“UP” Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Miguel Isaza has created a must-read new blog for anyone interested in sound design, and much to our delight has put it on noisepages. He’s being incredibly prolific with posts, covering creative projects to get your ideas flowing, terrific overviews of leading people in the field with links to interviews and resources for learning about their work, and tons of links for learning your craft technologically and artistically.

http://designingsound.noisepages.com/

Naturally, Pixar figures prominently, with some of the best sound design on the silver screen in recent years. I’m looking forward to finally seeing UP; Michael Coleman offers the video above. See Miguel’s site for more links and interviews and an overview of the all-star team that did sound for Pixar’s latest.

Thanks for this great resource, Miguel; I’ll certainly be reading daily.

Working with sound is, for many of us, the experience that attracted us to working with computers. Field recordings can be the best way to get close to sound – you’re attached to sounds you’ve found in the real world, you’ve experienced and collected, even if you transform them into something very different in production.

Nick Maxwell of the excellent Nick’s Tutorials Ableton Live production site shares some free explorations with us, complete with downloads you can reverse-engineer the instruments and play with the topics the video cover. You can also use these in your own work, royalty-free.

I really like some of the work here, from a kitchen knife to a found sound bass. Here’s Nick:

“Icy Shimmer” Effect

In this video, I use a few field recordings of a kitchen knife being unsheathed as well as a door closing as the layers for the eventual sound effect.  Basic things like reversing the waveforms, filtering , panning, and retuning are employed.  I also go beyond that into some more interesting stuff like using a grain delay, simple delay, and an autofilter to create a little effects section to further realize the sound.

Download

Speaking of games, you can expect game production to start to attract the attention of musicians and web publishers. Whereas a few short years ago, targeting musicians might mean dangling rock club gigs or album sales, now a lot of those same music makers want to break into gaming, too.

Kongregate is a bit like public access, only on steroids and for games. The idea is this: get indie game makers in one place contributing games, then get lots of people playing those games, then support the system with ad revenue shared with the game makers. The model has grown rapidly, with millions of users and over 15,000 original games.

The newest project from Kongregate looks to connect artistic talent on projects, including musicians, composers, and sound designers wanting to work on game projects. The Collabs section will see artists and sound and music creators uploading their work to find collaborators. Initially, there’s a contest on, with competition for attention, cash, and studio prizes.

http://www.kongregate.com/collabs

The competition aside, this could be the beginning of a successful community for collaboration in the indie Flash gaming world. Assets are often uploaded under a Creative Commons license, and I see one of the top sounds draws on samples from Freesound.org. While career success is an obvious goal, the contributors so far appear to see sharing as a way to get there – in stark contrast to the model in the mainstream, big-business game industry. Quality is, of course, variable, but ask anyone in the game industry how to become successful and the answer is always make as much as you can. Getting work out there, even primitive, can be part of a learning process. So I’m eager to see what transpires as these kinds of communities grow.

There is an invariable comparison to Deviant Art – and you’ll see they’ve already begun to invade.

Oh yeah, and I quite like these glassy tendrils, rendered in Cinema 4D. Image (CC) Chaodeath. Now, make that run real-time. Or, erm, imagine those are virtual renderings of artists … collaborating.

Wired has a great mini-documentary on the score for the videogame Infamous. It’s chock full of sound design ear candy, not only served by the chops of composer Amon Tobin but the team at Sony Music and Sony’s entertainment division, as well. Curiously, Jonathan Mayer, Music Manager at SCEA, says explicitly that he doesn’t want composers writing interactive music. He’d prefer to have them write a conventional score and then adapt it to the interactive engine. Now, of course, around these parts we like the idea of composers finding ways to write genuinely generative and interactive scores. But in this case, Mayer is acting as a kind of remix artist for the game realm, sampling Tobin’s compositions and reconceiving them in the game world. That kind of collaboration could be powerful.

Chuck Doug, SCEA music director, overstates things a bit by claiming this game has a unique aesthetic. The visuals are a burnt-out, post apocalyptic city – yeah, been there quite a few times. The music involves lots of ethnic percussion-y instruments and bowed metal and deep booming sounds. (Let me get this straight: we’ll hear a plucky stringy thing, then a bowedy metally thing, then there will be a big boom!) So, generally, not some radical new departure from game and motion soundtracks. But regardless of its novelty, I’d be an utter killjoy to complain: it sounds utterly gorgeous.

Previously:

I got to listen in on a lot of gems regarding sound design from composer Troels Folmann. He doesn’t just bow metal instruments – he boils them.

GDC: Boiling Waterphones and Other Sonic Inspirations from Composer Troels Folmann

And on the subject of getting composers to write interactively, Matt Ganucheau has been teaching that way:

Teaching Adaptive Music with Games: Unity + Max/MSP, Meet Space Invaders!

Sound is a wonderful, if invisible thing. To work with these tiny fluctuations in air pressure that make up what we hear, we always work with some sort of software metaphor. So why not make that metaphor pixels – and why not manipulate the visual element directly?

Translating between sound and image is not a new concept in music software. The deepest tool for these functions is unquestionably the Mac-only classic MetaSynth, which sprang from the imagination of Bryce creator and graphic designer Eric Wenger. To me, one of the most appealing features of MetaSynth has always been its filter tool, the one component that allows you to work directly with sound using imagery and painting tools. The core of the tool, however, turns images into a score for synthesis, which opens up powerful features for microtones and the like but can conversely make simply designing sounds more challenging. (Side note: Leopard users, read this re: MetaSynth.)

Photosounder looks like MetaSynth, but it more directly translates between sound and image. It also has a uniquely straightforward interface for precisely adjusting controls and mappings. Put these together, and you can really use Photosounder as an audio tool. That opens up not only experimental techniques, but even makes conventional tasks more accessible.

Photosounder is also under very active development, with recent additions like a lossless mode for better sound fidelity and loop modes. The result is a really compelling looking tool for audio manipulation.

What can you do with these pixel powers over sound? Users have been experimenting and posting some pretty impressive stuff:

• Isolating and removing individual instruments – making this an ideal remixing and sampling tool – using Photoshop
• Making entire tracks from photographs (which, again, was possible with MetaSynth as infamously employed by Aphex Twin, but sounds very different here)
• Processing using Photoshop filters
• Making beats by drawing
• Extreme time processing

Photosounder is currently Windows-only, but Linux and Mac versions are promised. (By the way, I think that’s going to become more commonplace as savvy developers take up cross-platform development tools, toolchains, and frameworks.)

It’s cheap enough to impulse-buy, too, at EUR25 non-commercial or EUR99 commercial.

http://photosounder.com/

Photosounder examples (with video)

I hope to get my hands on Photosounder and show off some features with this soon. Thanks to everyone who sent this in! (And yeah, after four or five people I finally get around to mentioning it!)

The best way to see what’s possible: check out the videos. Here’s a selection of my favorites: