Unidentified Sound Object

Out now: Unseen Noises [USO002]

2012-04-19T13:17:00.000+02:00

24-bit/48kHz Royalty-free Sound Design Collection

Unseen Noises is the second sound effects bundle created by sound designers and electronic composers Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka Unidentified Sound Object - U.S.O. Project).

Electromagnetic informations are invisible and omnipresent. In every city, especially the big ones, an infinite number of electromagnetic waves is hidden: we can't hear them, but they're everywhere! We explored this invisible noise pollution transducing electromagnetic fields into audio signals with a telephone pickup: it acts like a radio antenna for hum and weird electromagnetic noises.

We plugged it into a SONOSAX SX-R4 recorder, moving it close to electrical devices - like a stethoscope - to locate interesting and curious sounds, just like LCD television, internet antennas, lighting systems, transformers, game consoles, tablet, electronic security systems, scanners, computer monitors and hard-drives, printers, navigation systems, fax machines...

All of the audio files have been embedded with metadata for detailed and accurate searches in your asset management software.

As the previous library, this collection has not been peak normalized, but loudness normalized. Through loudness normalization, the gain of a signal is modified so that the signal’s loudness level equals -23 LUFS. Loudness normalization helps us solve the problem where we wish to balance the loudness level of multiple sound files.

Here is what you get in "Unseen Noises":

Stereo Files (40 items)
Tab-delimited file (.txt)
Excel spreadsheet (.xls)
License Agreement (.pdf)
Artwork (.jpg)

Audio Format: Broadcast Wave Files (.wav)
Sample Rate: 48 kHz
Bit Depth: 24-bit
Size: 2.43 GB
Download size is 2.2 GB (compressed .zip archive)

Price: $ 30 - via PayPal

We make every effort to email the archive to you within 48 hours after you place your order. Please contact us if you have not received your product within this time (*).

(*) Please note that the products directly for sale from this website are not automatically downloaded when you enable the purchase. We email you the download link upon receipt of purchase notification from PayPal. If you do not find it, please look into your SPAM or JUNK folder because it might have been blocked by your e-mail system.

GRM pt.2: the birth of a concept

2012-03-09T16:55:00.000+01:00

Daniel Teruggi wrote an interesting article about the Syter system at INA - GRM in the booklet for Archives GRM (CD 4). This whole CD is comprised of works created through Syter.

[via sonoloco.com]

"To mark and celebrate the thirty years of the INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel), the GRM (Groupe des Recheches Musicales) has chosen to bring together an exceptional set of five compact discs, illustrating some of its most remarkable musical archives. These original works, which are often previously unpublished or have been dispersed throughout a host of other publications, are important because of the originality and audacity they testify to in the second half of the 20° century. Some listeners will be pleased to see that there are a number of illustrious composers here who, in the 1950s, frequented the studio of Pierre Schaeffer, and others will discover numerous musicians whose enthusiasm enabled this innovative musical genre to last throughout the following decades."
Emmanuel Hoog, président directeur générale de l'Ina

Daniel Teruggi - The time of real time

From the very beginning, music, whether vocal or instrumental, improvised or written, and up until the invention ol recording processes, was listened to at the precise moment it was produced. The twentieth century changed all that, First of all with the appearance of recording media, which made it possible to listen to sound in a place and at a time other than those at which it was originally produced; then by the widespread use of electricity, which made it possible to invent new instruments and new ways of imagining and making music. Concrete music, electronic music, electroacoustic music, acousmatic music or contemporary electronic musics are all testimony to the same ambition: using electrical, electronic and computer-based technologies to invent the sounds of music. The invention of sounds is the invention of new forms of music, of new ways of looking at music, and is the logical consequence of the new opportunities that technology continues to provide us with. Musicians began to use computer systems a long time ago (1958) in order to synthesise sounds and to develop computer programmes that would enable them to combine sounds into musical works. Progressively it became possible to record these sounds, to process them or to hybridise them with synthetic sounds.

Musical computer technology did not develop fast and was dependent on the way processors and data storage systems evolved; in 1958, a large computer in a research centre was necessary in order to produce a simple synthesised melody, which it was not even possible to record in the memory. These initial technical difficulties brought about the appearance of two concepts which could be described in a historical perspective, but which are often presented as if the were antagonistic: deferred time and real time. Deferred time described the way that the first computer systems were unable to produce an instantaneous result.

Between the moment at which the intention was expressed and the moment when its result become an audible phenomenon, there was always a certain lapse of time.

The user programmed a sound using software, defining its various parameters and timbre, and then the computer calculated the sound and, depending on the complexity of the calculation, produced the result ofter a given interval. The listening time was deferred with respect to intention time.

It was logical that the next technological objective was real time, a concept that describes the possibility of hearing a sound at precisely the some time as the intention to make it is expressed.

Moving over to real time required changes to the command tools. Deferred time was the result of a programming system whereby the user defined, using written language, the result he wished to obtain; moving over to real time made it possible to define the intentions instantaneously and to modify the result as it was being listened to.

Now, most sound production and generation systems work in real time, enabling the user, thanks to various interaction tools (keyboards, mice, screens) to control and modify the sounds created and heard. Nevertheless, in the field of musical creation, and for a relatively long time, this technological evolution was opposed on methodological grounds. Real time obliges the operator to act and react, depending on the result, in a way that is similar to that of the instrumentalist. For many composers, deferred time, because it separated the moment of conception from the moment of listening, created a distance that was necessary for reflection, a situation that is similar to instrumental composition, between the writing of a piece on paper, and its being played.

[Daniel Teruggi @ Sonic Acts 2010 - courtesy Rosa Menkman]

Deferred time and real time in the GRM

At the beginning of the 1970s, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales began to experiment using computer technologies. At the time, the Group already had 20 years of experience, a major repertoire of musical works, a tradition for profound reflection on music and perception as well as innovative technological research. Little by little, therefore, work was undertaken to look at the possibilities that this new domain, which was already strong in the United States, could offer in France, where it was comparatively little known. Two projects were to follow one another, and then coexist, between 1975 and 1993: the first, from 1975 to 1987, concerned the development of deferred time sound processing tools, the "Studio 123 software programmes", developments that are dealt with in CD 3 of the GRM Archives set. The second project, the Syter system was a major technological development for musical computer programming, so original that its impact can still be felt in the development of processing tools today.
These two projects were vitally important in opening electroacoustic music up to composers from the instrumental world. The main successes of these two projects were to bring electroacoustic music out of the studio, making computer technology accessible, without needing programming skills, and making processing reliable and reproducible. The range of things it was possible to do to sound was considerably widened, using original and unheard of sound processing techniques. These two projects were a unique period for the GRM, the studios opened up to welcome composers with other ideas, concepts and points of view, the dialogue was rich and fruitful, and the understanding and analysis of the music being written there were enhanced.

The Syter project

With the advent of computer technology, the first idea was to imagine a parametric control of machines using digital tools. For example, synthesisers, while remaining analogue in the way that the sound is generated, could be controlled by digital systems that would provide o greater precision in terms of frequency that traditional rotary buttons. It was thus that the first Syter was born, an acronym for: Synthése en temps réel (real time synthesis), and the objective of which was to build up a digital synthesis system based on a set of oscillators, controlled in real time by specialised gesture-based access or by external signals.
The first prototype that was built was relatively simple, since its only function was to control, in real time, the movements of a sound source between a number of loudspeakers. This prototype, with its delicate control system and laborious programming, was used in concert on 16 March 1977 for the creation of Cristal by Francois Bayle.
The designer of this tool and of its following versions was Jean-François Allouis, an engineer who arrived at the GRM in 1974, and who was fascinated by the potential of computer technology as applied to sound and music, and who had an uncanny inventiveness when it came to finding solutions to new problems and designing original systems. For this first concert, the acronym Syter become: Systéme temps réel (real time system), and was the starting point for a whole 5-year period of development during which Jean-François Allouis contributed to the setting up of the first GRM computer, oversaw the implementation of the deferred time processing system, built the Syter real-time sound processor and the input and output converters, developed programming software for the processor, built one of the first interactive real-time parameter control systems and programmed the first processing tools. In conjunction with computer scientist Jean-Yves Bernier and computer technician Richard Bulski, he needed to build and rebuild the system several times before the first full system was complete, in 1984. The system underwent very few modifications and additions, subsequent to that. Eight systems were built and sold, up until 1988. The software continued to evolve up until 1989, in particular thanks to the impetus of Hugues Vinet, who designed a digital mixing tool, providing the system with all the functions of a Studio. Two systems were in operation at the GRM until 1995, and around 100 works were composed in part or in whole using the system.

Related Posts:

GRM Tools - pt.1: an interview with Emmanuel Favreau

Introducing: 'Vienna String Duo'

2012-02-05T15:21:00.000+01:00

U.S.O. Project is pleased to announce its collaboration for Sonic Screens 2012 with the Vienna String Duo (Sorana Gatlan & Ana Topalovic).

VSD will be also involved by playing the two selected scores during the evening Concert that will take place in Milan later this November.

About VSD

This exciting Duo can best be described as complex through its unique, profound understanding and expression of the music as well as its virtuoso character and a great control of highly technical skills. The idea of playing together came in 2010 when Ana and Sorana founded the "Vienna String Duo" out of their friendship and shared passion for chamber music. The main concept was to play classical music mixed with other music styles such as Klezmer, Balkan, Celtic, Latin American and even Asian music. All while maintaining their ideals and creating a colorful and entertaining repertoire to be presented and played in concert halls but also at various social events. In September 2011 the ensemble won at A. Mamriev International Music Competition in Braunschweig, Germany. Aside from classical works, Vienna String Duo also plays contemporary music and pieces of composers from all over the world such as F. Cerha and T. Hosokawa. The largest challenge for Ana and Sorana is to discover and overcome their own musical boundaries, to develop themselves and in the same time promote young composers by including their works in their repertoire and performing them on the stage.

www.viennastringduo.com
[VSD Presentation - pdf]

Ben Burtt about the genesis of the TIE fighter sounds

2012-01-04T12:18:00.000+01:00

[an excerpt from The Sounds of Star Wars - © Chronicle Books]

The genesis of the TIE fighter sounds is another story, one that began with Ben Burtt's search for the laser gun effect.

Originally, George Lucas had seen a British documentary on PBS about the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II and had noted that the firing sound of some strange Nazi rockets was quite weird and interesting. Lucas mentioned that it might make a great sound for the laser gun and Burtt managed to find a copy of the documentary. He then set about finding sources that could emulate that sound. Luckily, at Twentieth Century Fox Studios, Don Hall let Burtt go through the Fox sound library, where he found recordings of some elephants that had been done for an Errol Flynn movie The Roots of Heaven [1958]. In that film, elephants stampeded and bellowed. with an almost shrieking sound (the same sounds were used for the dinosaurs in Journey to the Center of the Earth).

After making a copy of that recording, Burtt realized that when he slowed it down and stretched it out, he ended up with a sound similar to the rocket one in the PBS documentary.

[The Lost World - 1960]

But it wasn't quite right, so Burtt took the sound of the elephant and mixed it with pass-bys he'd recorded of cars during a rainstorm as they sped through puddles in front of a motel where he was staying (a pass-by is when a vehicle comes toward the viewer, passes by, and then speeds away).
"Swoosh, the car would come by, and you heard this car plowing through the water," he says. "I took that sound still thinking that I was making a laser of some kind." The key "a-ha" moment occurred during temp track auditions, as shots started coming in from ILM of the gunport sequence.
"When we did temp mixes and played it back for the crew at Park Way, I would take advantage of the fresh audience, because the editors hadn't heard anything with sound," Burtt explains.
"The gunport sequence came along with the first trial shots of actual TIEs in motion. There was pressure to just get some temporary sound in for a screening, so I grabbed a random set of sounds I liked and cut in a different one each time a TIE fighter zoomed by," continues Burtt. "One sound was the elephant shriek, the next one was a slowed-down World War II warbird, the next a processed jet or rocket."
After the screening was over, the only talk in the room was about that elephant swoosh sound. "That was the greatest sound for those ships you could have possibly picked!" Of course, I was saying, "Oh yeah, of course". I’d really put it in because I had no other altemative, but it got great reviews, so naturally it became the sound ofthe TIE fighters."
"ln World War II, the super dive bombers had an artificially created siren wail created by air ducts," explains Joe Johnston, visual effects art director. "They didn't serve any purpose except to create this noise, which would terrify people. It was intended that the TIE should achieve the same effect."

