While set in the same fictional universe of Ridley Scott’s original offering, and sharing some of its key dramatic events, the director is clear in his intention that his latest film Prometheus is unrelated to the rest of the original franchise. There had been talk of a fifth Alien movie — with Scott reportedly committing to a sequel or prequel a decade ago — but it took 20th Century Fox to persuade the director to cast his unique vision of the origins and purpose of the Alien civilization, while also explaining the genesis of the enigmatic Space Jockey that forms a direct link to the original space explorers from 1979’s landmark motion picture. Sequel, prequel or neither, Prometheus is scheduled for release June 8 through 20th Century Fox.

In essence, the film (originally to be called Paradise) follows a team of scientists as they journey on the spaceship Prometheus to the distant planet of Erix to terraform the world. The crewmembers discover, however, that what they experience from the indigenous life forms is not just a threat to themselves, but to mankind. Prometheus takes advantage of new-generation sound technologies, while very much paying tribute to the original offering. As Michael Fassbender, who plays David, the artificial person in Prometheus, confirmed: “By the end of the third act, you start to realize there’s a DNA of the very first Alien, but none of the subsequent films,” with imagery inspired by its original conceptualist, H.R. Giger.

Working with elements coordinated by supervising sound editors Mark Stoeckinger and Victor Ennis from Soundelux, the intricate soundtrack was re-recorded at Fox’s John Ford Stage in West Los Angeles by Doug Hemphill (sound effects) and Ron Bartlett (dialogue and music). Creature sound design effects — of whichPrometheus features a wide range — were fashioned by Ann Scibelli, Alan Rankin and Harry Cohen. Other members of the sound crew included Foley mixers James Ashwill and Blake Collins; Foley editors Bob Beher, Bruce Tanis and Glenn T. Morgan; Sandy Buchanan handling the recording of computer voices; ADR engineer Derek Casari; ADR recordists Glen Gathard and James Hyde; ADR mixer Andy Stallabrass; dialogue editor Margit Pfeiffer; music editors Joseph Bonn and Del Spiva; and sound effects editor Tim Walston.

Continue reading at MPEG

[SFX Lab, the laboratory of sound effects, a place dedicated to experiment and explore sound libraries. The main goal is to hear what happens when sounds of a specific kind are combined, processed, and transformed in several ways.]

New chapter of the sfx lab, this time dedicated to explore high doses of resonance, with a quite special kind of sounds: bells and chimes.

These sounds are characterized because of their qualities regarding harmonics and detailed/subtle elements, so combining and processing them is always something interesting and very “musical”. I’m going to play with three different libraries, all of them full of elements that vary from the shortest and exotic, to pretty long recordings with beautiful/long resonant tails. The libraries used are the Bells and Animal Bells packages of Rabbit Ears Audio, plus the Chimes library Tim Prebble released at HISSandaROAR in the last year.

I’m going to do several quick experiments, trying to find different ways to process the recordings, and aiming to achieve different materials from the elements. There are so many things we can obtain from them, so as always we’re going to just experiment and listen. Remember this is not a tutorial or something to go into details regarding the tools. This series of articles are focused on listening to libraries and just playing with them.

We could use these elements to create a wide variety of sounds and layers which, alone or combined with other materials can generate sounds with a particular mood or emotional impact. Eerie atmospheres, nostalgic addons to the ambience, tension, mistery, wonderful drones! Resonant whooshes, magical powers and spells, extension elements for impacts, and lots of things more. They are also rich on tonalities, so the variations in resonance and dynamics can be very useful to give very musical touches to sounds and alter the timbre of designed sounds, in order to add more harmonics and details.

Bells

Let’s start with the big bells, from Rabbit Ears Audio’s sixth release, which includes bells fabricated in all kinds of material and recorded with several positions and performances. That approach creates a fascinating gallery of sounds, including recordings with heavy attack, along others which feature takes with long tails, perfect for stretching, freezing, shimmering, cloud making, and all kind of drone-atmosphere making techniques. Let’s explore that.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the early days of the musique concrete and experimental/electroacoustic movements, there were two experiments that led pioneers to develop a new world of sounds, and more important, new ways to listen and transform sound materials. The first experiment, coined by Pierre Shaeffer and his research team at GRM was called “closed groove”, which was basically a way to loop sounds as much as you want, so it could be heard repeatedly over and over again. That repetition was connected to the reduced listening experience, where sound is valued as material, trying to avoid the real casualties of the recording and its meaning/context in the visual/contextual world.

As Michel Chion tells in the guide to sound objects, the second experiment was important to further developments regarding the form of the sound, specially the attack and its relation to the timbre of the sound materials. That one consisted on doing the closed groove technique with a fragment of a bell sound’s tail.”A sound like a flute” was the result.

Below is a video with some experiments inspired on that, using GRM Freeze to select specific fragments of a bell’s waveform, and then changing the pitch/repetitions to create variations of the drones and tones generated. Although it’s something you can do manually on an editor, the plugin offers more controls and does the looping/multiplication instantly. I also added a couple of plugins more (eq and doppler) to explore different variations. Let’s listen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Although GRM Freeze is my favorite, there are also other alternatives and similar tools you may like to explore: Marc Lingk’s TimeFreezer, Michael Norris’ Spectral Freeze/Spectral Gate & Hold, ioplong’s flitchSplifter, and ndc’s Buffer Synth. Ableton Live users can find a freeze button on the default reverb, and also try M4L devices such as monolake’sGrain Freeze, beatwife’s creations, and ck’s m4l pack. Reaktor users checkout these ensembles: Twisted Tools effects (several of them come with freeze function) Fast FX (multi-fx, comes with the software), g-Transformer, Zero Kelvin,Travelizer FX, autoFreeze, and Freeeze. Even Reason users can have some fun with the hold option on the BV512 Vocoder. Anyway, sound freezing FTW!

Now let’s take another approach to the tails of the bells. This kind of material is pretty incredible for convolution process, so you can use the characteristics of the bell sounds and merge them with other sound. In this example I’m going to use the bells as Impulse Responses, inside Altiverb, which since its latest version allows to use WAVs as IRs in a very easy way. The plugin now allows to drag&drop any audio file directly and use it as an IR. Pure quick fun. Let’s take a look at that feature on this video and listen to different sounds being processed “inside” the bells:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Animal Bells

The second bell release from Rabbit Ears Audio is quite unique and interesting, since the wide variety of sounds performed by these bells are really dynamic and diverse. Recordist Michael Raphael, who crafted this fantastic package, explains it in a great way: “The materials include brass, bronze, common metals, wood, animal horns, and even some gourds. So just imagine: ding, clank, ring, twack, rattle, clunk, click, and who doesn’t love gourds?”. All those variations were recorded in different perspectives (close, medium, distant) and include a wide variety of materials. Each bell features an specific type of sounds and includes different takes, with details, movements and lots of great noises you’d like to use on wood/metal articulations, foley tasks and any kind of heavy layering of elements in order to build big structures and rattling metallic sounds.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I specially liked the textures you can obtain with these animal bells. It’s incredible to listen how the simplest variation can achieve lovely elements, textures, movements. When you process sounds which have been performed in such detailed way, processing gets more expressive and fun. Lots of surprises occur when you perform with those sounds in a sampler or something where you can manipulate the files with more expression. Let’s listen to quick experiments I did using Alchemy processing different sounds from the library:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Chimes

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s play with HISSandaROAR’s Chimes, which includes sounds with a lot of subtle details and harmonics. Tim Prebble recorded the sounds inside an ADR booth, so you can hear pretty detailed recordings, with lots of variations and even more fun: sounds where recorded at 192k, saying you can go extreme with the processes and stretch them in fantastic ways. For that exploration, I wanted to use some delay/reverb effects in order to listen to what happens when you multiply those harmonics or just extend their tails with echos and feedback manipulation. For that, I’m going to use a pretty crazy delay (which also gets pretty unique chorus/flanging/reverb effects) called ValhallaüberMod, developed by one of my favorite plugin makers: Sean Costello, owner at ValhallaDSP. Besides this fantastic delay, he has also developed two amazing algorithmic reverbs I encourage you to try. They’re just fantastic.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Torture Chamber

So, it’s time to torture these sounds in random ways. There’s a new tool you probably already know about, called Iris, developed by the masterminds at iZotope. Although it really deserves a dedicated review (I’ll share my thoughts in another post), I’ve been working with it since its launch and I’m in love with it. It’s perfect for torturing these bells and chimes, since there’s a wide variety of things you can obtain with it. Iris uses spectral analysis/processing to visualize and transform sounds, offering a spectrogram view where time, amplitude and frequency are showed in the same canvas. That gives you the opportunity of isolating, extracting, filtering and combining sounds based on their harmonic content and spectrum.

As any tool you can have these days, it’s just a different way to transform sound. Nothing to compare with, just a different option. There’re several samplers making impressive things since several years ago, but one thing is sure: there’s no instrument like Iris. It’s fresh, fun, and has a pretty extensive path for experimentation. It’s a fantastic tool to extend/explore timbre and sonic morphologies. Although it comes with a pretty nice library and optional add-ons, the game, as always, is more awesome when you use your own sounds. Experimenting with the stuff you already have, or with libraries like those mentioned in this post, is wonderful. A gift for the ears! Let’s listen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Andrew Quinn, sound designer at Splash Damage, was kind enough to speak to Designing Sound about his work on the recently announced mobile strategy title RAD Soldiers on the new social label WarChest. The music for the game was produced by Marc Canham of Nimrod Productions.

DS: Can you tell us a little about how you got into game audio, and your audio career so far?

AQ: I always had an interest in sound and music. In my youth I played guitar in local bands, recorded music with friend’s bands and generally made a racket. This messing with sound and music led to me studying a BSc in Creative Music and Sound Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University. During the course I got a chance to delve into post-production and more importantly game audio in the third year and I really enjoyed it. I stayed on another year at Leeds to do an MSc in Sound and Music for Interactive Games under the expert tutelage of Richard Stevens and David Raybould.

After I graduated from the masters, I really struggled to find a job in the games industry. Luckily, the university was looking for a part-time lecturer on their audio course and they took me on. As it was only part-time it gave me a bit of time to work on my own projects and get a portfolio of work together. One project I got to work on was the Game Audio Tutorial book by the aforementioned Leeds-based lecturers Richard Stevens and David Raybould. I ended up creating the tutorial levels and sound library bundled with the book.

That summer I decided to attend the Develop audio track in Brighton to do a bit of networking and generally get my portfolio about. I must have done something right as a few weeks later I secured a couple of interviews and later a job offer.

I joined Splash Damage just before BRINK shipped and I’ve been there just over a year now.

DS: Is there an area of sound that you’re particularly drawn to?

AQ: My main focus is sound design and implementation, that’s what I do. I particularly enjoy creating creatures and weapons.

DS: How did you approach pre-production for a mobile title such as RAD Soldiers? How did this differ from your work on a console title?

AQ: Pre-production for this title was very short. The game had already been going a little while when I was brought on, there was quite a bit of concept art, some of the characters and environments were being worked on and some of the base gameplay was already in. After I joined the rest of the team and I spent some of time working on the overall direction of the sound design and music. I came up with some style examples for the music and did a few pre-sonics for some of the ambience and weapons. I also wrote a document with some initial ideas for cool little audio systems we could have if we had the time to implement them.

In general though it’s very similar or I should say my approach is very similar, but scaled down. For instance, rather than ten variations of a knife stab or punch, we’ll have two. Instead of having all the characters speak localised dialogue, we’ll have very general barks, grunts and vocalisations that could be interpreted in any language. We may not have the same amount of time or budget as a AAA game but I still approach every sound with the question “How do I make this as good as possible with the resources available?”

DS: How large an influence did the Strategy genre and multiplayer aspects of the game have on your decisions?

AQ: We took a bit of inspiration from some strategy games, the Command and Conquer series and Worms being two notable examples. This was more their tongue-in-cheek approach to rather than a particular style.

DS: How do you approach communication with the other disciplines on the team? How closely do you work with the other departments?

AQ: During development I was sat with the team working on a pair of headphones rather than hidden away in a studio, so communication was pretty easy and free flowing. The team has always been fairly small (at its largest 8-10 people), so there was never the issue of not knowing what other people were working on or doing. It created a nice dynamic where you could iterate relatively quickly on content and make the game better.

