‘Pugs Luv Beats‘ is a hilarious music composition game for iOS devices developed by Edinburgh based studio Lucky Frame. It’s about guiding pugs (in costumes) around a galaxy of worlds, whilst creating an endless variety of music. It sounds fantastic and runs on a generative sound/music engine developed in Pure Data.

Lucky Frame is Yann Seznec (artist, musician and sound designer), Jonathan Brodsky (artist, designer, musician, coder) and Sean McIlroy (illustrator and print maker). Jon and Yann were kind enough to make some time right after the release of the game to talk about the sounds and technology behind Pugs Luv Beats.

DS: How did Pugs Luv Beats come together?

Yann: Jon and I made an app called Mujik a couple of years ago. A lot of people downloaded it and there were a lot of good reviews. It was basically a different approach to music on a mobile interface. After playing around with that for a while we started thinking about how much further we could take the idea and Jon started getting into the idea of making games. So, we started thinking about how we could really bridge that gap between music and games. What if you could use a game interface to create music rather than to play music that is already there? That was the starting point. Jon made a demo which we dubbed ‘Space Hero’. The idea was that you were controlling a little ship that was shooting enemies. As the enemies came on screen they made a sound and as you destroyed them they made a sound, with the twist being you could edit how the enemies came after you so it was like a piano roll hybrid drum sequencer. It was more of a proof-of-concept than anything else. We took that to Channel 4 and to make a very long story short they ended up eventually telling us that they liked the idea and that they wanted to invest in it. Interestingly they told us, ‘We want to invest in the concept but don’t make that game’ [laughs]. So we started making various different prototypes for what became Pugs Luv Beats.

Click here to view the embedded video.

DS: What is Pug Luv Beats about?

Yann: We were just prototyping with lines and dots on the screen and I think we went through two full prototypes. We ended up with a little bug and you had to tell the bug where to go, and once it did it would create a sound and then you would have a second bug and you can tell that bug where to go and it would instantly start creating these interesting rhythmic loops. That was the core of the game. Once we had a fun-to-play instrument, we tried to figure out how to make a game out of it – which was quite a challenge. Eventually the bugs became pugs and we designed this whole crazy world around them and decided the sounds that they made would be dependent on what terrain they were on.

We then made a bunch of different terrains and terrain sound banks and each of them react slightly differently. We then had the idea of the pugs being slower on certain kind of terrains, and you can speed them up with costumes – if you want. If you don’t, then it means that they are slow. If they have a costume its going to be 25-50% faster which is really interesting because something that has a slow melody and rhythm will speed up.

The way we have it set up with ratios is quite cool because there are eight terrains and each of them has a slightly different ratio of ‘slower-ness’, which means you can get a ratio of 66% between two of the same distance and if it’s 4/3 or 5/4 or 7/4 you can get all these interesting rhythmic ratios going. The other level that we’ve added on top of it is that where the pugs are hitting are given a value. So as the pugs are running around generating all this music, they are raising your in-game currency and allowing you to explore other places and find new terrains and new costumes and new planets. I’ve just described the full game right there – Pugs Luv Beats.

Click here to view the embedded video.

DS: So it’s a generative music game which was designed in Pure Data? Why Pure Data?

Yann: That was a decision we made at the end of the prototype phase, it was almost too late.

Jon: LibPD (embeddable PD core) came out some time in 2010 and PD has been around for god knows how long. The embeddable core is so great for us.

Yann: It’s really amazing because before that we didn’t really have a proper way of doing sound at all.

Jon: I was writing the entire DSP engine and right before we got in to LibPD I had a chain-able DSP system that was defined through code. But, it wasn’t twenty years of audio research [laughs] that we could just drop in to our program.

Yann: I know very little code. Whereas, my training, if I can call it that, is in graphical programming with software like Max. I felt our time wasn’t being used effectively. As soon as we were able to integrate LibPD in to the whole system, it made our sound development strategy thousands and thousands of times better. Pure Data, being a brilliant and occasionally frustrating thing, was overall really good. The integration through LibPd and in to Objective C is surprisingly painless once its all setup.

Jon: A lot of people have done a lot of good work. The toolkit that we are using for running the game is called openFrameworks, which like Max or PD came out of the art and code movement. And a guy made a wrapper that takes the nice parts of LibPD and none of the nitty gritty things and it was probably less than a day’s worth of work to drop PD in to the game engine I had been building for a few months. LibPD itself was made by Peter Brinkmann with help from Peter Kirn. We have a lot to thank them both for.

