’t go from idea to sound, but the opposite, I go from sound to idea. That is I need to find the sound that touches me for different reasons. [...] Inside this sound there is a potential, and the idea born from the sound is not subjected to an idea, it is the opposite. We can consider the sound as some kind of fugue, which means that there is a potential for development, and to work I need to find a sound which will be at the base because there is an emotive shock, there is really something imposing, which will be the source of my work, and at that moment we can listen to the sound in depth not for what it is, but for what it can become.

Most of the time, sound effects are created based on initial ideas, on the story. However, there’s a big potential on experimentation and creative uses of technology that can alter the sound designer’s initial idea and can also feature a potential for development, as Zanési comments.

I wanted to include some examples of this kind of extreme processing, so I talked with a specialist in the area: Richard Devine, who kindly shared some experiments and comments for the article.

(demo song created with sounds of the library)

I was really excited when Josh from Twisted Tools asked me if I would be interested in creating a demo track for Jean-Edouad’s new sound effects library. I have been a long time fan of Jean’s work and sound effects blog. His sounds and experiments have been a constant source of inspiration for me lately. I was really happy to work with him on this piece and even more happy to contribute some sounds as well.

For the “Transform” trailer demo song I mixed a few of my favorite sounds from Jean’s collection and tried to create a short slow piece that really showcased the versatility of some these sounds in a musical composition. I also included a few additional sound effects and percussion sounds from my personal library that are also included in the collection.

Richard experimented using the GRM Shuffling and Valhalla Shimmer plug-ins to get different gestural cascading pitching effects, some of these used for the tails and breaks in the demo. Here is the example:

Click here to view the embedded video.

He also shares another experiment with GRM Fusion, Evolution and SoundToys EchoBoy, combined for getting pitch modulated metallic effects that sound as a beautiful and twisted concert of grains.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Delicate Works

Transformation doesn’t mean complex chains and processes. Soft and subtle effects can make big changes into a sound effect, and sometimes even better results than those obtained with a big chains of the world’s most advanced plug-ins. At the end what you will get are just different results, and the use you give them will always depend on the story or the specific needs of project you’re working on.

For example, here are some textures and atmospheres created by time-stretching techniques, using +spiralstretch plug-in. I’m using one instance of the effect, plus some tweaks of Soundminer’s pitch control. The results are fun and always interesting with any particular sound, but I really liked how it sounded with the sounds from the Eerie category of the library.

This particular category feature long sounds recorded in large acoustic spaces or altered recordings that aim to recreate abstract tonal atmospheres. As Jean-Edouard adds: “it could be props clinked in a garage, a door squeaking in the washroom, a bowed spring,  a wine glass rubbed underwater, a large metal sheet mangled like thunder or any spectral processing done with Kyma, Metasynth and the Michael Norris plugin suite that give musical and emotional qualities”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s explore another delicate work, this time with some of my favorite sounds from the library, those included in the micro category. As Jean-Edouard commented, the source are recordings of springs, neonodium magnet buzzes, wood stumps, door creaks, and mouth noises that manipulated into Kyma’s microsound sampler. The results are quite interesting and make place for a lot of cool things. Below is another simple but radical example, using GRM Delays to multiply the particles and define new densities and variations of a single recording. The source is a recording of an egg, looped and processed trough the delay.

And what happens if we want to go deeper and create a more complex cloud of particles? Added another delay, this time with soundhack’s bubbler, a free granular delay suitable for pretty dense and extensive tails of granulation.

Torture Chamber

Finally, I had time to torture some of the sounds from the library. I’m a big fan of spectral processing, which I implement in several ways, using Max/MSP, GRM Tools and SoundHack (both the free app and the effects) plug-ins. The latter are developed by Tom Erbe, who recently released a package called pvoc kit, and including plug-ins based on phase vocoder and granular synthesis algorithms. For torturing the sound effects of the library, I’m using two plug-ins from the kit: +pitchsift and +spiralstretch,. Simple but powerful tools that, combined, result in a lot of interesting sounds and really extreme results if you like.

+pitchsift is based on a phase vocoder algorithm and allows you to use FFT or sinebank engines to alter the pitch of a sound. +spiralstretch deals with up to 100x of time stretching, based on pvoc or granular algorithms.

The wide range of sounds you can get with these “small” plug-ins is amazing. If you’re a user of SoundHack or any plug-in developed by Tom Erbe, you already know how far you can go with the tools, always finding something new and interesting. Listen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m happy to announce Harry Cohen as the featured sound designer of November.

Bio

I was born in New York City a long time ago…..1954. Grew up in Flushing , Queens (a borough of NYC). Undoubtedly the city has left an indelible imprint on me. As a kid I was mainly a science nerd that liked to build hand wired oscillator circuits in my basement ‘lab’. I moved to CA with my family just in time to start High School, in what is now Santa Clarita. Now, in NY, I was an amateur musician, but never considered good enough to partake in the neighborhood jam sessions. Out in suburban CA, the field was much more open, and I soon found myself playing piano in the school jazz band and involved in several garage bands. I started playing nightclubs like the old Gazzari’s on the Sunset Strip before we were out of High School. After school, I concentrated on music, with several side jobs to supplement income; I was a hospital lab assistant, I worked a plastic injector press, and did some time at a picture frame factory, until I almost cut off my finger. Eventually music was able to barely pay the bills, and I spent the next 12 years or so playing clubs and pursuing a career with various recording acts. Hunting in the bargain bins, you might find some records I did with a band signed to a Motown offshoot. I spent more than a year traveling back and forth from Alaska to Hawaii with a show band; that is where I met my lovely wife; she was one of the singers in the band.

