Randy Thom just published an interesting piece on the (over)use of Reverb on his blog. I think another natural tendency of ours also drives us to over-reverb: humans are innately fascinated by reverb. It’s why so few of us can resist blowing our car horns when we drive through a tunnel. It’s why the voices of the clergy seem all the more holy in the echo-y environment of a … [Read more...]
Sunday Sound Thought 20 – Pulling Focus
As the year continues, many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span… A few weeks ago, I talked about the idea of a sonic version of the "visual zoom." This past week, I had the … [Read more...]
Spaces From Noise
Impulse responses are great for recreating spaces, whether it is a resonant glass bottle or a large cave. Here's a handy a trick for sculpting your own impulse responses, and therefore your own reverbs, from something that we spend a lot of time getting rid of -- noise! If you listen to an impulse response by itself, you'll find that it has noise-like qualities, except the … [Read more...]
Open AIR Library
The Open Acoustic Impulse Response (Open AIR) Library is an amazing resource for sound designers to share acoustical data, and most of the content on this site is released under Creative Commons licenses. … [Read more...]
Auditory Perspective: Putting The Audience In The Scene
By Karen Collins Adapted from a forthcoming article in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal An often overlooked aspect of sound design is the use of sound to create a sense of identification for the audience. Just as with using point-of-view with camera angles, sound can be used to create an auditory position for the listener/audience, putting … [Read more...]
Nightmares and Soundscapes: Implementation of Acoustic Ecology Related Sound Design Techniques to Better Terrify your Players
Guest Contribution by Dr Tom Garner This article addresses contemporary concepts regarding how we attune to sound within a fear context and discusses the potential impact of these ideas upon sound design, specifically with regards to evoking disorientation in survival horror computer games. Relevant theory is distilled to consider an ecological perspective of sound experience … [Read more...]
New Research Initiative Will Dig Deep Into All Things Reverb
A project funded by the EU is taking on the challenge of modelling, synthesizing and analysing acoustic reverberation. The DREAMS (Dereverberation, Reverberation of Audio, Music and Speech) project began in February 2013 and is expected to run for three years. The research initiative is being led by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), and will focus on four areas seen … [Read more...]