DS: How is PD integrated with the game engine?

Jon: I basically send messages, just like how you would send messages in PD or Max/MSP between your different sub patches. I send those same messages from my game engine about what’s happening in the world in to LibPD. I construct lists that say, “There’s a bug on this tile, he’s picking up a beet and the BPM is whatever and the tile is this type”. There’s really not much integration, I can just tell PD what’s happening in the game at any point in time and then PD/sound designer deals with it.

Yann: Yeah, it literally was me making Pure Data patches as if I was making Pure Data patches for anything. The only difference being I have a little receive box in there that Jon is making the sends for and it outputs a giant list.

Jon: There’s one list for sound effects, there’s one for what happens in the world and there is one when the world is setup – I use a random number generator to generate the world.

Yann: It’s really great. It’s an amazing system. I get these three lists. The last list Jon described is the first thing that happens.

DS: So the world creation is completely random?

Jon: The nice thing about random numbers on computers is that they are totally predictable. The way random number generators work is that you give them a seed value and then every sequential random number is based on that seed value, so I don’t store the worlds, I just store seed values. When you go back to the world, I see the random number generator and regenerate the whole thing. That is also how we communicate about what world is on screen – just through those seed values.

Yann: We never even see that number.

DS: So it is a sort of identifier for the world?

Yann: That is exactly what it is. I use this number to do things, like pick a sound library for the beats.

DS: How many libraries does the game use?

Yann: At the moment there are only five. We may add some later on.

Jon: But that’s partially true. Only half of the sound engine is the beat sounds.

Yann: So beats are what happens when a Pug hits a beet [laughs]

Jon: The spelling of beats varies between vegetable beets and musical beats throughout the code. Sometimes the Pugs are still called rats for historical reasons [laughs]

Yann: Going through the code is hilarious! There are 5 beat libraries, which are each comprised of: a kick equivalent, a snare/clap equivalent and sound for when the beet is harvested. Otherwise there are libraries for each terrain as well. When it chooses a random number, it uses that random number to select which beat library it will use. It also sets a couple of other things – like there’s a little synthesiser you can play along with the planet. It will choose an attack and a decay on that synthesiser as well, that way each planet will have a lightly different sounding synthesiser. Another important thing that it does is it picks a scale or a mode (depending on how you want to think of it) and it applies that scale or mode to all the sound libraries and the synthesiser as well (the synthesiser is a semi-tuned synth). That way whenever you got to a planet it will be one of eight scales/modes. The way I’ve done that is for each library I have made a thirteen file sound-set for a chromatic scale, but that random number will select which look-up table it’s using and will select only eight of those thirteen. It does that across all the sound libraries. Another part of that list is the BPM. Each planet sounds quite different, even on a global level – in terms of being slower/faster, minor, mixolydian, major, etc.

DS: Is the BPM random?

Yann: The BPM for each planet is random, but will be the same when you return to that planet each time. Jon generates it from the random number, but sends it to me separately so its easier. I use that BPM not to trigger the sounds, because I’m getting the triggers from the code, but to calculate the delay times so that they are synced. I’ve put a soft delay on virtually everything to give a ‘rounder’ feeling. This whole process happens in a tenth of a second. Once you are on a planet, you have all these pugs running around. If you set a node and the pug starts running out, every time the pug jumps on to a new square I will get a list of numbers from Jon’s code. The list will be an identifier for the pug, what terrain he is on, whether he is wearing a hat, whether he is wearing a skin, whether the node he is jumping on is a node you placed or if he is just jumping on it to get to the node (I use that to make two different sounds).

Jon: It easier to think of the world as a heightmap rather than separate pieces of terrain. So there is actually an even more specific number. You can say, “this is sand, but also sand 0.5”, you can get a number between 0 and 1.

Yann: In practice that number is giving us a separate value for each terrain tile, which gives us a kind of location. If we have a specific number for each tile, every time a pug goes to that tile it plays the same sound.

Jon: It makes it like an instrument you can discover. It’s like a piano where you don’t know what note each key is going to play, but if you go back to that key it will play the same note.

DS: Each terrain has a different sound bank then?