Call for Works: Sonic Screens 2012

2011-12-27T21:00:00.000+01:00

U.S.O. Project is pleased to announce that the 2012 edition of Sonic Screens will be focused entirely to the electro-acoustic music praxis.

Specifically, candidates should produce a composition for instruments and real-time signal processing (live electronics).

Two works will be selected to be played during the concert.

The requirements are as follows:

The piece must be composed for Violin and Cello as a duo. Scores for solo violin or cello will not be taken into account.
The Score (in .pdf format) must be graphical and not in traditional notation.
The interpretational and playing instructions should be made clear, in order for the players to follow them even without the presence of the composer.
The electronic processing must be developed and implemented using Max/MSP or Kyma (*). The multichannel format for the spatial diffusion must be up to 6.0 (2.0 and 4.0 works are still eligible).
The type of interaction should follow the "ecosystemic" paradigm and should be as autonomous as possible (no pedals or sensors are allowed).
The work should not exceed a total duration of 12 minutes.

The evaluation criteria will focus on originality and effectiveness of the interplay between the electronic and instrumental parts.

The deadline for all submissions is set for 30th June, 2012.

Interested composers and sound artists should send the material (Score + Patch) within this date.

The two selected works will be presented during the evening of Sonic Screens in Milan.

The event will be recorded for digital distribution (on Synesthesia Recordings netlabel).

The names of the musicians who will perform the selected scores will be announced in March.

U.S.O. Project, composer Daniele Corsi and the musicians chosen to perform during the concert will form the reading panel which will evaluate the submitted works.

The selected works will be announced in September 2012.

For more information or clarifications, please contact us at our e-mail:

submissions at synesthesiarecordings dot com

(*) Clarification:

We can only accepts patches made with Kyma or Max/MSP due to the fact that we are not able to provide financial support for the two selected composers. To avoid any technical issues, we had chosen the platforms we already use in our daily work, with which we are very familiar. If the selected composers can confirm their presence for the evening concert at their own expenses, then any piece of software/hardware can be used to perform live electronics. Thank you for your comprehension.

Pixar Animation Master Class at 66th Venice Festival

2011-12-04T16:46:00.001+01:00

On Sunday, Sept. 6, 2009 George Lucas presented John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Docter and Lee Unkrich with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at Venice Film Festival. This is the first time in the Festival’s history that the Lifetime Achievement award has gone not to an individual filmmaker, but to a team of filmmakers. The next day, the Festival hosted a Pixar Animation Master Class on storytelling: during this rare and exciting panel dedicated to the Pixar filmmaking process, the directors discussed the various aspects of bringing their stories to life.

[Photo credit: graphicalSound]

John Lasseter

Animation is the most collaborative among art forms; one of the things that is very special about Pixar is the collaboration, never has a studio been so collaborative.
At Pixar we make films to entertain our audiences, all across the world, both children and adults. We make movies for ourselves, the kind of movies we would like to watch. We all have kids, we all love movies and we all love animation and this is what we wanted to do from the beginning as filmmakers. We (the creative Brain Trust) get together to help each director to make the movie the best it can be, and the director knows that. And so he takes the notes that make the movie better.
One of the things I remember more clearly of when I was a very new animator at Walt Disney, is a great professional called Ollie Johnston, a fabulous animator. I was not a great drawing person, my students were a lot better than me. At that time, when I was struggling drawing in a scene, he took my stack of papers and started flipping it. And I thought he was going to start talking about the drawing. But he turned to me and he simply asked: “What is the character thinking”? That simple statement from this guy hit me so strongly, that it became kind of a foundation of everything I have done after that point.
When you look for “animation” into the dictionary, one of the definitions is “to give life to”. The thing that I have always loved about animation is creating life. In our films the animator and the animation are the act. An animator must animate a character so that every single movement appears driven by that character thought process. That is when it becomes a thinking character.
You are moved by these characters, you believe in these characters. All the meticulous and hard work should be completely invisible. We wanted the audience to be involved in the scene and not to think that Nemo is a bunch of computer layouts. We do not want you to think about the many hours that took to create that scene. You are just carried away by the scene and every focus in every step of the production that we do at Pixar is about the story. It is about entertaining the audience.
We are constantly changing and growing, trying to make things differently. One of the things I stress in animation, is that you have to show your stuff really early: every single morning each animator shows his stuff so we can be sure they are on the right track. I also get inspired by what the animators do without telling them to. In Pixar we have a room with a video camera and mirrors so they can actually try out the acting of the character.
Walt Disney once said: “for every laugh there should be a tear.” This is the foundation of every Pixar film. This is not about animation, it’s about making films. I say something to my sons: “I want you to choose a profession that you love, because if you do you’ll never lose a day in your life.” And this is true for everybody, we work so hard, many long hours, but we so dearly love what we do.
Now we are going step by step through the entire process on how we make a movie, on how we develop stories and on how we can tell a story visually.

Andrew Stanton

In Pixar there is no politics, we are all employees, we do not have agents, no creative executives, no deal-making. We are very similar to the old studio systems where the artists work under one group on multiple projects: I’d like to call it a film school without the teacher. It’s a filmmaker driven studio, we invest in people. As John has previously described, we have a creative Brain Trust where the directors get together sort or like doctors conferring on another doctor’s operation. And we also have in-house original ideas, based either on ideas that the directors had, or stories the directors like or want to invest in. We pick one idea and we hammer on it. Again and again, until it finally is good enough to show other people.
First of all it is not just for kids: basically we make the movies we would like to see, we are film-goers first and filmmakers second.
We work hard on making movies as original as we can, in other words we think more like our own audience, what I’d like to see if I were the audience who wants to enjoy themselves as much as they did on the last film, but every time in a new way.
Being stupid is only possible if you are in a creative estate environment. So the truth is that we are not good at getting it right at Pixar, but we are really good at getting it together when we are getting it wrong in fixing our mistakes. And I think that’s really where our specialty lies. And the variable is that we have discovered something fresh from having made those mistakes. So we don’t try to avoid it, we embrace the idea to make mistakes.
The script is not the end of developing a story, it is the beginning of it: to me screenwriting is not writing, it is an intermediary form, it’s a way of passing all the ideas in your head to the screen. It’s also what I’d like to call cinematic dictation. You’re just basically notating what you have seen in your head, when you are trying to catch the visual aspect of something.
We just wanna tell 2 + 2 and let the audience decide on what 4 is. And that’s really the way to construct anything. The way dialogue is done, the way actors act. The way scenes are put together. I think you can apply it to any aspect of film-making. It is all about audience participation. Movie-making is all about manipulation, but it is only truly successful if your audience has no idea that they-re being manipulated. In most cases 2 + 2 gives you a greater sum than 4.
How you tell the story becomes as much important as the story itself. Even a great joke can be murdered by a bad joke teller. So the joke and the joke telling are equally important.
Personally I think you have to develop both characters and plot simultaneously. Plotting to me is your means of discovering the character. Then once you have found what that character is, you have to link them together, one begets the other.

Brad Bird

If we are going to talk about breaking the rules, we have to know what the rules are. And this is what storyboarding was traditionally used for, it was used to work out business for the characters, what the characters were doing.
I got my first opportunity to do my first feature film, it was Iron Giant. I had a third of the money and a third of the time I had for the other animated films of our competitors. So I dealt with something unfamiliar with animation, this was Warner Brothers, not Disney. They had limited power with visual imagination, so we had to find a quick and relatively cheap way of getting closer to what we were envisioning. We spent a larger percentage of our budget on storyboarding, because it was the cheapest place to make the stage. We couldn’t afford to do anything else, we got to look and know exactly what we were doing before we did it.
When I came on to Pixar to do The Incredibles, we had a different sort of problem. It was to enlarge the scope without enlarging the resources. I had way more resources than I had for Iron Giant, but the scope of the film was so huge.
The Incredibles was a fast cutting film, large location to a large shot camera, the only way to wrap our heads around it was to figure it out early. The downside of that is that you’re kind of locked in. The upside of it is that you know much more about the rhythm of the film and the specific needs of each shot.
Film is alive, it is a medium, it is a dream medium and dreams are unpredictable. There is a difference between sleeping and dreaming. One is active and one is throwing yourself off balance. Don’t take anything for granted: it’s a way to keep your company, your movies and yourself alive.

Pete Docter

Everything you see on the screen has an emotional charge. Characters, locations and the props in there exist for very specific story reasons. This is the primary job of the set designer. The first question a production designer should ask himself is: “what is the story about emotionally”? Designing for computer animation has no accidents, everything you see has to be intentionally designed, built, shaded and lighted.
Film-making is discovery. We do not just start drawing, we do a lot of research. The sense of authenticity really helped us capture an emotion. We wanted to look authentic.
The primary job of the lighting is to direct the eye. There is a whole lot of tricks to make sure people are looking where we want. The second job of lighting is emotion. And John (Lasseter) says that light is much like music and can really emotionally affect the eye. We are all trying to get inside the head of the character. Use light to represent how that character is feeling.
Lighting really works the same way it does in live action, so you have lights everywhere to get the final shot. Lighting is not left to chance, everything is planned for an impact. The quality of work is due to the fact that we are working with some of the best professionals in the world. The ultimate goal of lighting is to make the audience feel something.

Related Post:

Lee Unkrich on editing animated film

Pixar: 25 Years of Animation Exhibition

The Pixar exhibit that was originally displayed in 2005-2006 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City has been touring the world. Now, it's running from November 23rd 2011 to February 14th, 2012 at PAC (Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea), Milan (Italy).

[www.mostrapixarmilano.it]

[follow @leeunkrich, @andrewstanton, @Pixar_Mi on Twitter]

Sonic Screens 2011

2011-11-23T14:41:00.000+01:00

Electroacoustic music concert

an event by U.S.O. Project | Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi
in collaboration with O’ and DieSchachtel

Sound direction: Matteo Milani
Max/MSP programming: Federico Placidi
Visuals: Franz Rosati

O’ | via pastrengo 12 Milan | Italy

Saturday, November 26th - from 7 to 9 p-m.

Free admission

Sonic Screens aims to render the endless possibilities of life and its surroundings experienceable in our conscious activity, trying to deal with the possible infinites of the listening experience, both in their objective and manufactured dimensions. This journey related to the pure immersive listening will take advantage of Ambisonics sound diffusion practice, creating an immersive sound flow between different electroacoustic works by these selected international artists:

1. Benjamin Taylor - Keen Awareness
2. Daniel Blinkhorn - anthozoa
3. Daniel Courville - Variations on Vater unser im Himmelreich
4. Diana Salazar - Spindlesong
5. Jon Christopher Nelson - Just After The Rain
6. Josh Goldman - Hexagonal (Facets 1-6)
7. Kotoka Suzuki - Automata
8. Panayiotis Kokoras - Anechoic Pulse
9. Tae Hong Park - 48 13 N, 16 20 O

At the end of the evening, a/v live-set:

Franz Rosati - Theory of Vortex Sound [OUTFLUX]
PATHLINE #1

Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi

Milan/Rome based Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object) are sound artists whose work spans from digital music to electroacoustic improvisation. Unidentified Sound Object was born from the desire to discover new paths and non-linear narrative strategies in both aural and visual domains. The project includes several collaborations with visual artists and performers. Milani and Placidi are the co-founders of the label "Synesthesia Recordings", a repository of electroacoustic works. U.S.O. Project is a continuing evolving organism.

www.synesthesiarecordings.com

Franz Rosati

Franz Rosati is a sound and media artist, focusing his research on real-time A/V, Visual Music projects and installations following an aesthetic idea based on discontinuity of aural and visual patterns avoiding any kind of repetition through the use of chaos mathematics, generative and stochastic processes. He uses his own custom made software for real-time micro-montage and sound elaboration in the microscopic time scale to realize compositions and performances based on aural and visual matter’s costant metamorphosis. During the years, Franz Rosati has played in a large number of electroacoustic projects such as Franco Ferguson improvisors collective, Meccanica Ferma, Solderwire, GRIDSHAPE, developing his own approach to electroacoustic improvisation. In 2007 founded Nephogram [contemporary documents] collectives with Stefano Pala a.k.a. UKQWJB. He also teaches MaxMSP/Jitter for sound design, interactivity and multimedia, focusing in computer vision techniques in several Workshops and Art/Design Institutes, and developed Interactive Examples for Electronic Music and Sound Design, a book about sound theory and practice in MaxMSP.

www.franzrosati.com

Richard Beggs @ P.A.I.F.F.

