[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.

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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

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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.

We don’t use to talk so much about plugin news, but this fantastic.

spanner is a powerful surround channel manager, panner, remapper and folddown plugin for AVID Pro Tools.

it is the result of years of personal frustration with the Pro Tools panner and bussing setup and solves many of the common complaints about the surround workflow in Pro Tools.

if you ever work in surround you’ll appreciate this plugin I’m sure, but if mixing-in-the-box is your thing you’re going to see this as a major step forward.

Read more: maggot software | music of sound

GDC Vault has published the presentation materials from GDC 2012 online for free. There is a great wealth of information from a wide section of the game audio community, starting with Darren Korb‘s excellent keynote speech on his experience of creating the audio for Bastion in a New York closet. Thanks to Kenneth Young for tipping via the #gameaudio hashtag on Twitter!

All free Audio Track sessions are listed and linked below for your convenience;

(Video)

Build That Wall: Creating the Audio for Bastion – Darren Korb

(Slides)

80,000 Lines, Three Lessons Learned - Ariel Gross

Audio Boot Camp - Scott Selfon, Garry Taylor, Jason Graves, Martin Stig Andersen, Alistair Hirst, Sergio Pimentel, John Byrd, Bernard Rodrigue, Mike Caviezel

Authoring Soundscapes with User Generated Content and Automatic Audio Classification - Jordi Janer

Digital Orchestration for the Video Game Composer - Fletcher Beasley

From Minsk to London: How to make a live orchestra production in Europe happen - Pierre Langer

How To Ship a Game With Voices In 10 Languages? …On the same day? …And Keep It Consistent? - Alexandre Piche

Journey vs Monaco: Music is Storytelling - Austin Wintory

Orchestral Recording at Abbey Road for Lord of the Rings: War in the North - Craig Duman, Inon Zur, John Kurlander

Racing Games: A Semi-Formal Sound Study - Damian Kastbauer

Real-time Sound Propagation in Video Games - Jean-Francois Guay

Spot the Difference: AAA vs Indie VO Techniques - Michael Csurics, David Gilbert

Squeeze Play: The State of Ady0 Cmprshn - Scott Selfon

The Art of Non-Music: Crime Shooter Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days - Mona Mur

The Dynamic Audio of Vessel - Leonard Paul

The Emotional Puppeteer: Uncovering the Musical Strings that Tie Our Hearts to Games - Marty O’Donnell, Brandi House

The Weight of the World: creating massive destruction audio for  Red Faction: Armageddon - Stephen Hodde

What We Learned About Practical Audio By Going To Disneyland - Dwight Okahara, Chris Olander

Ted Conley, Audio Director of EA Canada and the technical artist behind the RUMR (Realtime User Music Remix) system, has uploaded a video demonstrating how to utilize the custom soundtracks features of SSX, and the RUMR system. In the five minute video, Ted explains and demonstrates the various methods used to dynamically accentuate player performance, using runtime parameters, sampling, filters and a wide variety of DSP effects.

Skip ahead to 1:35 of the video to bypass the custom soundtrack ripping tutorial, and get straight to the action.

Cool video profile about the work of the guys at Wabi Sabi Sound featuring sound designers Andrew Lackey and Geoffrey Garnett.

An interview with sound designer Randy Thom at VIEW Conference 2011.

Thanks to Matteo for the link!

Jesse James Allen, Audio Director at EA Sports Tiburon, delivered an hour-long presentation to the Advaced Interactive Audio students at Full Sail University on ‘Top Ten Game Audio Mistakes’, addressing misconception such as ‘audio being a one person job’, ‘Audio is easy to integrate ‘ and ‘Video game audio cliches’

In this exclusive SoundWorks Collection video profile, producer Michael Coleman sits down with the oscar nominated sound team of HUGO including co-supervising sound editor Philip Stockton, co-supervising sound editor Eugene Gearty, and re-recording mixer Tom Fleischman.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Brian Selznick’s award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret stars Asa Butterfield, as an orphan boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Sent to live with his drunken uncle after his father’s death in a fire, Hugo learned how to wind the massive clocks that run throughout the station. When the uncle disappears one day, Hugo decides to maintain the clocks on his own, hoping nobody will catch on to him squatting in the station.

His natural aptitude for engineering leads him to steal gears, tools, and other items from a toy-shop owner who maintains a storefront in the station. Hugo needs these purloined pieces in order to rebuild a mechanical man that was left in the father’s care at the museum — the restoration was a project father and son did together.

SoundWorks Collection

(seen via Game Audio 101 and Twitter ( @EngineAudioTom )

Click here to view the embedded video.