Yann: Yes. I tried to match a vague conceptual thing to each sound bank. For example, the mountain is a kind of far off sounding synthesiser. The desert is an Iranian dulcimer called the Santoor, which is quite cool. For water I have an African harp. The links between the actual sounds and the terrain are somewhat tenuous but I was prioritising on making everything sound good. It can get quite chaotic when you randomly get a planet that has got five terrains – but that’s part of the fun.

DS: Were there many technical limitations in creating sound for such a game?

Yann: It limited me in the sense that I wasn’t expecting it. I was very used to patching on computers, so I had loads of buffers and then at one point Jon asked me, ‘How many buffers are you running?’. And, I was like, “There’s eight instances of that and there’s four buffers in each, so there’s thirty-two”, and he was like, “YOU HAVE THIRTY-TWO BUFFERS?!”, and that was just in one of the sections [laughs]. In PD doing polyphony is much more round about than in Max, so I did have to learn that kind of stuff. Artistically I didn’t feel very limited by it. What was really fun about setting up this patch was trying to make it as flexible as possible so that I could develop it further down the line. One of the updates for example might have pickups that change how the audio is played, so you can have the sound in reverse for or you could have the sound engine going all wonky at some point or the other.

DS: Considering you can do anything you want, do you set up artistic limitations for yourself?

Yann: It’s really hard. I think for us the biggest advantage in forcing us to be limited is we have a real goal in mind – a released commercial piece of mobile gaming software. That’s a real interesting framework to try to place around everything. You could use the same data from this game and each formant of a sound can be applied to each pug and you can do crazy harmonic re-synthesis stuff. It would be awesome! Very cool! Who would want to play that? [laughs]

Jon: I think to a certain extent you are limited by time and complexity. There are a lot of defaults happening. The art style is very much like what’s in Sean’s sketchbooks. The African harp and Iranian dulcimer, that’s the most default Yann sample-set [laughs].

DS: What about the choice of sounds, considering it’s for iOS devices?

Yann: We made two choices very early on from a sound design perspective. One being we didn’t want to rely on people wearing headphones. Whilst I of course wish that everybody played all music games with headphones, I think it is unreasonable.

Jon: Or more preferably with studio monitors [laughs]

Yann: Yeah! “Please use medium field speakers with proper sound insulation” [laughs]. We decided very early on to make it sound awesome through headphones and awesome through the built in iphone speakers. It is a challenge. What it means is that you have to have mid-range in all your sounds and you need to make that mid-range not sound annoying when you listen on headphones. Stuff like the santoor cuts right through. And when you are dealing with generative sound like this you have to be careful about volumes. We haven’t put a compressor on anything, I haven’t really felt the need for one yet. The big sounds like bass drums were quite tricky, but it’s about putting a peak at the mid/high range to make stuff cut through.

DS: Considering most of the sounds occupy the mid-range, did you also try to create contrast between them?

Yann: The beats, the vegetable beets that create beats are the main percussive element. Otherwise I wanted to have a bit of a range. There’s a kind of a distortion guitar thing, there’s a sine wave synthesiser, there’s the santoor, there’s a xylophone/toy piano.. they need to be cohesive but also different enough so that when you land on new terrain it is really clear that a new sound is happening. It was quite challenging to make it sound like you were in the same game still. Also, everything runs at 22k but it does sound good and it’s funny how you much can get away with at 22k. It’s still in stereo.

DS: You mentioned about updates to the game. Anything around the corner?

Yann: Yes indeed! We are currently working on our next release, which is going to be a free app that is just the synthesizer part of Pugs Luv Beats, developed slightly to allow you to dress up the pugs in outfits and hats to create different synth voices. People really love playing with the singing pugs so we figured it would be a fun spinoff. That will be released in a couple of weeks.

Shortly afterwards we’re also going to release another update to Pugs Luv Beats to tweak a few things like the in-game beat currency. We’ve gotten some really great feedback on some small changes to make, so we’re going to implement a bunch of those.

After that we’re going to make a different music game entirely, but that’s all still hush hush!

DS: Pugs Luv Beats just got nominated for an IGF award for ‘Excellence in Sound’. Excited?