2011-10-03T19:14:00.000+02:00

From Apocalypse Now to Twixt: Sound Design with Richard Beggs

I have a masters in painting and it remains the motif of my work. I am an audio painter. #

I work thematically I like sounds that are motific. #

I have a very idiosyncratic work style... I like to be involved w/ every aspect of the track as the picture moves forward. #

Very important to be on the set, to absorb the feelings of the whole crew & to be in tune w/ the sensibility of the Director. #

The film exists on 2 levels: the sound that you see and sound that you don't see. #

I am in the biz of manipulating people. Sound can do that. #

Sound can convey emotional complexity without music, just with pure sound. #

When someone wants to work with me, I always asks "Why?" Because it informs what they know about me + what they like. #

On a smaller pictures you're given a lot of latitude, on the other hand limited resources make things challenging. #

courtesy of
paiff.net
twitter.com/PaloAltoIFF
twitter.com/Dolby
facebook.com/PaloAltoInternationalFilmFestival

Related Posts:

An interview with Richard Beggs

Rome Calling – The Audio and Loudness Seminar of 2011

2011-08-26T12:50:00.000+02:00

In June 2011, some of the most respected audio authorities – including George Massenburg, Bob Katz, Florian Camerer and Thomas Lund – gathered in Rome, Italy, to share their thoughts and experiences on loudness measurement in connection with recording, mixing, mastering and broadcasting. The speakers at the seminar in Rome included such capacities as Simone Corelli, Alessandro Travaglini, Richard van Everdingen, among the others.

The first day of the seminar focused on post-production, while the second day concentrated on professional broadcasting and particularly the radical changes happening in production and distribution of broadcast, film and music as a consequence of new ITU and EBU standards.

The groundbreaking and comprehensive EBU R128 loudness recommendation was investigated from a multitude of angles, as was the just updated ITU-R BS.1770-2 broadcast standard.

Tc Electronic documented the event and on this page they have gathered some of the footage form the seminar. First up are Florian Camerer and Richard van Everdingen from EBU’s PLOUD Group.

Florian provides a general overview of EBU’s R128 broadcast standard presented with great enthusiasm and a twist of humor. New videos will be available soon!

[tcelectronic.com/rome]

[tech.ebu.ch/loudness]

Sincronie presents: Field Recording and Soundscape Composition Workshop

2011-08-01T11:01:00.002+02:00

[Sincronie Cultural Association - Milan (IT)]

Speakers: Federico Placidi, Matteo Milani (U.S.O. Project)

"Listening to the environment, contextualizing it objectively and creatively has always been a priority of the work of U.S.O. Project.

Free from any pseudo-environmental or socio-political implication, the continuous work on sampling, processing and transfiguration of found sound and carefully preserved in memory of a digital recorder, has always played a central role in our compositional practices.

U.S.O. defines Soundscape as the expressive and narrative richness that comes from the reciprocal and continuous interaction of multiple sound sources from the real world, and other phenomena which are perceptible and measurable only through proper and adequate transduction (electromagnetic signals, for example).

A Soundscape is also an opportunity for reflection and imagination that has little to share with the real world.

A Soundscape can be a place of the mind, a reminiscence of a future experienced in dreams, lands far away in space and time.

We try to deal with the possible infinites of the listening experience, both in their objective and manufactured dimensions.

We believe this represents our primary objective, to render the endless possibilities of life and its surroundings, sensible and experienceable in our conscious activity."

Objectives of the Workshop:

Students will be encouraged to actively listen to the rich sound world around them. Their imagination and creativity will be stimulated, and at the end of the course they will create a sound composition using the world around them as a musical instrument.

The workshop offers an introduction to theory and practice as follows:

An historical perspective on the Soundscape Composition.
Tools and methodologies for field recordings.
The listening practice to analyze the characteristics of ambient sound.
A practical approach to the transformation of sound.
Composition with three-dimensional space. The Ambisonics format.
Tools and Advanced spatialization Techniques.

Target

Anyone interested in the Soundscape Composition and sound field experimentation.

Structure of the course

1) Introduction

Brief history of soundscape composition, with examples drawn from the work of contemporary artists who incorporate the practice of Field Recording in their compositions.
Introduction to the concept of "soundscape".

2) Tools

Field Recordist's Tools: microphones and recorders.
Conventional microphones techniques and creative miking.

3) Sound Transformation

Manipulation and digital signal processing techniques (VST+AU).

Filtering.
Convolution.
Granular Timeshifting.
PhaseVocoder.

4) Composing in Space

Multichannel Surround Sound.
HOA (Higher-Order Ambisonics).
Tools for encoding and decoding.

At the end of the four-day workshop, participants will develop a short sound composition (about 6 min.) using the concepts and techniques acquired during the various modules.

Duration:

4 days / 17-18, 24-25 September 2011
10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Costs and subscription

To participate in the workshop you must register no later than 10th September 2011. The fee is € 100.

For more information about the registration, please write to workshop@sincronie.org.

SoundWalking

Listening paths and outdoor recordings. The participants will take part in a "sound walk" to "collect" their point of view of a soundscape with their digital portable recorders, as defined by a preplanned route. Editing sessions of the collected material.

Requirements:

It is recommended that participants bring their own laptop, a portable recorder and headphones.
The number is limited to 14 participants.

[Subscribe now]
[Workshop_outlines_ENG.pdf]
[Workshop_outlines_ITA.pdf]

Hologram Room - vol.1 [USO001]

2011-07-28T22:59:00.000+02:00

24-bit/48kHz Royalty-free Sound Design Collection

Hologram Room - vol.1 by usoproject

Hologram Room is the first bundle of the abstract Sound Design Collection produced by sound designers and composers Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka U.S.O. Project).

These two gigabytes of “ready to use” original sound elements are designed to help you sweetening and enhancing your sound production. The whole library is organized in eight main folders: Active Drones, Alarms, Blips, Buttons, Communications, Ignitions, Telemetries, Transitions. It provides a selection of out of this world drones and ambiences, futuristic sound effects and electronic tools.

We have been spending hours composing, editing, mixing these categories in Symbolic Sound Corporation Kyma and Avid Pro Tools. All of the audio files have been embedded with metadata for detailed and accurate searches in your asset management software.

A note about the mastering: the library has not been peak normalized, but loudness normalized, based on the recommendation by the European Broadcast Union. What does it mean? During the audition of your samples, they will have the same loudness level when played through monitors.

This work has been made possible by the aid of LevelOne, a program developed by Grimm Audio.

EBU TECHNICAL provides all kinds of information about the EBU R128 loudness recommendation. The official R128 documents and guidelines can be found online, as well as introduction papers and videos.

Here is what you get in "Hologram Room - vol.1":

Folders:

Active Drones (81 items)
Alarms (26 items)
Blips (52 items)
Buttons (62 items)
Communications (18 items)
Ignitions (34 items)
Telemetries (35 items)
Transitions (123 items)

Tab-delimited file (.txt)
Excel spreadsheet (.xls)
License Agreement (.pdf)
Artwork (.jpg)

Audio Format: Broadcast Wave Files (.wav)
Sample Rate: 48 kHz
Bit Depth: 24-bit
Size: 1.87 GB
Download size is 1.66 GB (compressed .zip archive)

Price: $ 25 - via PayPal

We make every effort to email the archive to you within 48 hours after you place your order. Please contact us if you have not received your product within this time (*).

An interview with Gary Rydstrom

2011-06-24T15:02:00.000+02:00

by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi - U.S.O. Project, 2011

Gary Rydstrom was born in 1959 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the University of Southern California - School of Cinematic Arts in 1981. He began his career at Sprocket Systems, formerly Skywalker Sound, in 1983. Offered the job by a college professor, Gary received the opportunity to work with his mentor, Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt. He created sound for numerous successful films including Backdraft, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report and Finding Nemo. Through this work he has won 7 Academy Awards.
Rydstrom did his first work for Pixar on the short film Luxo Jr.. John Lasseter has said it was Rydstrom's work on Luxo Jr., such as creating the lamp's voice from the squeak of a lightbulb being screwed in, that taught him how sound can be a partner in the storytelling of a film. In 2006 he has made his directorial debut with the Pixar animated short Lifted. He recently jumped again into the director's chair to create his second animated short Hawaiian Vacation, set to play in front of Cars 2.

[Rydstrom talks about the first of Pixar's new brand of Toy Story shorts @ AWN]

For every director and for all of us the goal is at any one moment in a movie to have the audience on the edge of their feet and can't wait to see what happens next. You are moved by these characters, you believe in these characters. All the meticulous and hard work should be completely invisible. We wanted to be involved in the scene and we don’t you to think that Nemo is a bunch of computer layout. We do not want you to think the many hours that took to create that scene. You are just carried away by the scene and every focus in every step of the production that we do at Pixar is about the story. It is about entertaining the audience. - John Lasseter, 66th Venice Film Festival

USO: Gary, you’re the third person – of our personal “respect-list” – who came from a sound career and crossed over to a director’s chair: Walter Murch did it first, Ben Burtt came after him. They still design their own sound for their works, just as you did for your first short movie Lifted (with a tribute like the Wilhelm Scream at the very end). How did you manage the transition from sound designer/re-recording mixer to director? How about your feelings?

Gary Rydstrom: Working in film sound is a great way to immerse yourself in the rhythms of a movie. Having done sound for so many movies, and so many different kinds of movies, I’m hoping I’ve developed some mysterious “film instinct.” I think the best directors – and best sound designers – work more from their gut than their brain. In other words, to make movies, your gut has to be bigger than your brain… or maybe I should rephrase that?

GR: "It was a little scary but I always wanted to make films and wanted to have opportunities to write and tell stories. So Pixar being old friends, they gave me this opportunity to come over there and do that. So it was a little scary because there were a lot of things I had to learn. But doing sound for so many years, what I found was that the big similarity is that sound is all about rhythm. It’s about using sound, rhythm helps delineate sound effects, sound tracks, and telling a story with these kind of rhythms is really key. Animation is really about rhythms and timing so I think working in sound gave me a great sense of timing. In fact, on Lifted I used, before animation had been started, used a temp soundtrack to express the timing that I wanted to the animators so they had some reference of what I was after. It was a way for me to even communicate to the animators." - CanMag

[Lifted producer Katherine Sarafian and director Gary Rydstrom © AWN Inc]

USO: Did you develop and learn your new craft in sound room working movie by movie?

GR: Central to sound design is finding what feels right for a movie, what matches its look and heart. So every movie I worked on taught me different lessons. I kept thinking I was close to end of my lessons, but they never ended. Turns out that’s what makes working in film fun. It’s never the same twice.

USO: Being close to first-class directors during all your sound career has thought you well?

GR: I felt like a spy, watching a lot of directors. I’ve been very lucky to have worked with many of the best – Spielberg, Cameron, Lasseter, Redford – and you probably don’t need me to tell you (their movies do) how different in approach they were. One thing the best have in common: they inspire their crews.