Eventually, I was asked to do some piano overdubs on a new-agey album at a studio in Burbank that was just starting to shift gears into post production. The manager at the time was a musician I had been in several projects with. After the sessions, they offered me some part time work helping to organize their library of synth patches. After about 3 days of that , the owner asked me, out of the blue, if I would be interested in trying my hand at sound effects. So, I was already in my early thirties before I ever even considered getting involved in post !

The facility , EFX, was using emulator II’s (an antique sampler) to generate sound fx that were recorded to multitrack analog tape machines, synched up to  3/4″ video machines, all tied together with early synchronization systems that were very tweaky. I sat in a room with my emu and a stack of floppy disks, with an engineer (Ken Teaney) who recorded the stuff, and was my first real mentor. Occasionally he’d would make us trade places, and taught me the synchronizer and some console basics , though I already knew some of that from my music experience. So, I never went to a school to study post; it was all on the job training.

We started doing overflow work for Dave Yewdall’s company. He was the first real sound editor/designer I met, and he also taught me a lot of stuff, as well as sharing lots of library. I used to go over to his facility and transfer stuff from mag dubbers to F-1 digital tape (an early digital medium, before even DAT). I did a  fair number of films for Roger Corman’s company. I also did lots of industrial videos, some commercials, lots of TV work and animation, and also a lot of stuff for theme parks. The wide range of projects was a great lesson in flexibility. For some of those endeavors, the clients are sitting right behind you the whole time; thats a particular kind of pressure familiar to guys who do commercials.

Somewhere in there we started expanding and getting better films. We switched to Synclaviers, and the edit rooms became one man operations, recording to sony digital multi-track instead of analog; then it became DA-88′s; and finally pro tools. Now that was a great set-up; Synclaviers recording to Pro Tools!

Lots of really talented sound designers and mixers passed through EFX; and it was a great environment of exchanging techniques and figuring things out.(Gary Rizzo, Dave Farmer, Paul Menichini, Tim Gedemer,Tim Walston, Ann Scibelli, Juan Peralta, Tony Sereno, Michael Kamper, Marc Fishman, are just a partial list of ex-EFX-ers).I was head of our small department, and had an awesome day shift of talent ! (I am sure there are lots of names I am forgetting; my apologies.)Also we started to do some game work early on for Charles Deenen; I am sure association with him has had an influence on all of us !

At one point we partnered with Steve Flick’s company, and he was a great source of information and guidance for me. We did one film that mixed up at Skywalker, and that experience was a real eye-opener as well. Randy Thom and Laura Hirschberg were part of the mix team, and Gary Rydtrom came by and introduced himself to me, and invited me to come by and hang out while he was prepping stuff for “Casper”. Everyone was very open and willing to share information.

After about 14 yrs, EFX re-organized their business, and  I accepted an offer from Lon Bender and Wylie Stateman to join Soundelux. Except for a six month period where I was ‘on  loan’ to Soundstorm , I have been here ever since; those are the only facilities I have worked at ! The opportunity to be present at the mixes of the films I work on has been one of the most beneficial learning experiences I can think of.

By the way , when I can, I still get out and play in some local LA blues clubs , and I have an awesome collection of vintage keyboards and stomp box effects!

Selected Works

• Green Lantern (2011) – Sound designer
• Robin Hood (2010) – Sound designer
• Complacent (2010) – Supervising sound editor
• Inglourious Basterds (2009) – Sound designer
• Star Trek (2009) – Sound designer
• Wanted (2008) – Sound designer
• Death Proof (2007) – Sound effects designer
• Blood Diamond (2006) – Sound effects editor
• Van Helsing (2004) – Sound designer
• Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) – Co-supervising sound editor
• Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) Sound designer
• Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) – Sound designer
• The Patriot (2000) – Sound designer and Sound effects editor
• Blade (1998) – Sound designer, supervising sound effects editor)
• Babylon 5 (TV series) (1994-1998) – Sound designer
• Spawn (1997) – Sound effects editor
• Starship Troopers (1997) – Sound designer

More at IMDb

Game Informer has published several videos about the sound of “Transformers: Fall of Cybertron”.

When we decided upon Transformers as a cover story, I started asking around the office looking for ideas for our video coverage. Without a second of hesitation, Game Informer’s own Jeff Cork demanded to learn how the team at High Moon Studios recreates the iconic sounds of the transformations. We are happy to say that we captured the process on video along with many other glimpses inside the creation of audio for Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. Three separate videos each capture an element of the audio work being done for the game, from the fun of foley sound capturing, to working with the inimitable voice of Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen.

Full article