Yann: We are super excited! It’s absolutely amazing news for us. The other nominees are of such a high quality, it’s incredible to be associated with them. It’s particularly great to be recognised for the audio, since it is a music game and all.

http://luckyframe.co.uk
Twitter: @lucky_frame
The Amazing Rolo
More information on Pugs Luv Beats and LibPD integration on the CDM blog

In this SoundWorks Collection exclusive we talk with Composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Sound Re-recording Mixer Michael Semanick, and Re-recording Mixer, Sound Designer, and Supervising Sound Editor Ren Klyce.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a 2011 English-language drama/thriller film. It is the second film to be adapted from the Swedish novel of the same name by Stieg Larsson. The first was a 2009 Swedish-language/English dubbed film. The 2011 film was written by Steven Zaillian and directed by David Fincher. Daniel Craig stars as Mikael Blomkvist, and Rooney Mara stars as Lisbeth Salander. In essence, the film follows a man’s mission to find out what has happened to a girl who has been missing for 36 years, and may have been murdered.

SoundWorks Collection

New profile by SoundWorks Collection, featuring sound designer Gary Rydstrom and composer John Williams talking about the sound and music of “War Horse”.

From director Steven Spielberg comes “War Horse,” an epic adventure for audiences of all ages. Set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during the First World War, “War Horse” begins with the remarkable friendship between a horse named Joey and a young man called Albert, who tames and trains him.

When they are forcefully parted, the film follows the extraordinary journey of the horse as he moves through the war, changing and inspiring the lives of all those he meets—British cavalry, German soldiers, and a French farmer and his granddaughter—before the story reaches its emotional climax in the heart of No Man’s Land.

In the exclusive SoundWorks Collection video we talk with Sound Designer and Re-recording Mixer Gary Rydstrom and Composer John Williams.

DS: Like many other audio professionals that I know, you’ve got a background in music. Do you consider that the driving force behind entering an audio profession? How did that background in musical performance affect your first foray into audio production?

JS: Since musicians are attuned to their aural surroundings, either naturally or through training, they’re also instinctively aware of the importance and influence of sound in media like video games and film. This awareness led me to the field of sound design and that seems to be the case with almost every other audio professional I’ve met. It’s certainly helpful to work with other musicians because we’ve all inherited a vocabulary of articulation, dynamics and tempo that can be applied directly to sound design, editing and mix.

My sense of phrasing and dynamics in sound design is largely due to my background in music. Like many sound designers, when describing the design of a sound or scene, I often find myself “conducting” my way through a verbalization of what I’m hearing in my head. This is why sound designers don’t talk about their work in public; people might think we’re crazy. Most importantly, performing has given me a natural education in mix, especially my performances with orchestra and chorale.

DS: You’ve also studied computer science. What was the motivation for that, and how did you envision these two fields merging in your life?

JS: When I was preparing to enter the field of game development, I realized that many game audio professionals were expected to implement and troubleshoot their work at the code level. During my studies in programming, I concentrated on building a simple audio engine and then integrating it into a larger development project. Meanwhile, my friends in Berklee’s Music Synthesis program were using the Csound programming language and early versions of Max/MSP to create sounds unlike anything I’d heard before. I wanted in on the action and my studies in C/C++ and procedural programming helped me hit the ground running.

With the robust offerings in audio middleware available today, sound designers typically don’t need to dig down to the code level to get their work done. Still, game engines and tools are growing increasingly complex to meet the scale and scope of modern titles. I consider a strong technical background to be a huge benefit for keeping up with the constant changes and for interfacing with the tech team.

DS: How would you describe your transition from music into sound design? It seems like there’s been a fairly linear progression through the games you’ve worked on.

JS: To be honest, I was concerned that moving into sound design would be more of a fork in the road than a transition, almost as though I’d have to sacrifice music to pursue sound design or vice versa. This has proven true to some extent because on large-scale projects, no one person has the bandwidth to do it all. The good news is that the modern aesthetic in game audio and cinema is blurring the lines between sound design and underscore. It’s exciting for me to hear the fields of sound design and music complementing each other, playing off one another, and arriving at a soundscape that wouldn’t have been possible given a more traditional separation of the two disciplines. I’ve embraced this aesthetic entirely.

Day-to-day, I find that I create individual sounds, compose scenes, and mix in a very musical fashion. When I look back at the work I’m happiest with, it’s always a place where I’ve developed the sound or scene “musically” in terms of voicing, articulation, and timbre.