GR: "... I've had this long, great relationship with John Lasseter and Pixar. I've felt involved throughout the whole filmmaking process on their films. They offered me an opportunity to develop and direct films, maybe because I bring an outsider's perspective while still being a Pixar guy through and through.
My friends there know that I've had a long-standing love of comedy. When I first told Steven Spielberg and George Lucas that I was doing this, they were touchingly supportive and generous with advice. I'm grateful for my sound career. It gave me the equivalent of 50-yard-line seats, second row, during a fascinating era in film history." - Mix Magazine

USO: Can you describe what you were feeling when you left the Technical Building (where you spent almost 20 years), and all your friends at Lucas Skywalker Sound, to your new life/experience in Emeryville?

GR: Luckily I get back to Skywalker Sound quite often, otherwise I’d REALLY miss my old friends and career. Pixar’s no slouch, but there isn’t a more beautiful place to work than Skywalker Ranch.

I've known Gary for over 20 years and he's really been a mentor and a role model for me, as to how to do this work. His standard for quality, inventiveness and humor is really always in the back of my mind when I work. No one is a quicker study when you break down a scene or a film in terms of what, soundwise, is the best direction to go to serve the story. - Tom Myers, Skywalker Sound

USO: What does it mean for you to associate a particular sound to a visual event (identifying it in a vast catalogue as big as the sound library of SkySound)? What are the mental or purely instinctive paths competing in making the choice?

GR: Something magical happens when a sound effect is added to picture – and it’s not predictable. After all my years of doing it, I still depend on experimenting, putting sounds against image and seeing what happens. First time I did this, as a film student, it amazed me how sound could “open up” a movie, how the combination of sound and visual could create something greater than the sum parts. Having a great sound library is essential, but the real secret is how one uses it.

GR: "I wanted to give the lamps in Luxo Jr. character through sound. I told John (Lasseter) that I'd come up with these voices. He'd never imagined they'd have voices and was wary of the idea. But I experimented with taking real sounds — a lot of it as simple as unscrewing a light bulb or scraping metal. Every once in a while, a sound would be produced that would remind you of sadness or glee. I always think of sound design being like prospecting for gold. Start by, say, goofing around, making lots of sounds, then find the one percent that has something interesting about it. Put this against the film, and there's a magical moment when the sound, if it's right, merges into the image, brings it to life. They were not cartoon-y. They were fun, reality-based sounds. It felt like the birth of something new, even then." - Mix Magazine

A tribute to Gary Rydstrom by usoproject

USO: Many sound artists working in other domains like electroacoustic music, musique concrete, environmental sounds has been strongly influenced by the contemporary cinema, and by its ability to create stories with the help of sound effects, soundscapes and even to define the personality of some "objects" with unmistakable sounds. How it is possible to interrelate these multiplicity of experience?

GR: What all sound artists share is a desire to convey emotions, so I certainly was inspired by non-movie sound work. Sound is emotion. Not just music, but all sound. Humans (who can hear) seem to take sound in general for granted, which is frustrating, but liberating. How manipulative can we be when no one’s paying attention!

USO: While Europe was experiencing electronics and sound design like natural language consequence of the avant-garde of 50's, in the U.S. this journey took place independently in the field of the film industry with other purposes and objectives. You were aware of what was happening in the old continent and its experiments?

GR: I’m certainly aware of the European traditional of producing “soundscapes” (for lack of a better word) for radio. In some ways, I was jealous of sound work that didn’t depend on the visual – how free it seemed! Best I could do was build an “off-screen” world in film. But I always had a movie to be influenced by – how scary to have sound work stand on its own.

USO: You've been one of the most assiduous "regulars" of the Synclavier, an instrument widely used in various musical fields. Can you describe the creative approach with this tool? What were your procedures? What made it such as a instrument so unique? To create the sound of the engines of the Titanic you and Chris Boyes worked long on the Synclavier to reproduce the effect in question. Do you remember how you did it?

GR: I fell in love with the Synclavier early in my career because it was such a powerful instrument for shaping natural sounds. I never used the FM synthesis – even making electronic sound effects I would try to use natural sounds, just because I find real sounds are more interesting. Sampling sounds and putting them on a keyboard allowed me to quickly experiment with pitch and layering, which are my primary tools for bending real sounds to my will. The Titanic engine sounds took advantage of how the Synclavier could speed up and slow down a sound pattern. For me, nothing beats using a “musical” instrument for creating sound effects.

GR: "The idea of using a sampler for sound effects work had astonishing potential. With sampled sounds in RAM, you can instantly pitch-bend it and layer it and play it and shape it, without using any processing time. You can layer on the same key and very finely manipulate the pitch and delay and merge them together in ways that were harder to do in the tape-to-tape days. It allowed me to create the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, in which I took several layers and blended different animal sounds into what sounds like one animal.
With the Synclavier, I have a library of sound “parts,” little snippets that are like phonemes in language. Interesting bits of sound that can be rearranged in multitudes of ways. It's a library of raw material, and it's valuable still." - Mix Magazine

USO: How about your relationship with Ben Burtt along your sound career and especially now in Pixar? I mean crosstalk and dialogue, to share ideas. Could you describe him as a mentor, a friend, a colleague, a druid?

GR: All of my approaches and philosophies about sound come from Ben Burtt. At the time he was revolutionizing sound design, I was lucky enough to get a job at Sprocket Systems and see how he did it, how much he knew about film sound history, and most importantly how much he cared about using sound to tell a story. When I started working on Jurassic Park, I remember Ben was away on vacation. I stumbled along until he came back – for all sorts of reasons, psychological and practical, I couldn’t get started until he was in the building.

[Gary Rydstrom Talks About Cinema Sound - via DolbyInsider]

USO: Nowadays many sound designers are working in nonlinear environments like Pro Tools, Nuendo with tons of plug-ins to make everything. One thing we always admired in your work is the exquisite and unfailing "organic" sound and his innate musicality. It seems that sounds "exist" in nature and are not a product of a skilled craftsman. Would you like to talk about that?

GR: There’s a danger in processing sound too much. I believe the best sound effects come from the best raw recordings, and are tweaked as little as possible. The world is so full of amazing sounds – sounds no synthesizer can match – so why not find them and use them?

GR: [...] I remember a scene in the first Mission Impossible in which Tom Cruise breaks into a computer room at the CIA, for which we’d added all these sound details for equipment he was using to lower himself in. Yet the idea was that if he made any sound over a certain level, he would trip the alarm. Brian De Palma ultimately said, “No, take it all out.” And for the most part, that scene plays with nothing on the track. I went to see it with an audience and it had the desired effect: It made everyone lean in, pay closer attention, get nervous. Tension comes from the silence of that scene.
[...] Silence can be thought of as a type of sound. It’s like when somebody years ago figured out that zero was a number. And silence is just as valid as an amazing sound. Every sound editor can’t help but think of how to fill up a track; it’s what we’re paid for. - excerpts from “From here on in, absolute silence.” [via Benjamin Wright]

Thanks Gary... keep up the good work! M&F

Sonic Screens - call for multichannel works

2011-05-31T13:15:00.001+02:00

Sonic Screens – environmental music listening sessions

Live mixing and spatialization by U.S.O. Project (Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi)

Call for multichannel works

U.S.O. Project is pleased to invite submissions of fixed media sound works for the second edition of “Sonic Screens”, a journey among different electroacoustic Soundscape compositions.

Sonic Screens is an annual event that will take place during two acousmatic evenings in Milan during Fall 2011.

Sonic Screens aims to render the endless possibilities of life and its surroundings experienceable in our conscious activity, trying to deal with the possible infinites of the listening experience, both in their objective and manufactured dimensions.

“Listening to the environment, contextualizing it objectively and creatively has always been a priority of the work of U.S.O. Project.

A Soundscape is also an opportunity for reflection and imagination that has little to share with the real world.

A Soundscape can be a place of the mind, a reminiscence of a future experienced in dreams, lands far away in space and time.” – Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi

Composers and sound artists are invited to submit multichannel works, up to 8 channels. The assignment of channels to speakers must be clearly indicated in the submission. Works of any duration will be considered although pieces of under 16 minutes will be given preference.

The performance will take advantage of Ambisonics sound diffusion practice, creating an immersive and uninterrupted sound flow between different works from selected international artists.

The material will be transcoded in real time to 2nd Order B-Format (via ICST Ambisonics Externals for MaxMSP).

The recordings of the concerts will be available for streaming and released in binaural format for headphone use. The ownership of the tracks remains to the authors.

Submissions need to include:

a stereo version of the piece
individual mono files for each channel
channel configuration
sample rate
program notes
brief biography

While the composers of the selected works are encouraged to attend the event, attendance is not required for a work to be presented.

There is no registration fee.

The deadline for submission of works is October 31st, 2011.

Material Submissions

Please send download links to your work using one of the many file delivery services (yousendit.com, sendspace.com, gigasize.com, wetransfer.com, etc) in .zip or .rar format. Please do not email file attachments.

Electronic submissions should be sent to:

[submissions at synesthesiarecordings dot com]

For more information, email contact:

[info at usoproject dot com]

Terms and Conditions

Each participant may submit up to two works.

[Date and Venue To Be Announced]

[SchermiSonori2011-CallForWorks.pdf]

“The essential difference between an electroacoustic composition that uses pre-recorded environmental sound as its source material, and a work that can be called a soundscape composition, is that in the former, the sound loses all or most of its environmental context. In fact, even its original identity is frequently lost through the extensive manipulation it has undergone, and the listener may not recognise the source unless so informed by the composer. In the soundscape composition, on the other hand, it is precisely the environmental context that is preserved, enhanced and exploited by the composer.” – Barry Truax

Now online on SoundCloud:

Sonic Screens - pt.1 (binaural) by usoproject

Sonic Screens - pt.2 (binaural) by usoproject

Recorded 29th October, 2010 @ O' - no profit organization, during Live!iXem 2010 - Edition VII
International festival of music, mixed media and experimental electronic art - Milan

Ben Burtt on J.J. Abrams' Super 8!

2011-05-31T12:16:00.000+02:00

Ben Burtt's latest film as Sound Designer, "Super 8" - written and directed by J.J. Abrams - opens June 10th.

J.J. Abrams: “Ben Burtt did the sound design, and he brought with him one day a copy of this Super 8 film that he made when he was a teenager, that was about a train wreck, a WW2 film, and it so was much like what happened in this movie, it was uncanny. I was jealous, wishing I had a train wreck to go to when I was a kid.”

[courtesy of Empire]
[expect an update to Burtt's IMDb page soon]
[Ben Burtt Receives Charles S. Swartz Award from JJ Abrams]

Introducing: Observation’s Pod

2011-05-30T18:02:00.004+02:00

Observation’s Pod is a new section on Synesthesia Recordings where we post most of our researches’ output to the collective.
This place works as a permanent Laboratory where the product of our creative and experimental activity with sound is freely opened to the public in its raw form.

Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi

#1 Kyma Studies by synesthesiarecs

#2 Three Studies for Analog Synthesizer by synesthesiarecs

These three small works are based on the improvisational exploration of a specific configuration of the modules of Serge Modular synthesizer.

The synthesis model which was implemented is that of the Complex Feedback Frequency Modulation as shown in the artwork image: two oscillators recursively modulating that build a dynamic non-linear system exhibiting a chaotic behaviour.

In order to obtain a high timbral complexity, the waveforms generated by each oscillator are dynamically varied through the use of waveshaping modules.

All the material was created using only the patch described above, without any filter or other editing/mixing procedure.

The three short works are created on order to intuitively explore a dynamic system, while combining its output using an analogy with three well-defined poetic abstractions.

Sound & pictures by Federico Placidi

>>Flux

>>Field

>>Ton

[Observation’s Pod]

Sound designer Randy Thom talks about 'Apocalypse Now'

2011-05-30T00:07:00.002+02:00

[via notam02.no]

Related Posts:

Creating Film Sound: an interview with Richard Beggs, pt.1

GRM Tools - pt.1: an interview with Emmanuel Favreau

2011-05-17T22:58:00.002+02:00

by Matteo Milani - U.S.O. Project, May 2011

GRM Tools is the result of more than 50 years of cutting-edge research and experimentation at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales de l'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel in Paris.

These plug-ins were realized by a succession of hardware and software engineers, who formulated the algorithms for the original GRM Tools in the 1990s. Over the years the GRM has focused on developing a range of innovative tools to treat and represent the sound.