DS: What do you feel is the hardest part of creating sound for interactive media on devices such as smartphones or tablets? What were the main creative / technical challenges you faced in achieving your vision?

AQ: Delivering a compelling and interesting audio experience on a mobile device is quite a challenge, however there were a few things inherent in the game that helped. The asynchronous turn-based gameplay meant that the amount of sound playing at any one time was largely predictable. This enabled me to orchestrate events in a semi-linear fashion, so the overall design ended up being pretty clean. The mix never really gets too busy which can be a problem in strategy/multiplayer games and would be an absolute nightmare on a mobile device. Additionally, for the most part the game has a fixed perspective and player view, so we didn’t have to deal with shifting distances or multiple player perspectives on the same actions which would have complicated the mix and increased the amount of sound playing back. So in the end we managed to avoid quite a few headaches that can be inherent of strategy and multiplayer games.

One of the major issues we encountered was caused by the devices’ ability to only decode .wav or .mp3. Wav is obviously really nice, but for most instances, the size of the file is just too big for a mobile device. Most of the implementation work in Unity was done on a PC that compresses sounds in Ogg, which is lovely. The Ogg compression seemed to hold up pretty well, even at ridiculously low bit rates. However when the build gets deployed to a device, all the sound gets re-compressed into MP3, which created all sorts of interesting problems. Listening back to the sounds on the devices was night and day; there was aliasing, artefacts and all sorts of other compression nasties. The guns and ambiences were particularly affected by this. In the end, I had to spend a bit of time working out what sort of compression values didn’t degrade the quality on a sound by sound basis. In some cases the Mp3 compression bit rate had to be a great deal higher than the Ogg versions to get the same quality.

Strangely, the usual game audio memory limitations haven’t seemed to be as much of an issue as they usually are. The devices themselves have a decent amount of memory, and being sensible about the amount of sound used has meant we haven’t had to go through assets purging quality. Saying that, it’s not like we have skimped on the amount of sound – in fact, we managed to squeeze over 1000 sounds into the base game.

DS: What are the Splash Damage audio team preferred tools for working with? Do you have any software suites, plugins or apps that you use regularly?

AQ: We use Sound Forge/Protools and a combination of Waves, GRM Tools, McDSP and Sound Toys plugins for content creation. Implementation in RAD Soldiers was done within the Unity Engine with some extra custom in-house audio components. On our other projects we’re running an Unreal-Wwise combo.

DS: What do you feel is the most satisfying part of creating sound for games?

AQ: Sound for games poses a unique challenge that I really enjoy. Not only do you have to create the sound asset but you also have to make it work in an interactive environment. When you have hundreds of events, states, parameters, dsp’s and files being triggered dynamically, just getting a sound playing back in-game as intended is a big win.

DS: Do you have a favorite sound or audio system from any game?

AQ: I can’t really put any one down, but I can mention a couple that impressed me recently. Mass Effect 3 did a great job of selling the scale of the war happening around you in the ambient audio, and the big audio events featuring the reapers were really cool. Portal 2 just generally impressed me audio wise, the gels had some really cool little music systems attached to them and the processing on GlaDos’s and Cave’s voices were really great. Oh and Battlefield 3 in its entirety (damn you, DICE, I want my life back).

DS: What was your personal favourite sound or audio system from RAD Soldiers that we can look forward to?

AQ: I had a lot of fun with the weapon and ability audio, it’s mostly hyper-realistic, overdesigned stuff. They were really fun to create.

Another group of sounds I enjoyed creating was for the UAV character. He’s a plucky little robot that enjoys nothing more than a bit of casual leg humping. The sound of his voice was made using a recording of a screwdriver being fed into a little plastic desk fan and some processing with Sound Toy’s Crystallizer.

Under the hood, RAD Soldiers is pretty simple. There were a couple of little audio systems that I was pretty keen to get in from the start of the project. One of these was a simple ducking system to try and make the big events shine through. It’s essentially a very basic snapshot system that allows us to duck a group of sounds when another sound is playing. We can define the attack, duration, depth and release of the snapshot, and snapshots can layer on top of one another. It’s something that big, grown-up engines have been able to do for a while that I wanted to have.

Oh and seeing as the game is set in London, it would be a shame not to have a working Big Ben!

DS:What developments in game audio would you like to see in the future?

AQ:There is some interesting research going on into sound propagation, I’d like to see some systems that approach real acoustic modelling appearing. However with that, I’d still like to be able to tweak and tune how sound plays back within a space rather than having a one stop reality model.

DS: Thank you for your time, Andrew. We look forward to hearing the game in action!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Featuring Rocksteady audio director Nick Arundel, and foley artist John Roesch and gun recording expert Bryan Watkins

Click here for the video

The Recordist has released Autumn Rain.

A pristine collection of 50 24-Bit 96kHz rainfall sound effects from the forests and fields of North Idaho. Recorded primarily in the fall season of 2011 around my ranch and high up in the mountains. Other rain tracks were recorded early and late winter when the rainy season it peaking. A large portion of this library was recorded with the Sennheiser MKH-8040ST at XY-90 and XY-120 to capture the stunning detail of rain drops on leaves, wood and concrete.

BOOM has released Micro BOOM – Gun Handling.

Impressive and high quality gun shot sound effects are invaluable but they’re only half the battle. “Micro BOOM – GUN HANDLING” now gives you the perfect other half. 11 different firearms. Triggers, dry shots, safety switches, reloading, magazines and much more, delivered in the high BOOM Library quality standard with 96kHz, 24bit. A more than perfect addition to the BOOM GUNS Library. Click, click – BOOM!

Affordable Audio 4 Everyone released Lighthearted Magic. All proceeds above $5 go to Curesearch.org

A must have for anyone looking to add some interesting sounds for their visual FX. Don’t let the name fool you, there is plenty of good stuff to mix together to build up to darker sounding elements. The Lighthearted MiniMagic library was made for building that fun loving disappear sound, or for adding a great feel to some spining particles around a character.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Empty Sea has a sound library. They have one small release so far and there’s another one coming soon.