DS: What, or who, have been some of your biggest influences sonically? What do you bring from those influences to your work?

JS: Wow, there are so many personalities and projects that have shaped my sonic style. My strongest influences come from the worlds of music and film sound. On the music side, Björk and Amon Tobin have had a huge impact on my sound design and personal aesthetic. I love the way Björk’s songwriting and vocal performances drift between haunting and visceral. If I can capture that same emotional range in my work, I know I’m doing something right. I consider Amon Tobin to be equal parts sound designer and musician. Deconstructing his music is some of the best sound design education you can get.

In the field of film sound, I’ve been heavily inspired by the work of Ben Burtt, Walter Murch, and Randy Thom. All three of them are incredibly committed to detail and quality, but more importantly they design, edit and mix thoughtfully, always complementing the overarching narrative of their films. Another thing that draws me to these three is their ability to articulate how and why they arrive at their conclusions and practices. Their lectures and articles have proven more valuable than any other resource in my career.

DS: Is there anything you do to find new influences and inspiration? What do you prioritize in continuing to hone your craft?

JS: One of the biggest challenges for an in-house game audio professional is staying current in popular culture and in the trends of audio itself. In an age of unprecedented and convenient access to games, film, music and literature, that challenge gets a lot more manageable. I draw a lot of inspiration from music and film. Spotify and sites like nme.com help me keep tabs on the latest developments in music. Netflix is my go-to outlet for discovering independent and foreign films that are hard to come by in the theaters. Most importantly, my friends and colleagues who share those same influences keep me informed of their latest discoveries.

One thing I keep in the back of my head while working on a multi-year project is that the tastes and trends in audio are always changing. I know that the sonic expectations of the entire world are being shaped by the latest releases in gaming, film and music. If I hear something unique in a new game, for instance, I immediately ask myself “Could I create that if I needed to?” because chances are, that sound will be referenced by someone on a future project. If the answer to my question is even a “maybe”, I get to work trying to recreate the scene or individual sound effect. It’s not just a good exercise professionally, it’s the type of discovery and experimentation that keeps things interesting, challenging and fun.

DS: In your career thus far, what has been your favorite challenge?

JS: My favorite challenge has been developing and adapting my sound design to meet the needs of multiple game genres. So far I’ve worked in the genres of real-time strategy, city building, sports, fighting and first-person shooter. Each genre has brought with it a tremendous amount of discovery and a new set of audio challenges. The perspective shift from top down to first person, for example, has been a huge eye opener in terms of new avenues and constraints for audio.

One thing that I always enjoy is deconstructing the legacy of each genre and the expectations from core players of that genre. I like to identify those expectations early on to ensure I’m meeting, and hopefully exceeding, what fans have come to expect from the aesthetic and player feedback of each genre.

DS: What kind of things do you do to advocate for audio throughout the rest of the development team?

JS: I learned early on that without advocacy, audio can easily fall off the radar for the rest of the studio. It doesn’t help that the audio team is typically working behind closed doors. I’ve made a concerted effort to promote the audio team within each studio by reaching out to other departments and developing the mutually beneficial relationship that can, and should, exist between them and the audio team. The key here is that talking is not enough. I show artists and designers how audio can develop their ideas with prototypes rather than trying to explain it with words or on paper. And I’ve yet to meet an artist or designer who isn’t excited to see his or her work come alive after an audio pass. Many times those prototypes lead to iteration on the original artistic or design concept resulting in a stronger end result.

I’m also a strong promoter for audio being included in the concept and pre-production phases of a development cycle. Most modern game projects are too large for audio to be treated strictly as a post-production department. I feel that the most memorable and best sounding games are those where audio is a contributing voice from the start.

DS: What developments in game audio make you excited for the future of that industry?

JS: Two things: The availability of incredible middleware and the independent game development scene. With industrial-strength audio middleware freely available to professional sound designers and students alike, new discoveries are being made all the time in terms of implementation. It means that students are going to come into the game development field already trained up on the tools we use day to day. Middleware still comes with its own technical challenges, but for game audio professionals, I think the scales are now weighted much more heavily on the side of creativity.

The independent film scene has brought us some of the most experimental and creative audio in the field of cinema. I believe independent games are headed in that same direction. Just as independent film sound is informing the sound of major motion picture, I believe the sound of independent games will influence the work of game audio professionals everywhere.