The new GRM Tools Evolution is the latest powerful and imaginative bundle of new algorithms for sound processing. Three new instruments are available: Evolution, Fusion and Grinder. All works in the frequency-domain and provide powerful ways to manipulate audio in real time. I had the privilege of interviewing Emmanuel Favreau, software developer at INA - GRM. Here we go!

Matteo Milani: How many people are part of the GRM development team at INA?

Emmanuel Favreau: We are two people, working full-time. Adrien Lefevre handles the Acousmographe. I’m on GRM Tools. We welcome regular students.

MM: Can you tell us a brief history of the GRM Tools from the origin until now?

EF: The first version of the GRM Tools was created by Hugues Vinet, who is now scientific director of IRCAM in Paris. This stand-alone version offered a couple of algorithms, using the Digidesign SoundAccelerator/Audiomedia III card. The user interface was made with HyperCard. When I arrived at the GRM in 1994, we took the decision to convert the processing available in the stand-alone version of GRM Tools plugins to TDM for Digidesign Pro Tools III. Treatments were rearranged, some modified, others abandoned. The original GRM Tools Classic bundle dates from this era. Later, the evolution of treatments has been closely following the technological evolution: when the processors became powerful enough for real-time processing, Steinberg introduced the VST architecture and the Digidesign RTAS Pro Tools format. And finally, we developed the ST version - Spectral Transform - when computer processing power allowed us to calculate several simultaneous FFT in real time.

[Emmanuel Favreau showing Evolution - courtesy Leonardo Zaccone]

[...] Jean-Francois Allouis and Denis Valette pioneered the hardware development of SYTER (SYsteme TEmps Reel / Realtime System) with a series of prototypes produced during the late 1970s, leading in due course to the construction of a complete preproduction version in 1984. Commercial manufacture of this digital synthesizer commenced in 1985, and by the end of the decade a number of these systems had been sold to academic institutions.

Benedict Mailliard developed the original software for SYTER. By the end of the decade, however, it was becoming clear that the processing power of personal computers was escalating at such a rate that many of the SYTER functions could now be run in real-time using a purely software-driven environment. As a result, a selection of these were modified by Hughes Vinet to create a suite of stand-alone signal processing programs. Finally, in 1993, the commercial version of this software, GRM Tools, was released for use with the Apple Macintosh.

The prototypes for SYTER accommodated both synthesis and signal processing facilities, and additive synthesis facilities were retained for the hardware production versions of the system. The aims and objectives of GRM, however, were geared very much toward the processing of naturally generated source material. As a consequence, particular attention was paid to the development of signal processing tools, not only in terms of conventional filtering and reverberation facilities but also more novel techniques such as pitch shifting and time stretching.

[via Electronic and Computer Music by Peter Manning]

MM: About GUI - 2DController. What is the origin of this pioneering, intuitive, but simple performer-instrument "link"?

EF: This type of interface has been widely used at the time of SYTER during the 80’s. It allowed us to regain "analog" access to a digital instrument. Indeed, even the manipulation of a slider with a mouse requires some attention (click in the right place, moving vertically or horizontally without mechanical guide, etc.). With the 2D interface, the entire surface of the screen becomes a controller. To obtain a result as soon as you click, the precision of movement is becoming necessary if you want to tune that.

MM: The mapping of parameters on multi-touch control surfaces free us from the use of a mouse and gives us an expressiveness never achieved before. What do you think of this new generation of controllers?

EF: Of course, these interfaces allow an overall and "analog" control which is not possible with the mouse (although the knob 2D mode or "elastic" are possible solutions to overcome the single pointer limitation). Since the engineering of the SYTER we proposed a system of "interpolator balls" to interpolate between different set of parameters arranged in a two-dimensional space. The multi-point control of such a device is natural: we need both hands to shape and transform the space.

"Interpol" control screen of SYTER

[via DAFX: Digital Audio Effects - Udo Zölzer, Xavier Amatriain]

MM: Is the SYTER still in use today in Paris?

EF: No, SYTER no longer works. It was composed of several elements (a PDP-11, large hard drives, a vector graphics terminal) which can not be sustained today.

MM: Host-based tools vs. custom DSP engines: will there be a winner or they will continue to peacefully coexist in the business?

EF: For the type of tool that we develop, the winner is clearly the host-based. For very large sessions with dozens of tracks and hundreds of plug-ins, DSP is now the best choice, but they could disappear with the diffusion of multi-core processors.

MM: How long did the Classic Bundle take to get ported from TDM to RTAS?

EF: It's hard to say because it was not done directly. I first made the VST version, and then adapted the RTAS version. The algorithmic part posed no particular problems, the difficulties being rather on the side of the interface between the various plugins and hosts.

MM: How much research was needed to create the Spectral Transform bundle?

EF: The prototypes of the Spectral Transform have been fast enough to achieve. The basic algorithm is the phase vocoder, which has been well known for a long time. What took time was the interface design, the choice of parameters and their mutual consistency, stability and the whole robustness (i.e. avoid audio clicks and saturation of the values of some parameters).

MM: What's the technology behind the bundles?

EF: If we leave aside the TDM - the processing code is written in 56000 assembly language, all plugins are written in C++. The processing codes are fully compatible between Mac and PC. In addition, the portability of the user interface is guaranteed by Juce. All development is done on Mac; PC adaptation is virtually automatic and requires minimal work.

MM: A description of version 3 and its new features: what goals have you achieved during this long period of software development?

EF: Having redesigned the interface and rewritten all the code allowed us to add some new features: resizing the window, MIDI control with automatic learning, agitation mode.

Agitation is a generalization of the Randomize, it can be applied to all parameters of random variations in amplitude and frequency control. Now all the GRM Tools are also available as standalone applications. This easily handles individual sounds, to make quick tests and become familiar with the treatments without having to use host daw and sequencers.

MM: How do you manage feedback from musicians and sound designers to improve sound quality and the graphical interface?

EF: The user feedback comes from various forums and from discussions with users and composers here at the GRM. In response to suggestions, plug-ins will be changed, some features will be added (but always in small numbers to ensure compatibility) or it will create a new treatment that may ultimately prove quite different from the original application. This is what happened to Evolution that comes from improving the freeze that can be achieved with FreqWarp.

[GRM Tools Evolution @ Qwartz 7 - courtesy Alexandra Lebon]

MM: What are the most efficient methods of applications against piracy?

EF: There is none. Whatever the methods, they will be bypassed one day or another. We must find a solution that is not too heavy for the users, while allowing a minimum of protection. We chose the system of Pace iLok because it is very common in musical applications. The recently announced changes should make it more flexible to use.

Thanks for your time Emmanuel, keep up the good work!

[...] Any transformation, no matter how powerful, will never equal or surpass synthesis, if it fails to maintain a causal relationship between the sound resulting from the transformation and the source sound. The practice of sound transformation is not to create a new sound of some type by a fortunate or haphazard modification of a source, but to generate families of correlated sounds, revealing persistent strings of properties, and to compare them with the altered or disappeared properties.

In synthesis, the formalisation of the devices and resulting memorisable abstraction, offer a stable set of references which can be easily transposed from one environment to another. In sound transformation, no abstraction of the available results is possible and neither is generalisation. The result of an experiment is always the product of an operation and a particular sound to which this operation is applied. The composer must be able to add to the sum of knowledge by reproducing a previously proven experiment.

What makes the wealth and functionality of a system is the assembly and convergence of the whole, its ability at any moment to answer the questions imagined. Specific tools built for a single experiment, no matter how prestigious, are sterile if they cannot be applied to other purposes. - Yann Geslin

[an excerpt from Sound and music transformation environments: A twenty- year experiment at the "Groupe de Recherches Musicales"]

Related Posts:

References:

[Digital Audio Workstation by Colby Leider]
[sounDesign, a blog dedicated to the world of Sound and Audio Design]
[On GRM Tools 3, Part 1 - via designingsound.org]
[GRM Tools 3 review: a classic reborn]
[The GRM: landmarks on a historic route]
[GRM's current team]
[GRM Tools Store]

You can also read my interviews and reviews on Computer Music Studio (italian only), a monthly magazine by Tecniche Nuove Editore. - Matteo Milani

Out now: U.S.O. Project - Functions (binaural)

2011-05-09T12:00:00.004+02:00

Functions (binaural) by Synesthesia Recordings
[Free Download]

Between 1967 and 1969 Gottfried Michael Koenig devoted himself to compose electronic music, producing a series of works entitled Funktionen.

The instrument that inspired and made possible these compositions was the Variable Function Generator, designed by Stan Tempelaars at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht.

Koenig used the VFG not only to produce the basic sounds (waveforms), but employed it as a modulator and control instrument in order to dynamically manipulate the elaboration processes which were carried out on materials (ring modulation, volume curves, filtering and reverberation).

The idea behind the experiment was to entirely produce the sound material and its structural implementation using only the VFG (this led to the creation of Funktion Grün, Funktion Gelb, Funktion Orange, Funktion Rot).

For a detailed analysis of Gottfried Michael Koenig’s Funktionen, please see the document on his official website:

Analytical Descriptions (1971) [Download]

The works presented in U.S.O. Project’s Functions explicitly refer to a series of works that with an extraordinary vision Koenig realized in those years.

The main challenge was both philological and aesthetical. The idea was to create an automated composition by exploiting the computing power of modern computers and by a sufficiently widespread and flexible software in order to re-program the original algorithms.

The Patches used in the prototyping of the generative software environment were assembled using a specially written program that provided in text format - using serial procedures - how the various modules should be combined with each other - i.e.:

Mel / empty / reverb
Basis / ring+mod / Empty
Pulses / empty / reverb
Basis / mod / filter-reverb
Mel / ring / filter
Pulses / ring+mod / reverb
Basis / empty / filter
Mel / ring / filter-reverb
Pulses / mod / Empty
Basis / ring+mod / Empty
Mel / ring / filter-reverb
Pulses / mod / reverb
Mel / empty / filter

Once we had identified the blocks, they were displayed in the form of flow charts - i.e.:

The various Patches were then implemented as Abstraction in Max/MSP:

In order to manage all the modules in parallel, plus the sends to the reverberation units and so forth, we constructed a matrix, that automatically reconfigures itself according to strict procedures based on serial techniques:

The implemented automata procedures have in fact "created" the composition itself.
In the end, the multichannel final master was obtained with Kyma/Pacarana’s surround Objects.

As you can deduce from a listening comparing the work of Koenig and U.S.O. Project, there are many differences, both in the aesthetic and formal domain.

It was clear to us since the beginning that we didn’t want to repeat Koenig’s compositional experiment in every detail, but to build - and then understand - something new produced using the same modus operandi that convinced him to make those works. At the same time we wanted to preserve an historical legacy with those works (something that is easily recognizable especially in the first piece). It was also interesting to us to empirically verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the procedures in terms of timbre and formal development using the serial approach.

The actual distributed version is rendered using U.S.O. Project’s custom binaural techniques for headphone listening only.

Beyond any reference to Koenig’s original works, Functions is a spontaneous self-reflection about the different states of sound matter and the exploitation of its possible configurations, shaped and imagined through a dialogical process between the machine and its operator.

Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi

[Functions Press Release - pdf]

An interview with Otto Laske

2011-05-01T17:00:00.006+02:00

by Federico Placidi and Matteo Milani - U.S.O. Project, May 2011

Otto Laske is a composer internationally known for his work in computer-assisted score and sound composition. In the 1980’s, he co-founded and co-directed the New England Computer Arts Association, NEWCOMP, together with Curtis Roads (1981-1991). In 1999, his 25-year long work as a cognitive musicologist was introduced to, and explained to, a larger public in Jerry Tabor’s 1999 Otto Laske: Navigating New Musical Horizons (Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance). The book contains a comprehensive bibliography of Otto’s compositions, poems, and musicological writings.