Coming soon, the full version of Sea Monsters.  This collection will showcase some of Empty Sea’s most original and best creatures.  Each sound will be recorded at 192k/24bit for optimum quality and maximum design potential

Frank Bry has released a new library called The Devil Dog.

Introducing Dixie, a very special English Bull Terrier with an amazing vocal ability that is unlike anything I have every heard. She is special because she is deaf and cannot hear what comes out of her mouth. She is loved and cared for by some friends here in town and they graciously allowed me to come to their home and record her. The Devil Dog HD Pro SFX Library contains over 800 individual Zombie-like sound effects recorded at 24-Bit 192kHz presented on 60 tracks.

Dixie makes the best noises when she is asleep dreaming or very tired and does not want to be bothered. She was very excited when I arrived so they tried to calm her down a little bit to see if she would make some of the amazing “alien” noises they say she makes. The sounds she made when I was in the room were great but after a while I went outside for 5 minutes and left the gear with them and they were able to get her to make some really cool noises. I was able to leave the recording gear overnight and got some really amazing close up sleeping sounds.

I used a Sennheiser MKH-416 and a MKH-8040 with the filter module set on a small stand. This combination is very good for this type of animal recording as the hyped-up top end of the MKH-416 works perfect for the normal pitched intense growls and barks while the MKH-8040 sounds amazing when pitched way down with a nice smooth top end and a monstrous low end. There are multiple distances for variety and dozens of variations on most tracks. Dixie can make sounds ranging from soft and subtle to over the top loud and vicious. She can purr like a kitten and snarl like an attack dog. I have never heard any animal make these kinds of noises especially a dog. Dixie got to know me after a few days and maybe next time I see here she will let me record her in her dream state.

The Devil Dog is available now at The Recordist. 60 files (over 800 sounds), 744.9MB, $50 us.

Hart FX has released Hart a Gator, a new library of alligator sound effects, cut from 10 hours of material recorded at 192kHz.

Alligators are quiet, stealthy creatures that roam the swamps and marshes of Florida like big, scaly, green ninjas. You see one silently skimming along, then all of a sudden it disappears! They hardly make any sound either – except for this one time of year… mating season.

During mating season, gators all of a sudden decide to emerge from their quiet ninja state and let the world know how much of a sexy beast they are – or at least they try to let the female gators know about it.

A gator bellow is when a gator fills it’s lungs with air, then lifts it’s tail and head up into the air, and then forces the air out in a way that causes the entire gator to vibrate violently. This creates this really awesome little dancing of water off the gator’s back, and creates a crazy growl that can be quite frightening. It definitely gave me a new respect for these oversized lizards…

This was not an easy library to record! The gator bellowing is infrequent, and it is often difficult to get close enough to get a clean recording. To add to that – if you approach too quickly and startle the gator, he will stop bellowing.

Hart a Gator is available for download at $95. More info: HartFX

Below is a q&a with Colin Hart, who shares some details about the process behind the library.

Can you tell us about the process of conceiving and planning this library?

I don’t really remember how the original idea came up (it was over a year ago…) but somehow we got the idea that it would be awesome to go out and record gator sounds. There is a gator “park” nearby where I live called “Gatorland”. They have upwards of 2000 gators and crocs there – I figured it would be a good place to start. So I called them up and got in touch with a guy that ended up touring us around to get gator sounds. The first time we went was in June – we were able to get some cool hisses and jaw snaps, which are territorial and warning sounds. Our contact told us that if we wanted some great sounds, it would be best to come back during mating season, when the gators bellow (as a mating call).

So come this year, around March, I called up Gatorland again and asked to come back in for a day of recording. I had no idea what to expect, so I just brought a bunch of gear and planned to stay a few hours. What I was able to get that day absolutely amazed me – these sounds were incredible! I had to get more. I was at the park for about 3 or 4 hours that day and only ended up with about 5 or 6 usable sounds, so I scheduled time to come back. I ended up going down there about 7 or 8 times total to get the sounds that I needed to build this library.

How were the recording locations and the specific situations with the animals? Did you have any preference regarding their movements and vocalizations?

The location made things a bit difficult. Because there are so many gators around, there are a lot of birds around. These birds don’t belong to the park – they are wild – but they come to the park because the gators add protection for nesting. No way a raccoon or bobcat is going to try to make it past all those gators to get to a bird’s nest. These birds were so pesky and loud! It made getting a clean sound very difficult. I basically had to be on top of a gator to get a decent sound.

The weird thing about recording the bellows was that the gators decide to bellow all at once. You’ll be sitting there with nothing to do for anywhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours, then one will start bellowing. Within a minute or two, all of the others start bellowing – one after another – as if they’re talking back and forth. Essentially, they are, telling the others how much more of a stud they are… In the main area, the bellowing probably only lasts 10 minutes, if you’re lucky.

So you stand around for up to 2 hours, waiting for the bellows, and all of a sudden it starts and you only have a few minutes to record. So you have to be ready. I would hang around taking pictures or something – maybe recording some ambiences – but my recorder was on and ready to go. I had to stay alert – as soon as you hear that first bellow, it’s off to the races! Then it was just a matter of figuring out which gator was about to bellow and get to them in time.

That was another thing – you could tell when a gator was about to bellow. They lift their head and tail up in the air and hold it there for a few seconds before they start. So when I saw one that was in a good recording location make that pose, I got over there as soon as possible – it is a very large area though, so sometimes that can be difficult – you always had to keep moving to try to anticipate what was going to happen next. The trick is that you can’t approach the gator too fast from the front – you will startle them and they’ll stop. Gators see movement and colors very well. David found that out the hard way when he wore bright colors one day and all of the gators were stopping once he approached them. Didn’t do that again!

How was your setup and methods for getting those sounds?

I had a recorder (generally a 702T) and a shotgun mic (a Sanken CS-3e or a Neumann KMR81i, depending on how I felt that day). I had the rig strapped to me and in standby for the whole time I was there, so that I could press record and go at a moment’s notice. Some days I brought little handheld recorders and my Joby tripod to mount them to the railing. I would just set them there, hit record, and leave them there for an hour or so. Those gave me my best ambiences, especially because the birds were slightly more active when nobody was near them.

