About a year ago I watched 'An Island', a documentary film by Vincent Moon on the Danish band Efterklang. The whole soundtrack of the movie is extremely musical and is a great example of sound design and music creating a great blend. It was almost no surprise to see Nils Frahm credited for mixing and recording the soundtrack. Frahm is not only an accomplished producer and … [Read more...]
Audiovisual Correspondences
Guest contribution by Martin Stig Andersen The following is extracted from the author’s article "Electroacoustic Sound and Audiovisual Structure in Film" (supervised by Denis Smalley) originally published by eContact. Music Versus Sound Effects — Sound Designer qua Composer? Given sound’s ability to create temporal experiences unique to that of other media, it seems no … [Read more...]
Loudness and Metering (Part 2)
Guest contribution by Owen Green [This is the second of a two part series on loudness, mixing, metering and the new ITU loudness spec] The New Loudness Standards, and What They Might Mean for Us Depending on the field in which one worked, standard production practices have tended to be orientated around peak normalisation of material. That is, lining up recordings by their … [Read more...]
Loudness and Metering (Part 1)
Guest contribution by Owen Green [This is the first of a two part series on loudness, mixing, metering and the new ITU loudness spec] Understanding the complex relationship between sound level and perceived loudness turns out to be very important to us as designers of sound for a number of reasons: Our perception of loudness is not constant (or even remotely linear) … [Read more...]
Endless Series – Review
Endless Series is a unique audio tool from Oli Larkin. It is tough to describe it in a single sentence. The description on the 'box' says "Shepard/Risset Tone Modulation", which only scratches the surface of what this plugin is capable of. What are Shepard/Risset tones? From the manual: Endless Series is an experimental effect/tone generator based on the auditory illusion … [Read more...]
Design Toolbox #1 – Flangers
[This was originally posted a year ago and has been republished because it fits in with this month's theme - Varun] Inspired by Miguel's 'SFX Lab' series, I thought it would be nice to start a series on using conventional plugins to design sounds. With many of us primarily working off DAWs with a mouse pointer and plugin windows, there isn't much room for 'hands-on' … [Read more...]
Recording Impulse Responses
With growing computing power over the last decade, convolution plugins have become commonplace. Some of the most common ones include Audio Ease Altiverb, Logic’s Space Designer, Avid TL Space, Waves IR-1 and McDsp Revolver. They are usually packaged with large and useful libraries of impulse responses (more on what all this means below), but what makes them really powerful is … [Read more...]