Otto Laske has always been seen as an innovator, both in theory and composition. After a career in music, he became a knowledge engineer in the 1980s and a psychologist in the 1990s. Since 1999, in addition to his compositional work, he has practiced as a developmental coach and management consultant based on a methodology created by him, called the Constructive Developmental Framework (www.interdevelopmentals.org). This methodology for assessing individual’s developmental potential shares certain global structures with Laske’s cognitive musicology of the 1970s and 1980s, in that it is multi-dimensional, dialectic, and based on empirical research.

[Barry Truax with Curtis Roads and Otto Laske, Cambridge, MA, 1989 - courtesy Barry Truax]

" [...] a theory of music has to understand not musical results but rather the mental processes that lead to such results." - Otto Laske

"Looking back at 43 years of making electronic music, it's clear to me that ever since I began composing in 1964, the development of music technology strongly shaped my compositional ideas. The artistic task seemed to be to show that new technologies can indeed produce "art." At the same time, these technologies brought forth new compositional ideas not elaborated before. In short, a stark interdependency of compositional thinking and technological possibilities prevailed. When listening to my various compositional adventures today there is, for me, a certainty aesthetic unity that binds all of my pieces together. It will be up to historians (once they have become knowledgeable about the technology underlying these pieces) to judge them from a more balanced perspective than is perhaps possible today." - Otto Laske, January 2010

Computer Software Based Composition

My background is in both philosophy and music, not to speak of poetry. I studied with Adorno in Frankfurt: a philosopher and composer who shaped my thinking for a decade (1956-1966) and also helped me to emigrate to the U.S. in 1966 in order to study computer music. He also made me aware of the Darmstadt Music Festival, at which I met Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Ligeti and Boulez, among others. The first time I went to Darmstadt was the 1963: I was especially taken with Stockhausen as a teacher and with Pierre Boulez' notion of orchestration virtuelle, by which he meant that a professional composition contains elements that are not immediately obvious or even hidden, but have to be there to make a rich composition come to life. This notion of Boulez’s has accompanied me all my life, and not only in music, as much as P. Klee’s Das Bildernische Denken.

My main musical mentor, although not as a teacher of composition, is Gottfried Michael Koenig. I met Koenig in 1964 when he first presented Project 1 to colleagues. While his program was unfamiliar to me, I had previously studied with a German composition teacher (Konrad Lechner) who was very influenced by medieval music, as well as the works by Webern and Stravinsky. He had taught me something called micro-counterpoint by which he meant minutely working-out selected musical elements (such as, e.g., 10 rhythms, tones, or tone colors) and bringing them into the form of a cantus firmus on which to base a larger composition, under the intense influence of the ear.

When I listened to Koenig in his lecture at that time, I understood him to be talking about parametric counterpoint, counterpoint of parameters like pitch, duration, instrument color, register, volume and so forth, as Lechner had done. The difference was his use of computers for composition. What captivated my interest in computers was not the hardware, but the idea that compositions could be designed on the basis of contrapuntal ideas so that different parameter streams (lists) could be merged to create new sounds, either in ideal time (through notation), or in real time (electronically). In all of the computer programs of the sixties, such as those by Xenakis and Mathews, what interested me was expanding my contrapuntal, multi-dimensional way of working.

When I sit down to compose music using a program like Project 1 or Kyma, I find of central interest the feedback loop between the frozen and the living knowledge that is engaged: the frozen knowledge embodied by the computer software, whether it is knowledge of an instrument, waveforms, envelopes or knowledge about deforming and sequencing visual images, and the living knowledge in the composer’s mind. In my writings, including in Computer Music Journal, I always emphasized that a computer used in music (including its interface with the user) should have as much intelligence as possible, including the ability to learn from the user. I was always disappointed that this has been made possible to date by programmers only to a small extent. My notion regarding this was to permit the composer to build new “task environments”, a kind of artistic homesteads in which s(he) could re-use fruitful ideas and presets, or even understand his/her compositional process better.

I think that the new concepts engendered by computers are valid in many artistic fields. When I work with my painting program today, or make animations accompanied by music, I find much greater openness to the idea of having the computer program “know its user”. It seems to me that the visual programs I am using have a higher-level intelligence than present music programs, or so it seems to me. (I am not a live performer of music, where much of the available computer intelligence seems to be located these days.)

In music, I guess, I am an “old-fashioned” composer, in the sense that I typically work from numerical templates such as produced by Koenig’s Projekt 1. I refer to this way of working as “score synthesis” in contrast to “sound synthesis”, whether I am engaged in instrumental, vocal, or electronic composition. Algorithmic composition really never caught on in the US, except perhaps in Milton Babbitt’s work. As to Koenig’s Project 1, it seems I have remained the only composer who used it also in electronic composition, -- although composers like Barry Truax have, of course, been using “algorithmic composition” all their life, much influenced by Koenig’s work as holds for myself.

Score synthesis was a European idea stemming from Xenakis, Koenig and few others like L. Hiller in the US. My goal as composer over 45 years has been to bring score synthesis (the computation of score parameters) and sound synthesis (the computation of acoustic material based on “reading” score parameters) into balance with each other, giving equal attention to both. This meant that I had to always use at least two different programs (not originally made for working together), one for score synthesis and another for sound synthesis. And considering that the algorithmic paradigm of composition requires bringing together “score” and “sound” (whether in CSound or Kyma), the art of composition for me became that of marrying the right set of instruments to the right score by using my listening.

The Project 1 Experience: Interpretative Composition

In the 1960s and 1970s, there came into being very different compositional programs. Some made it easy to create numerical materials but required intensive interpretation by the composer, while others required elaborate inputs (such as Koenig’s Program 2) and their outputs could only either be accepted or rejected.

Koenig's Project 1, like Xenakis's ST/10, is of the former kind. It requires very little input and will give the composer a large amount of data to interpret, either for instruments or for electronic sound. I found that the Project 2 type of program didn't suit me as well as Project 1 because I love the freedom of interpreting data, often using the same score for an electronic as well as an instrumental composition (which probably nobody would hear or needs to know). However, I am still curious about the Project 2 type of program and may use it some time in the future after all.

Both programs show me that it is the composer’s mind that creates music, not the sound or the machine, because the composer can obviously use any kind of template, even – as Stockhausen used to say – a telephone book.

I called my work with Project 1 interpretative composition, because I was interpreting data generated by computer software according to guidelines programmed by a composer. I also refer to it as “rule” rather than “model” based composition, meaning that in each new composition I followed a different set of rules, some inherent in the program, others stipulated by me. It is the feedback loop between my own set of rules and the computer’s that interested me. As to the difference between following rules or models, I thought little of artists following others’ or their own compositions as models. I wanted to start from scratch each time, although I of course brought into being my own tradition over many years of composing.

As an abstract thinker, I was also of the persuasion that one should plan compositions “top down”, by stipulating rules for how a score or set of sounds ought to be created, and not bother about details other than in continued rehearsal of listening to the results, -- Berg’s “Durchhören”. It was a matter of what to control when, and not to control everything but to know what controls one could delegate to a computer slave.

Specifics of Koenig’s Project 1

To be specific, in Koenig’s Project 1 (created in 1967 and continuously refined til the 1990s), a composer works with 7 degrees of change for all parameters (such as pitch, entry delay, pitch, register, volume). Degree 1 represents constant change, while degree 7 stands for minimal change (redundancy), with degree 4 standing in for a compromise between the two.

Now imagine the fun to be able to plan, and carry out, a creative process in terms of the different parameters that need to come together to make a new composition! Should entry delay – the delay between subsequent sound entries – vary according to degree of change 1 or 4 or 7? If you chose 7, then what degree of change do other parameters such as pitch or volume need to follow? If you then in addition to using Project 1 stipulated your own interpretations of what “register 4” or “volume 6” is to stand for, you are in a creator’s paradise because you can model your rule stipulations to whatever strikes your fancy, keeping in mind the limits of the medium – instrumental, vocal, or electronic – you are writing in. Each movement of your composition will have it own unique “parametric signature” that is never repeated anywhere in your life’s output. And with regard to electronic music, you might arrive in a studio other than your own – e.g., at the GMEB in Bourges – and hear your score for the first time in your life -- with 2 weeks left to convert it to sound.

By using Project 1, I was able to plan the FORM of my compositions’ – the main esthetic concern of every composer – in the minutest detail by using a global top-down design based on parametric counterpoint. I was not composing with “tones” but at a meta-level, with“parameters” whose streams coalesced to create novel sound. And I could do so not only for sequencing scores (whose length I determined); I could also MERGE (mix) scores to my heart’s content. (This procedure is found in all of my electronic compositions after 1999).

Of course, the computer (luckily) could not help me sequence or merge different “sub-scores”, as I called them. I was challenged to do so by ear, “rehearsing” pieces like a conductor (without ever needing one). The computer couldn’t even guide me in designing instruments (e.g., in Kyma) that would be ideal for playing a particular score. I was free and obliged to do so myself (which shows that “algorithmic composition” is a very misleading term). And so, I often ended up “orchestrating” a particular score based on different sets of instruments (called “orchestras”), and then would mix different sonic renditions of the same score into a final complex result. It is here that I practiced what Boulez had called orchestration virtuelle because many fine details of a composition could easily be generated by superimposing different instruments (tone colors) slightly varied in their onset in time against each other.

Of course in instrumental composition I could only sequence, not mix, scores, although even here I could (theoretically) have decided to orchestrate the string section with one and the brass section with another score. Ultimately, electronic music won out in my production of music. I could easily produce a final score with 18, 24, or 36 voices per sound entry, by overlaying different scores played by different instruments, and I could vary the “parametrical depth” of the sound from second to second. The compositional freedom I enjoyed using Koenig’s Project 1 and Scaletti’s Kyma was limitless.

[see the pdf on how to use Project 1]

I am speaking here of the most recent phase of my work of computer music programs during the first decade of the 21st century. The beginnings of this labor in the 1970s and 1980s were far less idyllic. For one thing, not having access to a computer running Project 1, I would produce my numerical scores manually, by “cutting and pasting” parameter lists from older score printouts I had retained and copied. This allowed me to design new scores in which the 7 degrees of change in Project 1 were quite different from previous scores, whether for instruments, voices, or tape. Then also, there was initially no “translator” for Project 1 scores into the DMX1000 or CSound or Kyma format, so that all of this work had to be done by hand. So it was a breakthrough in the early 21st century when Koenig provided me with a formatting of Project 1 scores that could actually be read by CSound or Kyma, respectively. No longer did one have to wait for a week, as in the 1970s, to hear a short piece one had programmed, by which time one had already forgotten the compositional idea input to the computer a week earlier.

The New England Computer Arts Association (NEWCOMP)

The 1980s were a heady time for “scandaliser le bourgeois” listening to music at Boston Symphony Hall. Curtis Roads was a very good friend of mine at that time, and for nearly a decade we worked together trying to put the focus on the production, rather than the consumption, of music. (It was only at the end of the 1980s that I could finally built my own studio, so that I could experiment with musical ideas any time I pleased, rather than having to travel to Vancouver, Bourges, or Ötwil am See to make a composition.)

I met Curtis (then editor of Computer Music Journal) in 1980 when he came to live in Cambridge, MA. After some talks we decided to form an association of composers, initially for presenting computer music concerts, later expanded to other computer arts, like computer poetry, computer dance and what we then call “visuals”. At that time I was married to a choreographer and I taught her to use Koenig's Project 1 in designing choreographies, which she did using parameter lists for determining “gestural events” for her dancers who collaborated to make a composition.

Curtis and I founded the New England Computer Arts Association in 1981 (which was renamed in 1984 into Computer Arts Association). During the time we worked together, Curtis and I gave about 65 concerts, planning every detail of them. Artists came from around the US to be presented by us. Curtis left NEWCOMP in 1985 and I carried on until 1991 when, not finding a worthy successor, NEWCOMP ceased to exist. We presented concerts not only in Cambridge (Massachusetts), but in also Europe (Warsaw, Stuttgart, Tbilisi). In addition, we sponsored an international computer music competition which became internally known as the NEWCOMP Music Competition.

At that time, both he and I were very sick and tired of the concert music scene in Boston, which was all about consuming music. We felt that what matters was producing, not consuming, music, and so we also presented composition courses for computer music beginners, and symposia for showcasing creative work. Our concert venue was a church in Cambridge, near Harvard University (where during 1992-1995 I would study developmental psychology).

