It's been a great month here on Designing Sound! We took a gamble in November with the new monthly features format, and it's been paying off in spectacular fashion. This site would not be so special without the support and contributions of the community it serves. A hearty round of thanks goes out to this month's guests: Ian Palmer, for his examination of just a few of the … [Read more...]
Analog Worldization
Guest contribution by Cormac Donnelly I am, at heart, a techno-nostalgiast and I’ve worked with tape machines of one kind or other for most of my career. When I sold my 2” multi-track, in 2010, I resolved almost immediately to get myself another tape machine (albeit something a little smaller than the 250kg Otari I had just parted with). A few weeks later, I found myself … [Read more...]
Creating the Spaces of Ambience
Guest contribution by Michael Theiler (Kpow Audio) Situating an Ambience When creating ambiences for games (this applies equally to film), I am striving to make them blend into the background and not mask any important in game sounds. For most ambiences, these are the most important qualities that I am attempting to resolve. In order to achieve this, I need to firstly focus on … [Read more...]
Panning Reverb Returns
Guest contribution by By Douglas Murray OK, here is the ugly truth for film post, or really any surround sound work… Most reverb plug-ins do not sound natural for applications using greater than 1 or 2 speakers. What you don’t want: a reverb that jumps to completely different speakers from the source. What you do want: a reverb that spreads out from the sound and helps localize … [Read more...]
Creative Uses of Reverb
Guest Contribution by Ian Palmer There are a lot of technical articles on Designing Sound so I thought I’d try to balance that with this month’s theme of Reverb. We all know that reverb is used to create realism. Adding the correct or appropriate reverb to ADR will instantly make the dialogue fit better into a scene and remove the artifice of the replacement. However, we can … [Read more...]
Psychoacoustics: Faking the Space
When building the space that sounds occupy, it may sometimes seem like overkill to load up those DSP hungry (though wonderful) reverb plug-ins. They can be a pretty big load when it comes to even the mildest amount of spatialization, and it can also be time consuming to configure one to emulate an outdoor space. I thought it would be worth sharing a trick of mine for both … [Read more...]
Welcome to Reverb Month
Sound occupies space. Actually, sound is a wave (or set of waves) that travels through a medium. So, it's not so much that it occupies a space, but is trapped within it. Sound interacts with that space, fills it, bounces around inside it and, if it causes enough vibrations, can bleed out into adjacent spaces. The interaction between sound and the space it occupies can tell us a … [Read more...]