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David Farmer has published more than 20 videos taken from his field recording sessions. You’ll find a very good dose of inspiration. From worldizing, to ambience recording, fails, accidents and more. It’s great!

Feel free to go to David Farmer’s YouTube Channel and have fun!

Some years ago, MPEG published a very interesting article of Charles Maynes talking about his approach on the use of the worldizing technique:

For some of us in sound and music circles, “worldizing” has long held a special sense of the exotic. Worldizing is the act of playing back a recording in a real-world environment, allowing the sound to react to that environment, and then re-recording it so that the properties of the environment become part of the newly recorded material. The concept is simple, but its execution can be remarkably complex.

In Walter Murch’s superb essay on the reconstruction of the Orson Welles film A Touch of Evil, he quotes from a 58-page memo that Welles wrote to Universal to lay out his vision for the movie. At one point, Welles describes how he wants to treat the music during a scene between Janet Leigh and Akim Tamiroff, and he offers as elegant a description of worldizing as I can think of:

The music itself should be skillfully played but it will not be enough, in doing the final sound mixing, to run this track through an echo chamber with a certain amount of filter. To get the effect we’re looking for, it is absolutely vital that this music be played back through a cheap horn in the alley outside the sound building. After this is recorded, it can then be loused up even further in the process of rerecording. But a tinny exterior horn is absolutely necessary, and since it does not represent very much in the way of money, I feel justified in insisting upon this, as the result will be really worth it.

At the time, Universal did not revise Touch of Evil according to these notes, but the movie’s recent reconstruction incorporates these ideas. Worldizing is now a technique that has been with us for some time and will likely be used and refined for years to come.

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Worldizing, an amazing sound design concept created by Walter Murch. Watch the video to know all about that process. There are at Filmsound one interesting article about Worldizing; Walter said:

George (Lucas) and I took the master track of the two-hour radio show with Wolfman Jack as DJ and played it back on a Nagra in a real space – a suburban backyard. I was fifty-or-so-feet away with a microphone recording that sound onto another Nagra, keeping it in sync and moving the microphone kind of at random, back and forth, as George moved the speaker through 180 degrees. There were times when microphone and speaker were pointed right at each other, and there were other times when they were pointed in completely opposite directions. So that was a separate track. Then, we did that whole thing again.

When I was mixing the film, I had three tracks to draw from. One of them was what you might call the “dry studio track” of the radio show, where the music was very clear and sharp and everything was in audio focus. Then there were the other two tracks which were staggered a couple of frames to each other, and on which the axis of the microphone and the speakers was never the same because we couldn’t remember what we had done intentionally.

Sometimes, Wolfman Jack would be on axis on one track, but he would be off axis on the other track. I was able to blend those three tracks to get the right amount of atmosphere. I could make transitions from a live, very present sound to something that sounded like it was very distant and bouncing off many buildings. I could create a sense of movement too – hence, the moving microphones.

Read the full article here.

Video vía usoproject