NEWCOMP was a group of about 15 artists and composers which held regular meetings in my house, complete with a President, Vice-President, 2 Artistic Directors, and a Treasurer, -- all volunteers. We invited composer colleagues in the US and Europe – Koenig, Lansky, Ruzicka, and GMEB, and others – to be judges of the works submitted to the competition. NEWCOMP members came together to make the final selection of 3 winners. For ten years, NEWCOMP was the only association in the US that presented regular computer music and mixed computer arts concerts outside of academia. We “schlepped” loudspeakers, advertised, sold tickets, and in this way performed a lot of new music. It was a great pleasure.

Laske's work in Cognitive Musicology

I was always interested in what is knowledge, that is, epistemology. What does it mean to know, how does knowledge develop and work in the world?. As a result, the essential question I posed in my cognitive musicology between 1970 and 1995 (to be published in part in three volumes by Mellen Press by 2013) is "what is musical knowledge"?

As you know, musicologists have formulated hypotheses as to how Beethoven may have composed his string quartets, but they don't have enough data to really establish any sound theories about that. So that was the project that history handed to me. I was tired of the old musicology that I had studied in Frankfurt am Main. In my research after 1970, I was suggesting that, given the existence of computers, the time had come to branch out and study not only musical products – “compositions” – but the mental processes by which living computers brought their works into being. I was especially eager to understand the linkage between the mental process that led to a particular composition – carried out by using computer programs – and the work that resulted: how was musical form actually created? I was convinced that one could never derive the process from an existing work of a dead composer. Even old music was brought to life only through mental processes in the present, and so, in a way, there was no pre-existing music; it all occurred NOW. I also thought that conventional musicologists made too many illicit assumptions, called “interpretations”, that couldn’t be empirically proven and were largely arbitrary; and still think so.

Therefore, when upon Koenig’s (Godsend) invitation I worked in Utrecht between 1970 and 1975, inspired by what he called “composition theory”, I decided to use computer programs to work out empirical theories about how music is thought or “made”, whether in music analysis, conducting, composing, and listening. I rejected notation as a worthwhile medium and started working directly with electronic sound produced by the Institute of Sonology’s PDP-10 computer. Influenced by J. Piaget, the geneticist of knowledge, as well as N. Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar and P. Schaeffer’s Traité des Objets Musicaux, my goal was to understand the musical thinking of children.

" [...] At the Institute of Sonology, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Otto Laske and a host of really excellent teachers were formulating the digital future. That may sound overly dramatic, but they had this wonderful set of analog studios, with a lot of custom made equipment and two and four channel machines for recording it and banks of voltage control equipment that defied description. It was very, very complex. A long way from the Buchla and Moog synthesizers I’d been weened on at UBC. Stan Tempelaars was teaching modern psychoacoustics that he had gotten from Reiner Plomp, which I now realize was pretty cutting edge at the time. Koenig was teaching composition theory but also programming and macro assembly language for the PDP-15, almost as fast as he was learning it himself. And suddenly, for the first time, I found myself with the mini-computer; that’s what they were called, even though they took up one huge wall of a room. But they were single user, not mainframe computers like Max Mathews had. Although the only means of interaction was the teletype terminal, you could have real-time synthesis and interact with it as a composer rather than writing programmes. And I developed this thing called the POD System for interactive composition with synthesis, which was a top down type of approach." - Barry Truax

[via asymmetrymusicmagazine.com]

While in society computers were used to make profit, I looked at the computer as a machine that could strengthen (not replace!) the creative mind, thus working against the grain of technology. I felt artists could finally become independent of the many conventions than bind them in their work and in their performances, and simply satisfy their own criteria for what was “good art” (never mind the conductors who wouldn’t play their work). That was the political background.

Theoretically speaking, I was waking up to Artificial Intelligence as a means to “simulate” creative mental processes. For this reason, when I returned to the US in 1975, I applied for a grant to study with one of the luminaries of A.I., Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh (himself an excellent cello player). Together with A. Newell, another founder of A.I., Simon had created the first chess computer program that could beat a human player. He had also invented “protocol analysis”, a way of analyzing the intellectual moves of a human computer user engaging with a particular task such as chess and understanding spoken language.

So it was natural to wonder whether a computer program could not also “protocol”, or document, what children did with electronic sound compositionally (as I had been trying to understand in the Utrecht OBSERVER programs built together with B. Truax in FORTRAN), and whether they could not simulate, or at least intellectually support, musical composition, and not only for children. It was an idea that was in the air, so to speak.

As this shows, thinking about composition as a theorist and making music was very closely linked in my work. Not that composition was becoming a “science”, but rather that composers would do well to get out of their studio and sniff the air of science, as many composers began to do (e.g., James Tenney, not to speak of Xenakis and Koenig). I felt the composer needed to know as much as he/she could about computers and composition theory in order to understand his/her own creative process, and become more dynamic and flexible in using new processes rather than following old “models”, even their own.

From documenting children’s work in composition at the Instituut voor Sonologie, Utrecht (1970-75), I proceeded to simulating compositional processes by writing A. I. programs (1975-77) at Carnegie-Mellon. However, to do this was a very large undertaking, and I never managed to obtain the financial funds for working with others on this project which, finally, I had to give up to fully return to composition (1995). EMF is bringing out a 2 CD set “Otto Laske: The Utrecht Years”, which features 9 music pieces I had composed in at the Institute of Sonology over 5 years.

Visual Music

[Lanesville seen by camera - Otto Laske]

My artistic life is far from over. I have often been told that my music is very visual and contains many visual cues. Therefore, in 2009 I began to think: composition is composition, why don’t I extend my compositional work into the visual domain. (I also have written a substantial body of poetry, both in German (1955-1968) and in English (1967-1995)), still unpublished.

In 2008, after having begun work in watercolour and oil, I discovered what today is called visual music through Dennis Miller, a fellow composer living near me, and one of the pioneers of the new medium. (I always meet the right people at the right time, it seems.) Visual Music is a discipline still in its infancy, but has its roots in the 1920's and 1930's, when artists like Oskar Fischinger, Germany, began to experiment with abstract films that were called “absolute film” since they were without narrative and storyline, and rather simply focused on (often geometrical) shapes and colors. The pioneers of visual music had the vision that it was possible, or should be possible, to bring abstract painting in the sense of Kandinsky and Klee to film or video, and link it to music (instrumental music at first, and later electronic music).

In my present work with Studio Artist and Cinema 4D -- the first a program for digital painting and the second for animation -- I have again taken up the practice of using two different programs not initially meant to work with one another. But at least they can “talk” to each other now, which was not the case with early music programs. And so I am gradually learning to go back and forth between these 2 programs, not to mention that I also need to use a sound processor such as Sound Forge, a movie making program such as Vegas Movie Studio, and bring them all together to produce a visual music video.

For the time being, I have produced a gallery of images that will be accessible on www.ottolaske.com in the near future. Even for an experienced composer like myself, learning and using visual programs presents a steep learning curve. I am therefore putting my poetry and music on hold in order to became a digital painter and animator. I have given myself two or three years to learn these programs before I can turn out anything that would satisfy my artistic standards.

Again, the computer is the "leading voice" that challenges me as an artist to bring together music and image after a lifetime of composition. I feel very fortunate to be able to do this at my age (75), additional years permitting.

[works by Otto Laske @ silenteditions.com]
[www.cdemusic.org]

KISS2011 Call for Proposals

2011-04-06T23:42:00.000+02:00

The third annual Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2011) will take place from 16-18 September 2011 at Casa Da Musica, architect Rem Koolhaas' dramatic new music venue in Porto, Portugal.

Inspired by Portugal's proud history of navigators who set out to explore beyond the known and visible horizon, the theme of this year's symposium is "Explorando o espaço do som" (Exploring Sound Space) in honor of those who are exploring new methods, concepts, and ideas, beyond the familiar horizons in sound and music.

Call for Proposals

Universidade do Porto and Symbolic Sound invite you to share your ideas, experiences and results with fellow practitioners by submitting a proposal related to this year's theme, including topics ranging from the most literal to the most abstract definitions of sound, space, and exploration.

The KISS2011 program will also include master classes on sound design, CapyTalk, and other Kyma topics, plus the annual demonstration of what's new in Kyma this year.

[more info about the Call for Proposal here]

Questions? Please send email to: info.kiss2011@gmail.com

Out now: "hiSS vol.1" on Synesthesia Recordings

2011-04-02T17:51:00.003+02:00

The works included in 'hiSS [Synesthesia Sampler] vol.1' have been produced using only analogue devices and processing tools - such as no input mixers, analogue synthesizers and custom-built or hacked/reconfigured instruments.

Without the use of computers or digital devices, the 4 pieces recall an era from the 1950s-70s, when most of the electronic music makers around the world had limited resources and quite primitive equipment.

The compositional techniques are available in the following document:

[hiSS_vol-1_Press_Release.pdf]

Produced by Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi
Artwork by Kirjava [kirjava.deviantart.com]
SYN-005 | 2011 Synesthesia Recordings
Artists retain copyright to their respective works

RELEASE INFO:

Title: 'hiSS vol.1'
Cat.No: SYN-005
File under: Experimental/Electronic
Format: Digital/Compact Cassette
Release date: 4.2011

Limited edition compact cassettes coming soon! Contact us for more info:

write [at] synesthesiarecordings [dot] com

Digital album available ($ 5, mp3 @ 320 kbps) [here]
Pick other formats (FLAC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis) on BandCamp [here]

ALBUM ARTISTS:

Volker Hennes (GER)
Title of the piece: eromenoi erastai
Duration: 12' 16''

Volker Hennes (b. 1976) is a sound artist and composer. He studied at the Academy Of Media Arts Cologne from 2000 till 2005 – mainly at the Sound Laboratory, at which he was employed as assistant for two years. Focuses on live-electronics, acousmatic and electroacoustic music, computer music, field recordings, multichannel and interactives works, and installations. Works have been performed and presented internationally; e.g. Metamorphoses / Belgium, ICMC / Copenhagen, Concordia University/ Montreal, Música Viva / Portugal, MANTIS Festival / Manchester, Festival Internacional de Música Electroacústica Ai-Maako / Chile, A & A Elektrokonzert / Argentina, Digital Art Weeks / Zürich, SMC, Inventionen / Berlin. In 2003 he founded All Of Orlov with Robert Vater, since then performing duets and duels. Member of the audiovisual performance and improvisation group Frequenzwechsel.

[www.earesistible.de]

Chris Mercer (USA)
Title of the piece: Deification | for 2‐channel tape
Duration: 13' 14''

Chris Mercer received a B.M. in Composition at the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Composition at the University of California, San Diego in 2003. His principal teachers were Chaya Czernowin and Chinary Ung - instrumental music; and Peter Otto and Roger Reynolds - electronic music. He has held artist residencies at Experimentalstudio SWR, Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, and Sound Traffic Control in San Francisco. His music has been performed by The Nonsense Company, Ensemble Ascolta, Ensemble SurPlus, SONOR Ensemble, and Schlagquartett Köln. His most recent electroacoustic music and research have focused on animal communication, especially non-human primate vocalization, with research residencies at the Duke University Lemur Center, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, and the Brookfield Zoo.

His instrumental music involves modified conventional instruments, found objects, and instruments of the composer's own design, in combination with amplification, live electronics, and spatialization. He has taught electronic music at UC San Diego, UC Irvine, and CalArts, and is currently coordinator of the Music Technology program at Northwestern University.

[musictechnology.northwestern.edu/Mercer]

Ian Helliwell (UK)
Title of the piece: Convergence
Duration: 14' 02''

Since the start of the 1990s Ian Helliwell has been making films and building and modifying 9v circuitry, developing his unique series of Hellitron tone generators, which are used for live performance and for the soundtracks to over 50 of his experimental super 8 shorts. In 2007 he designed and built an analogue synth, the Hellisizer 2000, and since 2008 he has been producing The Tone Generation, his ongoing radio series which explores the early development of electronic music. In 2010 several of his abstract super 8 films have been included in a major retrospective of direct animation - Celluloid: The Cameraless Film at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.