DS: What are you currently working on?

JS: I’m working on Bioshock Infinite at Irrational Games.

DS: Do you have any advice for people interested in entering game audio as a profession?

JS: First and foremost: No reel, no deal. I’m consistently surprised when I meet people who want to get into the audio field, game-related or otherwise, and haven’t created a demo reel of any kind. You live and die by your latest work in this industry and a reel is required for even most internships. There are free audio/music apps available for download and there are plenty of places to host your content once it’s ready.

Next, and this might seem obvious, I advise aspiring game audio professionals to play games! Knowing both the pitfalls and the paths to success that have come before you is invaluable. More importantly, a sound designer well-versed and well-played in video games holds a common vocabulary that can be used to interact with all team members at a game studio.

And finally, I encourage aspiring game audio professionals to use the copious amounts of information and software available on the net to learn the tools of the trade. The same tools we use every day, both audio middleware and game engines, are available to anyone with an internet connection. Download them, start learning, and start experimenting!

On vacation in Los Angeles, Walter, the world’s biggest Muppet fan, and his friends Gary (Segel) and Mary (Amy Adams) from Smalltown, USA, discover the nefarious plan of oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for the oil recently discovered beneath the Muppets’ former stomping grounds.

To stage The Greatest Muppet Telethon Ever and raise the $10 million needed to save the theater, Walter, Mary and Gary help Kermit reunite the Muppets, who have all gone their separate ways: Fozzie now performs with a Reno casino house band called the Moopets, Miss Piggy is a plus-size fashion editor at Vogue Paris, Animal is in a Santa Barbara clinic for anger management, and Gonzo is a high-powered plumbing magnate.

In this SoundWorks Collection exclusive we talk with Director James Bobin, Film Editor James Thomas, Supervising Sound Editors Kami Asgar and Sean McCormack, and Sound Re-recording Mixer Kevin O’Connell.

Locate a theater to experience Muppets in Dolby Surround 7.1 at www.dolby.com

Via SoundWorks Collection

“Cabbit” is a short animation film by the artist, Soogie. It has been in production for over 3 years and is now being co-produced and sound designed by John Kassab (Kickstarter campaign). We spoke to John about his sound design work on ‘Cabbit’ and why he decided to sit in the producer’s chair.

What attracted you to Cabbit?

I am a huge fan of visual art and animation so, predictably i watch a lot of animation on Vimeo and often go to art galleries. Unfortunately, this sort of saturation had began to create a numbness in the way i looked at art. When i saw a trailer for ‘Cabbit’ on Vimeo, it made me completely still and my throat dried at just how beautiful it was. Its just so honest. Everything down to the clunky editing and animation flicker. Its just so raw – which is quite punk with all this clean cold dehumanised refinement thats going on in animation at the moment. i loved the handmade-ness of Soogie’s work. Its simplicity is brutal and the complexity of the cross hatching is mesmerising. I was instantly inspired.

I understand this is your first experience as a producer. Is this something you want to do instead of sound?

No, not at all – first and foremost i am a sound designer. However when i was starting to get to know Soogie early in our collaboration, I learned that he had not really considered a festival plan and was struggling to make ends meet working on a mini-mac from his home in montana. Furthermore, he is largely housebound due to illness and did not have a network or means with which to complete his film properly or get it out there. As I work with producers everyday, i see how they go about things and i have always been interested in how they operate. Similarly, so much of what i do as a sound supervisor involves this kind of organisational tasks and dealings with other businesses and facilities. So i have become well versed in this kind of stuff anyway. Plus i have dear friends in virtually every department of filmmaking which makes it easier when seeking guidance and favours.

On a more personal note, I took on this role because i felt so strongly that Soogie had created a true thing of beauty that i really wanted to be apart of. So i decided to offer all of my efforts to give this film the exposure i feel it deserves.

What is your brief for the sound and how have you undertaken the sound design?

‘Cabbit’ has a very nostalgic feel to it. Not only in the way that it looks but also in the way it recounts its story. it plays like memories and so we wanted it to sound like memories too.

Seeing that the film was going to be grounded in wall-to-wall music, i felt the sound should be impressionistic and minimal – as in, i wanted to hint at the sound things made without being overly detailed and clear about it. I felt that reverbs could be used effectively to creating this effect.