The first two times I kept my headphones on, because I was concerned with the sound quality. Once I figured out how to best capture the sounds, I kept my phones around my neck, because I wasn’t able to locate where a sounds were coming from with them on, so my reaction time was slow – I was missing recording opportunities. David talks about this in one of his posts from a while ago on DS. I kept them nearby so I could reference if I needed to, but keeping them on my head wasn’t working so well. I experimented with using open back phones so I could hear through them, but they were still messing with my perception of direction.

I know one of the alligators ate a blimp that was covering the mic… How shocking was that? Do you have any sound of that moment?

That was a bit shocking – somewhat of an adrenaline moment… Both Johnny and I were recording when that happened, so we do have recordings of that – both from “First Mic” and “Third Mic” perspectives.

I have to say, I was kind of asking for it to happen because I was trying to provoke the gator into making hissing sounds by bopping it on the head with my boom pole – something that I picked up from the trainers. What I didn’t pick up from the trainers was that they were doing it with a stick, not a boom pole with $2000 on the end of it… Not my brightest moment, but it lead to some fun stories. The gator grabbed the “Dead Wombat” off of my blimp, along with one of the end caps. He also put enough weight on the pole to snap it in the center. Luckily I was able to wrestle it back from him (I did not actually wrestle him – just yanked on the boom pole a lot…), so I didn’t lose the mic or the blimp frame. K-Tek and Rode were both very nice and amused enough at my stories that they sent me replacement parts for free. Two awesome companies when it comes to customer service!

If I think about it enough, I can still feel the jarring sensation in my hands from when the gator bit the blimp – those things are strong!

Recordings of that moment:

You must be very busy recently, since there hasn’t been so much activity on Hart FX. I wonder if this library is the beginning of a new wave of releases or something. Any plans for what’s coming next?

I have been very busy! I’ve been doing a lot of SFX Editing on a handful of feature pictures over the past year, which has taken up a lot of my time. Also, a lot of custom sound effects libraries for specific projects. That has prevented me from having the time to release all that much on HartFX in the past year, but I am working on some stuff. I have 3 or 4 libraries that are all half done. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them released in the next few months :-)

Rabbit Ears Audio has released Hind Helicopter, a library of 77 files recorded at 24-Bit/96kHz.

One Soviet-era helicopter, four recordists, and plenty of fuel brings you REA_010 Hind. The Mi-24 Hind is a Soviet gunship that was introduced in 1969 and saw action in Afghanistan and throughout the Cold War. A few month back, I had the opportunity to record the Hind and assembled a team of of recordists to get ‘er done.

Sometimes when an opportunity presents itself, you just have to jump at it. This an animal of a helicopter that requires 26,000 lbs of thrust to get off the ground and pushes a ton of air. The helicopter’s large size and five blades give it a unique sound that is a combination of a “chirpy” whine and extreme low end.

Hind Helicopter is available at $129. More info: REA.

Below is a quick Q&A I had with Michael talking about this new release.

- What led you to create this library?

I was working at another gig and a friend of mine mentioned that he knew the owner of this particular helicopter and asked if I wanted to record it. At that point I didn’t know much about the Mi-24 and I started to do some research. Once I discovered how few of them were in the US and how little coverage there was, I jumped at the opportunity.

- What were the most interesting things of this helicopter regarding sound?

I can’t say that anything was boring. We learned very early on how powerful this machine was. It put out a tremendous amount of SPL and air-pressure. At various points throughout the shoot, each of the recordists were knocked down at least once from all the air that was being pushed. The blades are huge and the Hind has five of them, so it is truly a beast of a machine. I watched one recordist, Rob Byers, get flipped over twice during a take-off sequence because the Hind  passed a little too closely in his direction. We lost some good takes when we got a little too macho. During all of the pass-bys, I often found it hard to breathe from the amount of pressure hitting my body. Boy, was that fun!

We also spent half a day recording all of the doors, switches and electrical systems.  I really fell in love with that material during the editing process. Even the smallest switches have real weight to them.

- Could you tell us about the setup used and methods used for capturing those sounds?

For all of the pass-bys we wanted to capture a variety of perspectives and tonal elements so we went went out with a diverse collection of microphones. For all of the exteriors, we recorded with the following gear:

Exterior: Schoeps MK4, Sennheiser MKH 40, MKH 60, Sennheiser 8020, 8040, and 8050. Onboard: MKH 30/40. Interior Switches and Exterior Electrical Systems were recorded with a Schoeps MK4 + MK8 and a Sennheiser 8060. All tracked to Sound Devices 7-Series recorders.

The Schoeps really brought out the chirp of the helicopter where the Sennheiser 8000 series helped bring out the shear size and low end of the helicopter. Ultimately, the most important task at hand was recording as much coverage as we could with the fuel load we had. As you can imagine,  it is expensive to put the aircraft up, so you really have to maximize the potential for interesting recordings.

- How was the collaboration between the team of recordists?

I was happy to bring a crew of recordists that I knew very well and had worked with previously. All of the guys (Rob Byers, John Loranger, and Kelly Pieklo) have plenty of field experience.  Since I knew them well, spending a few days together was not going to be issue. We truly had a blast!  If one is going to do any sort of vehicle recording, having a group of recordists will help get the job done way more efficiently. We were able to spread ourselves across the airfield and cover the aircraft thoroughly.

U.S.O (Unidentified Sound Object) Project is defined as a continuing evolving organism of sound. Created by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi, two sound artists working on several fields and exploring sound in many inspiring ways. Perhaps you already know about their fantastic blog, where they share lots of great things, making the site a must for anyone interested on sound experimentation, film sound design, electronic music, sound synthesis, signal processing, etc.

In the last year, Unidentified Sound Object started a new series of libraries aimed to sound designers and composers, starting with Hologram Room, a package of a wide variety of sources suitable for all kind of contexts and designed meticulously by the two sound sculptors. Today they’ve released their second package, which includes a fantastic collection of sounds created from electro-magnetic field captures.

Electromagnetic informations are invisible and omnipresent. In every city, especially the big ones, an infinite number of electromagnetic waves is hidden: we can’t hear them, but they’re everywhere! We explored this invisible noise pollution transducing electromagnetic fields into audio signals with a telephone pickup: it acts like a radio antenna for hum and weird electromagnetic noises.