[ianhelliwell.co.uk]

Jeroen Visser (CH)
Title of the piece: The Spanning
Duration: 13' 41''

Jeroen Visser (1961) is a musician and a composer living in Zürich, Switzerland. His primary instrument is classical piano, and he is also a self-taught woodwinds player. After his study of Sonology in Utrecht, being taught by a.o. G.M. Koenig, J. Vink, and S. Tempelaars, he worked as musician and sound engineer. From 1988-1992 he worked as music technologist at the Sweelinck Electronic Studio in Amsterdam, NL.

After his relocation to Zürich in 1993, he has been composing music for groups and theatre, where he was also responsible, as musical director, for productions, and making musical or sound installations. Recent musical activities, apart from electro-acoustic compositions, include studying ethiopian music, and playing music which investigates the combination of improvisation and musique concrete.

[121234.net]

Product pages:
[synesthesiarecordings.com]
[synesthesiarecordings.bandcamp.com]

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An Audio Journey into the Rainforests of Mamori

2011-03-24T20:59:00.000+01:00

Mamori Sound Project
6th Annual Workshop/Residency for sound artists & composers
@ Mamori Lake (Amazon, Brazil) / October 2011 / 2 weeks

This Kickstarter Project is to assist in funding eight US sound artists to participate in this year's Mamori Sound Project and, by doing so, help this whole exceptional project in the Amazon survive. This project will only be funded if at least $25,500 is pledged by Tuesday May 31, 1:00am EDT.

Mamori Sound Project is an independent residency/workshop that has been carried out in the Brazilian Amazon since 2005 by a small non-profit organization, integrated by sound artist Francisco López and the cultural association Mamori ArtLab, based in Spain and Brazil. Mamori Sound Project supports the local community at Mamori Lake (Amazonas state, Brazil) by providing jobs every year for a significant number of people in this community.

The Mamori Sound Project is a 2-week workshop/residency for professional and semi-professional sound artists and composers with previous experience in the area of sound experimentation and field recordings. It takes place at Mamori Lake, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, and involves theoretical/discussion presentations, field work and studio work. The workshop/residency has a special focus on creative approaches to the work with field recordings, through an extensive exploration of natural sound environments. It does not have a technical character but is instead conceived and directed towards the development and realization of a collective project of sonic creation with the interaction of all participant artists/composers. The activities of the workshop/residency include: Introductory theoretical/discussion presentation sessions on field recordings and sound creation, with a historical/philosophical perspective.

Field trips (both diurnal and nocturnal) for extensive listening and recording of sound environments.
Collective listening and discussion sessions of the sound materials gathered. Sessions of studio work (with laptop) using these materials.
Development and realization of a sound piece by each participant (or in small groups), as part of the collective project.
Public presentation of the finished pieces for both the participant artists and members of the local community at Mamori Lake.

All these activities are organized in a daily schedule according to the changing sonic environments of the rainforest. This typically involves many hours of field and studio work but there is also flexibility to allow participants to choose from several schedule options and to have the opportunity to carry out other activities related to the daily life in this environment, such as fishing for food or interacting with the local community.

[project home: kickstarter.com]
[franciscolopez.net/amazon.html]

Walter Murch about the layers of sound for the editing of a film

2011-03-15T22:25:00.000+01:00

[an excerpt from "Film Sound: Theory and Practice"]

I think it's generally misleading to say, "Well, that sequence had eighty tracks, it must be great." Ideally, for me, the perfect sound film has zero tracks. You try to get the audience to a point, somehow, where they can imagine the sound. They hear the sound in their minds, and it really isn't on the track at all. That's the ideal sound, the one that exists totally in the mind, because it's the most intimate. It deals with each person's experience, and it's obviously of the highest fidelity imaginable, because it's not being translated through any kind of medium.

So, at a certain point, there were 160 tracks for Apocalypse. That is an awful lot, but on the other hand, if somehow I could have achieved the same effect with no tracks, I would have been more impressed. Or one track. If there had been one sound that did all of that, so mysteriously, I would be more impressed. but what that means is: thinking very, very deeply, and being very, very lucky in getting exactly the right thing. And if you can do that, then the number of tracks is meaningless. But, generally speaking, it doesn't happen very often, if ever, to get that one thing. That's just an abstract ideal that I always strive for.

I believe that there have always been sound films, since the invention of films, and there will always be silent films. You can look at television show today, or even some features, and there really is no "sound" in them. There is talking, and there's music, maybe, but the part of the brain that is interested in sound and texture and the meaning of sound as music is totally uninvolved. The sound in those films is conveying little pellets of information - the door closed, the person said this - and there's no duality, no stretching. So there are silent films today: they've got sound tracks, of course, but emotionally, they're silent.

Whereas you can look at Chaplin's silent comedies and certain other films and they depend tremendously on the sound: the sound that the wardrobe made when it fell on him. You can "hear" all of the dishes break. Those films are using sound. They're asking you to imagine the sound of things. So they are sound films, even though they are completely silent. You try to track yourself along the boundaries between those two things - that's where you swing between zero tracks and 160 tracks.

- Walter Murch

U.S.O. Project @ Digital Experience Festival

2011-03-08T22:09:00.004+01:00

Listening Points - Punti di Ascolto

This panel discussion will present a selection of sound professionals with different paths and specializations.

The exchange of experiences, procedures and areas of action, will draw lines and perspectives on possible developments of the work on sound.

From sonic branding to custom software coding, through the most advanced and immersive forms of sound and music creation, these "listening points" are starting points to think and talk together about the craft of sound design nowadays, in relation to different media and the current technological/cultural communication system.

Guests:
Massimiliano Viel - composer and live media artist (Otolab / Sincronie)
Matteo Milani - sound designer and sound artist (Unidentified Sound Object / Green Movie)
Stefano Fontana - music producer, DJ and sound designer (Sound Identity)
Guido Smider - software developer and multimedia artist (Noiseplug / Smidernoise)

Moderator: Sergio Messina - musician, sound designer, journalist and teacher @ Ied Sound Design
Chairman: Painé Cuadrelli - sound designer, musician, coordinator @ Ied Sound Design

[www.digitalfestival.net]
[event page - ita]
[ustream.tv]

Creating Film Sound: an interview with Richard Beggs, pt.2

2011-02-27T22:09:00.000+01:00

Jenny Stein interviews sound designer/mixer Richard Beggs about film sound, how he creates emotional or psychological space and gives dimension to objects and events.
An excerpt from Oggetti sonori. La dimensione invisibile del design.

(Continued from pt.1)

Jenny Stein: What is a sound designer?

Richard Beggs: My idea of a sound designer is the soundtrack equivalent of the production designer (responsible for the look of the film, and the stylistic considerations that express the director's intention for how the world is perceived in their film). This look, this visual feeling, can carry a strong emotional or dramatic load. The sound designer works with the same material aurally. It can be as simple as hearing a clock. What kind of clock is it? Is the clock heard subjectively (in the character's mind) or in the room? Acoustical manipulations of the natural world can direct the audience subconsciously towards a particular feeling or point of view about the scene.
The sound designer is responsible for developing these ideas and working with the sound editorial crew. Because movie sound is complicated and there is so much to cut, a lot of people are involved. Even the most ordinary mundane sounds that you would say have no particular dramatic importance one -door slam- as opposed to another may help push the movie in the direction the sound designer would like it to go.
I'll read the script and right away I'm thinking about the various possibilities. What is the feeling I get? I like to develop various sound motifs that carry through the film. This creates a psychological glue that helps tie the film together emotionally and gives a bit more depth to the character's emotional reactions.

Sound motif: a sound effect or combination of sound effects that are associated with a particular character, setting, situation or idea through the film. The sound motifs condition the audience emotionally for the intervention, arrival, or actions of a particular character. The sound motifs can be very useful in the rough cut, where they help clarify the narrative functions of the characters and provide a sound association for those characters as we move through the story. The use of sound motifs can help shape a story that requires many characters and many locations and help unify the the film and sustain its narrative and thematic development. [edited excerpt from The Technique of Film and Video Editing - via filmsound.org]

JS: How are motifs used?

RB: Early on in the movie Sleepers (by Barry Levinson) there is a really terrible, emotionally disturbing event, during which specific sounds happen as a natural course of the action: somebody bumps the light bulb with a little metal chain rattling on the bulb and a steel cage door is opened and slammed. Throughout the movie in those moments when the characters who experienced this horrific incident either speak about it, or you can tell they are thinking about it, I would reintroduce the sound of the pull chain and the door, but in a very distant, diffuse, almost musical way.
It's like the sense of smell. You have an experience that is either pleasant or unpleasant and some odour or aroma associated with it. For the rest of your life, if the experience was strong enough, when you smell that smell, there's a good chance that you'll recall the initial experience. Sound can work much the same way. Especially when it's all jammed inside an hour-and-a-half in a dark room the audience won't forget that easily what they heard 20 minutes or an hour ago.

JS: How else do you use sound?

RB: I'm into backgrounds, the emotional qualities of background sound. The sound of air conditioning in a room can be passive and gentle "fill the space" or it can create an oppressive, unpleasant, pressurized feeling. It's not an issue of loudness or quietness, but what the sound is. In Spike Jonze's movie, Adaptation, a lot of scenes took place in Florida just outside and inside a house we decided had a really funky air conditioner. The neighbourhood was just droning with these air conditioners, but one in particular had this rattle that would come and go, rhythmically. I embedded that in the background and then the background began to function as what are called effects.
Very often, depending upon the movie and the style, sounds will be required to trascend the mundane, to take on special significance. And a specific sound - because it isn't normal - will leap out and become an event. In Children of Men (by Alfonso Cuarón) there's this protracted amazingly-shot battle sequence as our hero journeys through the combat zone and into a large institutional building: lots of rubble, broken windows, with concrete stairs that go up 6 or 7 stories. People are living there in primitive conditions, with chickens. In the middle of this really awful battle I twisted the sound around so that the battle sound suddenly receded - what's loud suddenly becomes very quiet and in the foreground you hear very specific small pin point sounds from the battle. It's a subjective point of view. You hear the loud "buck buck buck" of the chickens before you see them. As Clive Owen comes up around the stairs suddenly you see a couple of hens scurrying around "buck buck bucking" and the sound of them is inordinately loud and prominent. It is not a realistic impression of that scene, but it works dramatically - it affects you emotionally.

JS: Do you record specific sounds when you are working on a film?

RB: For Lost in Translation (by Sofia Coppola) went to Tokyo for 2 weeks and recorded all of the practical locations of the movie; - both night and day - specifics and backgrounds. Even if there were a library of sounds called Tokyo Sound Effects it wouldn't have had the focus that "having read the script and seen dailies of the picture" I had very specific ideas about what I wanted in the sound track.
For Marie Antoinette (by Sofia Coppola) I went to Versailles and spent time in the Palace of Versailles, at 11 p.m. at night after it was closed and really quiet. I recorded the creaking of the floors, the same floors that were there when Louis XVI was there, and recorded the clock in what was Louis XVI's bedroom, the actual clock that was there 200-plus years ago. I recorded doors and fountains, bells, the forest, the grounds of the Palace; we hired French hunting dogs and French hunting horns. It was all done to order.
I'm interested in and I enjoy the physicality of sound. If I have a specific requirement for a sound, I will reject sounds over and over and over again until I get the right one. I want the sound to capture the essence of that object.
Technology has given us the ability to make many, many layers - and in fact reality has many, many layers - but we don't really hear in many layers. The advantage of having, let's say, 12 things we can listen to in the scene (they've all been prepared and cut) is i can pick the 2 or 3 things that best convey the scene and either forget the rest or relegate it so far away that it's merely a colour.
I would rather have the one sound that says the most than 5 or 6 sounds - all combined - that try to convey that same idea. It's not the amount of stuff but the specific choices you make.

[via electaweb.it]

Related Post:

Creating Film Sound: an interview with Richard Beggs, pt.1