So I decided to bus the tracks into three separate AVID TL Space reverbs that were tuned differently:

1. Recent Memory – this is a light reverb i added to foley which i wanted to feel most present.

2. Fading Memory – this was a heavier/wetter reverb with a longer tail. This was used for the fore-and middle ground sounds such as vehicles, war and industry. I started to think of these as “impression sounds” or “sounds the future would rather forget”.

3. Distant Memory – this is the wettest and longest reverb used. This one was used on the back ground sounds and as reinforcement to the fading memory cues if i felt a sound was somewhere between fading and distant, if you know what i mean.

You mentioned “wall-to-wall” music being used in the film. Did this become an issue for the sound?

We were all very much in love with the music which we felt complimented Soogie’s style perfectly. It is grounded in an earthly guitar riff but has electronic elements which dances above it with some degree of abandon. Sadly the hard drive that the music session was kept on was stolen from the composer, GreenGender (who is based in San Francisco). So all that was left of the session was the exported stereo track from his album. It would have definitely been great to have access to the stems for mixing but when engaging in guerilla filmmaking, we learn to take all limitations in our stride and own them as decisions.

The wall-to-wall really works on this project because of its mediative qualities. However, we really didn’t want the film to read like a music video. So i started to add some transient low frequency sound effects and Adrian Medhurst’s foley in the midrange. I kept the high frequencies free for the music to have as much space as it needed.

However, after many listens i started to play with a narrow Q point on a parametric EQ. i’ve always enjoyed the sound an EQ makes when you sweep up and down music through its various frequencies. i always find interesting sounds hidden in there. For example, high up in the range there is a screaming frequency which i found complemented the screaming in the film perfectly. i also made a filter sweep from high to mid to compliment the image of the comet falling through the air from the heavens. Automating the EQ of the music in this way seemed to have bridged the barrier between sound design and music – music had become the site of sound effects manipulation and this automation also allowed me to free up frequencies monetarily for sounds to poke through before being engulfed with the music. This was particularly useful for giving a voice to high frequency sounds as birds in the background which would have otherwise cluttered the track.

My hope is that by bleeding the experience of music into sound, and vice-versa, this cohesion would enhance the mediative quality of the film without causing any distraction from the images.

I see you have set up a kickstarter campaign to raise funds. Can you tell us a bit about this?

Thanks, Miguel. Yes, we have set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for finishing expenses such as a 5.1 mix, website, dvd duplication, mastering, festival applications, etc. We are hoping to raise $5,000 but we kept the goal at $1,500 because of Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing policy. Even $5000 will keep us at a shoe-string budget but i think it is doable if we stay a little bit punk about it and its for a good cuase.

For pledges upward of $30, there is lots of artwork (original and prints) up for grabs. But any donation would be warmly welcomed, great or small. Thanks for your suport.

Project at Kickstarter

Ben Burtt explains how the electronic score of “Forbidden Planet” was created. The video is at the right side of this page.

Prior to the screening, Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Craig Barron and Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt investigated some of the secrets behind the making of the film. Barron examined the film’s breakthrough effects sequences that used miniatures and matte paintings, as well as explored how Joshua Meador created his animated “id monster” effect and combined it with live-action photography. Burtt explained how the electronic score was created, using newly discovered source tapes from the film’s composers, Louis and Bebe Barron (no relation to Craig).

via @vfxblog / @usoproject

There is a strange and porous border in film sound and that is the one that exists between music and sound design, it is not a sealed and clearly defined boundary, but an open, shifting and nebulous one, easy to cross over back and forth, sometimes inadvertently and other times boldly and deliberately, by both the composer and the sound designer.

One might ask what is the difference between music and sound design? A flippant answer would be royalties. A better answer would be at times a great deal and at others not much at all. For the most part the roles of music and sound design are clearly defined, music in film continues the role of the “pit” orchestra from the days of silent cinema, commenting, narrating and guiding the audience emotionally through the action.

Sound design mostly exists within the world created on screen, but from time to time it steps out from this perhaps “functional” role and crosses over the borderline into music, and it is this area of overlap and blurring of distinction between the two that I find increasingly interesting. The films of David Lynch and the work of his sound designer Alan Splet are good examples of this ambiguity and were an early inspiration for me, their early film “Eraserhead” in particular.