We plugged it into a SONOSAX SX-R4 recorder, moving it close to electrical devices – like a stethoscope – to locate interesting and curious sounds, just like LCD television, internet antennas, lighting systems, transformers, game consoles, tablet, electronic security systems, scanners, computer monitors and hard-drives, printers, navigation systems, fax machines…

Available at U.S.O. $30, 40 files, 48kHz/24-Bit.

Below is an interview I did with Matteo and Federico, talking a bit about this new library and the ideas behind their project.

DS: Why you became interested on releasing a sound library about electro-magnetic sources?

M&F: For this Unseen Noises (USO002) we used telephone tap coils that receive electromagnetic signals around us and convert them into audible information to discover invisible and surprising aspects of the environment in which we live in. To widen our sound palette, we explored cell phones, tablets, light systems, automated teller machines, wireless communication systems, anti-theft security devices, surveillance cameras, computers, navigation systems, wireless Internet routers, neon advertisings, public transportation networks. We just used the system of electromagnetic induction as way of amplifying musical sounds. Our efforts were focused on finding “articulated” behaviours and other musical qualities in them. Note that the files contained in “Unseen Noises” are real performances executed on different devices without editing. What you hear is a selection of several hours of recording: you’ll find those sounds in our musical productions such as InharmoniCity or installations like Empty Rooms.

DS: I wonder how’s your collaboration as a team and how is sound design and music linked in your work?

M&F: Our first meeting dates back to 2005 on the Cinema Audio Society forum. Despite the distance between our hometowns (Milan-Rome), from day one we’ve been very good friends and we never stopped producing ideas and material in various forms – under the common denominator of Unidentified Sound Object. This second sound library is a good example of multi-disciplinarity. Our experience in different domains – from post-production to composition – helped us creating musical material of various kinds. Sound editors and designers can choose whether to use the sounds contained in our collections as they are, or sculpt them further – being very rich in the frequency spectrum. It’s material which lends itself to be processed in the frequency domain in order to extract the masked harmonic components. Our work is all about detail, and our albums take a long time to make. Usually we extract from a raw material the aspects that will serve the compositional idea. In every collection there is a part of each one of us, a mixture of our different experiences.

DS: What about processing of the elements?

M&F: We processed the recordings a little, by means of decorrelation, to control only the source width and create a diffuse sound field. When decorrelating the source between two speakers, the impression is a psycho-acoustic spreading of the audio in the space between them to achieve a diffuse, broad sound image. A recording is replicated in a second channel and shifted with a variable offset (ms). Decorrelation of audio signals uses this micro-temporal delay to enrich the sonic complexity of the overall listening experience, creating timbrical colouration and combing due to constructive and destructive interference. These time intervals are indeed acting and influencing our perception of musical facts. As in “Hologram Room”, we took care of the loudness overall level: the problem we always found navigating through sound libraries of different origins, is the extreme difference in signal level between their content. Having examined the subject in loudness over the past two years, it is clear that it no longer makes sense to peak normalize the sound-files, but it is better to balance them towards a universal center of gravity. Personally I found the EBU R128 solution an efficient response. The experience of moving between sound effects and music without constantly adjusting the listening level is an approach on which we can not give up. The future is in the loudness control and the calibration of the monitor. The K-System by Bob Katz – who has the authorship of the system – is an effective solution: excellent readings are available on his website digido.com.

DS: Although you designed all the sounds included in the package Hologram Room (USO001), it doesn’t feel like a collection of designed sounds. I’d say is more like a package of layers or something like “designed raw elements”. If that’s correct… could you tell us how do you proceed on making these single elements, rather than “ready to use” sounds?

M&F: The sound sources can be extracted from field-recordings, everyday objects, acoustic instruments or materials generated through analog and/or digital synthesis.  This library is born instinctively, at first in an effort to create a private archive of custom designed sound effects to work, easily available for TV works. The effort to create an appropriate catalog, has generated similar groups for various applications. What we were looking for, was a family of recombinant sounds, to be easily layered and structured in any DAW. Thanks to Kyma and the custom tools in our possession, we’ve been able to sculpt our idea in an easily and familiar environment with instant feedback, before jumping in the Pro Tools timeline. We wondered: why not provide the material extracted from our musical encounters as “raw” material, but already organized, to suggest “emotions”? Fragments of sound materials – amorphous in terms of musical discourse – are defined by David Lynch and his composer Angelo Badalamenti as firewood. The director said that “continuing to work with sound, what you do not want to become is more and more evident.” In fact, the most perceptually original ideas we had, have always determined the nature of our compositions, with or without sound processes of transformation and transfiguration. Every phenomenon, deliberately taken out of its natural context, becomes something else and is no longer reconstitutable.

DS: What were your main tools and methods for fabricating sounds for these categories? Specifically talking about Kyma, could you tell us about the advantages you find for sound design related works? I wonder if you have any thoughts regarding other “similar” alternatives, such as Max/MSP for example.

M&F: Max/MSP and Kyma are not really similar. Kyma shares more similarities with SuperCollider. The advantages are in terms of operating procedures and efficiency of programming in an object oriented environment. All the control domain functions are written in Capytalk (a real-time implementation of Smalltalk). So the fact that you can “code” functions instead of patching them is quicker and more elegant (in terms of debugging). Kyma offers a true DSP object oriented work-flow that is focused on sound design. Max is more flexible when we talk about multimedia stuff, like installations, augmented reality or cross-domain applications. There is an issue about sound quality as well. Kyma has its own “sound-print”, which we like very much.

DS: How much improvisation is involved in the process?

M&F: Improvisation or sound exploration is fundamental. Sometimes you can achieve interesting and unexpected results only running trough unknown paths. It is time consuming – of course, but very often you find undiscovered territories only if you lose yourself inside them. Experience plays also a great role. It is not about what to do, but what to not do. It’s a negative approach; don’t do this or that, because you already know what it will sound like. It is a series of no, and no, an so on until you find what is left, which is very often quite challenging. Most appropriate for our work of art is the process of designing our tools and to study their “aural” behaviours based on what we would like to accomplish. Then the feedback approach comes into play. You do something and then you hear the output, very often predictable, then you inject some amount of “randomness” into it and things start to sound more exciting. A very stimulating approach is what we call “exploring the phase space”. When you define an instrument, that instrument can achieve specific discrete configuration states. We obtain this by using presets, and presets of presets. Then we move inside this discrete space adding just a little bit of randomness around each predefined states. So you explore in a non-linear way the behaviour of the system and its internal dynamics.

DS: How regularly are you thinking to release these libraries? What could we expect in these series?

M&F: Like every one of our free initiatives, there is no precise schedule for the release of future libraries; we would like to produce at least a couple of packages a year, derived from timbrical explorations of ongoing projects. We’ve quietly started working on a new collection: our job is to always deal with something new, to find sound objects for aesthetic consideration on their own terms. We’re just kind of scratching at the surface of that, we’ll see where it ends up. And in the pipeline there’s a new upcoming “untitled” album, to be released soon. In parallel, we recorded a considerable amount of material for a mobile interactive album that will be released very soon, a pure sensory experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Article written by Frank Bry about his new library Ultimate Destruction, a collection of+600 destruction sounds recorded over a five year period at 24-Bit 96kHz in a multitude of dirty, dusty, smelly, noisy, dangerous and physically grueling locations. Available at The Recordist]

The Idea

Where do I begin? This sound effects library has been in the making for over five years so I need to access my memory banks and see if I can remember some of the crazy sessions I did. But first, I want to share some of my thoughts on why I made this collection and the theory behind the madness.

Ever since I started in sound design I’ve always needed all kinds of crashes and general destruction source material. This kind of material is not easy to find and sometimes recording your own can be a challenge. There are some great CD library collections of destruction sounds but most of it is designed. While these work great for a simple “drop and play” audio situation when your in a time crunch and they sound wonderful when played by themselves, they often leave you to a situation that is just not quite right. What if you have a complex destruction scene in a film or need to create that incredible crash sequence in a video game? You need clean, high quality sound elements separated out that you can manipulate and process so it sounds like something you created, your signature sound. That is the idea behind Ultimate Destruction.

From My Mind To The Microphone

Some of the sessions for this collection were planned multi-microphone fiascos and others were just from being observant or being in the right place at the right time. When I was recording the crashes and other crazy stuff on my ranch I ran images and sequences through my mind of my favorite crash scenes from my favorite movies. I tried to remember what certain scenes sounded like and how the arrived at the final audio destination. One of the things I noticed in theses scenes is there are a lot of elements used to create them. How can I mentally break them down to the individual parts was my obsession during the recording process.

My goal was to record them as big as I could and as long as I could and this presented many challenges. The first was having the various objects needed to make the vibrations and second, the tools need to make the action happen. I’m always on the look out for stuff to smash. My garage is full of things like old TV monitors, computers, boxes of bricks, metal objects and other stupid stuff any sane person would dispose of. When I purchased my ranch it had a lot of junk laying around and I have kept it all and even found some things I never knew were there until recently. I have my tractor, long chains and cables and many farming tools to hit stuff with. OK, a good start. Time to begin recording.

Got Concrete?

After recording Ultimate Concrete SFX I had tons of cement block and sidewalk debris left over. I wanted to record long dumps and pours with the tractor but the loader bucket always made a multi-pitched metal tome when things fall out. I needed to solve this problem as the concrete dumps sounded like they were coming out of a metal container. I experimented with many types of padding inside the bucket and finally found the right combination of a couple of old rugs clamped and taped inside the bucket. This was no easy task since the weight of the concrete would sometimes pull the rugs off and they would fall to the ground with the debris. This did not effect the sound that much but is was a pain in my backside to put the whole dampening system back in place after each dump. It was enough I had to hand load the bucket each time so this was an extra step I wanted to do without.

The concrete still made some noise as it was falling out of the bucket so I carefully positioned the microphones so that sound was off axis and I tried to dump from as high a location as possible. I have a dirt ramp I built to drive the tractor up on and was able to dump the debris onto a concrete floor I found buried in a hillside that was from an old barn the burned down many years ago.

Cool! I Found a BIG Rusty Old Tool Box!

Just recently I found a old construction tool box that fits into the back of a pick up truck on a remote corner of my ranch. I pulled it out and dragged it to my foley pit and planned my next sessions with this lucky find. My goal in recording this metal box was to create source material that could be used for a variety of crash situations. From a car rolling down a hill to a large bus hanging off the edge of a cliff and falling over.

This tool box was full of old nails, tools, chains and other disgusting things so when it was moved it made all kinds of noises not just a hollow metal sound. Stuff was rattling around inside the box and I knew it would eventually all fall out so I only had a few takes to get that sound. The first thing I recorded was the rolling and tumbling down a hill. This did not go as planned at first because the box would not roll! It would just fall to the ground and stop even on a steep embankment. This was actually a good thing because I was able to kick it down the hill one or two revolutions at a time. I was able to digitally edit the take together for a full roll and still have the separate parts that can be timed to a sequence.

The next thing I recorded was pulling the box with a cable attached to my tractor. I had 75 feet of cable so the tractor was far enough away from the microphones that the engine sound is not there. I proceeded to yank the box up and down a steep dirt embankment and got some great stuff. Slowly the box began to empty itself and was now becoming lighter in weight that I was able to easily pull the box with a short cable against the dirt. I later added some metal pieces and then some glass windows for added effect.

No, You’re Not Tearing That Building Down, Are You?

When one of the auto dealerships moved out of their downtown location, the new owners scheduled the buildings for demolition. I kept an eye on the location as I drove by it on my trips to town. I finally noticed the big excavators and cranes in the parking lot next to the buildings. Soon they would be ripping the buildings apart, and I wanted to be there. I missed the first part of the tear down, but I eventually showed up and recorded the machine operators pulling some of the walls apart and separating the metal into piles. Wanting to be mobile, I used my MKH-8040ST rig on a boom pole. I was there at the right time. They had already pulled the roof off and the machines were inside the building behind the walls they were about to rip down. I was able to get up close (maybe too close for comfort) to the wall as they tore it apart and it fell over. I struck gold! I was so nervous and excited that I barely shot any video. The video I got was with my iPhone while I was holding the boom and positioned to flee if debris headed in my direction. This was a little dangerous I guess, but in the end, it all came out great. Thankfully I did not breathe any toxic dust.

The excavator operator came over to chat with me during the metal separation. He was more than happy to “perform” some cool metal mangling for me. Metal can make such unexpected sounds and this metal certainly did. As he shoved it around and slammed the excavator bucket into the pile, I recorded all sorts of nice big wrenching and squeaking sounds. Gold!

On another occasion, a house right up the road from my ranch was being destroyed, and I was able to get the final stages of that tear down. I recorded some wood crunches and cracks along with some metal roofing being rolled up for recycling. This was the same house where I recorded glass windows being broken for Ultimate Glass SFX.

Wood and Glass Make A Great Couple

I recorded some hard breaks, cracks and dumps using some old, slightly rotted lumber that I had laying around. After whacking them with a sledgehammer and breaking them to bits, I loaded them into the tractor bucket using the same dampening technique used with the concrete. I dropped them onto the ground and also onto the concrete floor. I had some alternate microphone recordings from Ultimate Wood SFX of plywood rips in my archive that I included in this collection.

Glass is a very difficult thing to record. It’s dangerous, loud, and messy. My goal this time, using all the left over debris from recording Ultimate Glass SFX, was to get some long glass debris sprays and dumps. After hand loading the glass into the tractor bucket (I always wear hand, eye, and hearing protection when working with glass), I was able to slowly pour the glass out. I had previously separated the large mirrors and thinner glass so each pour had a distinct size to it. Mirror glass is thicker and heavier while window glass tends to be much thinner. I tried short and long pours, but at times it did whatever the hell it wanted to do and it all fell out.

I had saved some broken window frames and was able to crunch and crack them in a stack using a MKH-8040 to record them. I also had some computer and TV debris set aside that contained glass pieces along with the plastic and metal portions. These made for some great debris movements that can be used to sweeten a crash scene. Some of the sounds are subtle, but they are still destruction.

Metal Madness . . . The Recycler!

I took a quick trip to the local metal recycling facility to ask them if they would allow me to record. They were super nice and loaned me a hard hat and said, “stay out of trouble.” The only interesting activity they had going on was some scrap aluminum bundling. This giant machine is belt fed with scraps of metal. After tumbling down the chute into the compactor, the scraps come out bundled in a fairly large size rectangular hunk of metal.

I was able to position the MKH-8040ST microphone just inside the top of the chute and get the pieces falling in and being mangled. The machine is powered by a large electric motor and hydraulics which produce a very loud whine and hum. Since the mic was just inside the chute, the motor noise was minimal. This machine was extremely loud when the metal was falling in. Since I had to wear a hard hat I could not wear headphones, only earplugs. Good thing I did not monitor the recording with headphones as I’m sure hearing damage would have occurred.

The sounds this machine made were awesome! Most of the time the belt would continuously feed hundreds of pieces of metal into the compactor so it sounded like one long, drawn out metal crash, perfect for sound design. The metal pieces were not that heavy so the resulting sound does not have much low frequency information, but when a larger aluminum chunk hit the side of the chute, it was great.

KABOOM!

I’ve always wanted to record explosions and while I was recording a few guns last year I had my chance to record some Tannerite. Explosions are not something you can record everyday. It takes some planning, a good location that allows this kind of very loud noise, and a very good rifle shot. Since I have the gear, all I needed was the above. It all came together after months of planning with the local gun shop. After recording multiple guns, it was time to set off the Tannerite. If you don’t know about Tannerite, it is two (legal) substances that when mixed together and hit with just the right projectile at just the right velocity, it goes BANG!

We brought along 25 half-pound canisters and planned how many we were going to tape together and set off. We started out with a few singles and doubles and then moved on to the big ones—up to five taped together. We set the canisters on tree stumps so they would not kick up too much dirt and debris. I recorded with all the microphones I had on the gun shoot placed at various locations in the gravel pit. I used a Sanken CSS-5, AT 835ST, MKH-416, PCM-D50 (96k), MKH-8040 and my MKH-8040ST microphone set at 24-bit 192kHz and 96kHz. I aimed the microphones in different directions and set them at different distances. I would guess the mics were anywhere from 30 meters to 50 meters away from the blasts.

I did not know what to expect. I knew they were going to be loud, but since we had just shot off some REALLY loud rifles, my perspective was totally messed up. Needless to say, they were LOUD. Your body feels the concussion but if you’re wearing hearing protection (like I was), they sound muffled. After we set off the first few smaller blasts it started to rain. I quickly grabbed all the gear scattered around the gravel pit and set it under the hatch of my car. It seemed like the rain was not going to stop so we called it a day, and I tore down the gear. Then as quick as it came in, the rain stopped. Since we were running out of time, I quickly got the MKH-8040ST and Sanken CSS-5 set up, and we recorded the remaining explosions.

I thought I was going to regret not setting up all the gear after the rain delay. After I returned to the studio and listened to all the takes, I found the best recordings were the MKH-8040ST. These microphones at 192k sound amazing. They record the full spectrum of the blast and when pitched down, live up to the hype.

It’s A Wrap

I recorded a many more sounds for this library and would love to detail it all out but this article would become a short novel. Head on over to my website and look at the photos from many of the sessions. Some of the sounds date back to a time when I was not documenting the sessions as I do now.

There are no heavily processed sound effects here (except the explosions), just the real life destruction action as it happened. Many of the tracks were recorded with multiple extended frequency response microphones at close, medium, and distant perspectives. Each category was recorded separately to give you, the sound designer, the freedom to layer and process each type of sound individually for the most creative options. I hope you get much use out of this collection and hope it works well and inspires you. If you use it, feel free to let me know where and how. I would love to hear your end results and am honored if you were able to use it in your sound designs.

One of the things I’ve learned over the many years recording sound effects is to be very observant. I’m almost too observant (it drives my wife crazy sometimes). I can get easily distracted driving around town or just hanging out in a public place. I’m always listening and looking for things to record. I was fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time and get some unique, and maybe once in a lifetime, material. I thank my lucky stars I was not in the right place at the wrong time. As always, be safe and enjoy! -Frank

Click here to view the embedded video.