Most sound designers have a musical background, which may be a formal one or perhaps, like me, their love of sound started in manipulating electronic instruments and discovering the wonders of the recording studio. The reason I call the supposed divide between music and sound design a strange border is because it is often an arbitrary one, for example an atmospheric drone can be created by a composer and it is a music cue, similar material created by a sound designer is a sound effect.

In the past I have contributed sound design elements to films that I felt had crossed that border from sound design into scoring, I’m thinking in particular of moments in the films Love Is the Devil and Chatroom. I used to have a rule for myself that I restricted what I did to utilising un-pitched sounds – pitch and rhythm being the province of the composer. However, I have recently crossed over this border and, I must hasten to add, did so by the invitation of the filmmakers themselves.

One such film was The American, another is the most recent Lynne Ramsay film We Need to Talk about Kevin. In The American I was asked by the picture editor Andrew Hulme to supply for certain sequences in the film, “compositions” formed from what might be termed atmospheric sound design elements, that he felt would be better able to convey the tension in those scenes then perhaps  “traditional” music cues would.

In Lynne’s film, because I had started work early in the film editing process, I supplied a few music/sound design pieces to Lynne and the picture editor Joe Bini to help them with the cut, a composer hadn’t been chosen at the time, and I also provided them with some further pieces from other composers and sound artists. About four of my cues found their way into the final mix and some others exist as underlying tonal elements. The score was written by Jonny Greenwood and my elements and his music seemed to combine in a unique and fortuitous way.

I’m not trying to set myself up as a film composer I don’t have the necessary skills and I have too much respect for the craft of people like Jonny Greenwood, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Adrian Johnson, Dickon Hinchliffe amongst the many composers I’ve worked with, but I think what skills I do have are suited to those occasions and those films that sometimes require sound/music elements that lie “in-between” the border of music and sound design. The “compositions” may contain little traditional musical material, but they somehow convey emotion and drama more than just a drone or atmosphere sound would do, perhaps they do this by shifting and transforming themselves through the scene, and if they do have a musical element it is a very simple one.

I realise that I can only speak for myself and my own experiences, but it’s interesting to note that one of Hans Zimmer’s collaborators Mel Wesson has for a long time provided similar elements on films such as “Inception”, “The Dark Knight”, “Michael Clayton” and many other films. Mel’s term for this is Ambient Music Design (and further information can be found at his website with the interesting caption on the main page “music is noise”). So I’m sure that I’m doing nothing new here, and I wonder how many others find themselves contributing “music” cues through sound design, whether that is acknowledged on the cue sheet or not.

In terms of technology, I love using the midi functionality of Nuendo, as well as having a liking for Mackie’s sequencer Tracktion, which features very impressive time stretch and pitch shifting capabilities, software instruments and effects from Native Instruments and Waves diamond bundle and GRM Tools for processing, I regret to say I haven’t plugged in my hardware synths and effects for some time, but keep on meaning to getting around to it.

For those who may be interested examples of music/sound design I’ve contributed to films and other bits and pieces can be found at SoundCloud

This is one of a series of podcasts exploring the ways sound and sound effects can be used to help bring stories to life.

Meet Ben Burtt, Sound Designer for films like Star Wars,Raiders of the Lost Ark and WALL-E. Learn how he comes up with sounds that complement the amazing things seen on the silver screen – from laser blasts to whirring, buzzing lightsabers. Find out the story behind some of his signature effects and how he first got interested in sound design.

Listen here.

via @usoproject

Finland based composer and sound designer Ari Pulkkinen seems to be one of the most listened to composers in the world right now with over 250 million people who have heard his original Angry Birds theme. Pulkkine’s catchy theme was also recently performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra which was part of a music festival in the city.

Angry Birds has been praised for its successful combination of addictive gameplay, comical style, and low price. Its popularity led to versions of Angry Birds being created for personal computers and gaming consoles, a market for merchandise featuring its characters and even long-term plans for a feature film or television series. With a combined 350 million downloads across all platforms and including both regular and special editions, the game has been called “one of the most mainstream games out right now”, “one of the great runaway hits of 2010″, and “the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far”.

Ari has also worked on other very popular games such as Trine (PS3/PC), Dead Nation (PS3), and Outland (PS3/360). The games have received rave reviews and praise for their soundtracks and sound design.

SoundWorks Collection