Designing Sound, as the name implies, focuses entirely on the craft of audio from film to games. While there are industry-driven sites devoted to the topic, this blog is entirely the labor of love of composer and sound designer Miguel Isaza, whose writing has also appeared on Spain’s Hispasonic and Monofónicos. (Miguel also tweets to Reaktor aficionados as reaktorlovers.) That personal perspective has imbued the site with the feeling of artists talking to artists.

http://designingsound.noisepages.com/

All week, Designing Sound has focused on Rob Bridgett, who has worked on numerous sound designs for games. Despite the massive growth of the game industry, most top artists have worked largely in obscurity – even less so in sound. There isn’t an equivalent of Ben Burtt, Randy Thom, Walter Murch, or others. (Those greats have been featured in Designing Sound specials, too.) Gaming is a young industry, to be sure, but that’s no excuse for simple ignorance.

In this week’s interviews with Isaza, Bridgett talks frankly about every last detail of what goes into sound production. He’s frank not only about what can go right in a game production – Scarface, pictured above, gets special treatment – but also what can go wrong. The brutal deadlines, fluid production parameters, and tangled production process of games can exact a toll on sound in gaming. The high point of this: Bridgett has gotten to employ the full resources of Skywalker Sound and has been at the forefront of bringing Hollywood-style sonic treatment to gaming.

I’m sure many readers here are curious about the games industry. There’s still time to forward your own questions to Miguel to pass along to Rob Bridgett.

Exclusive interview

Rob Bridgett Special

Ask your own questions

Incidentally, this is beyond what we even imagined for our fledgling noisepages.com, which we’re readying for a full launch as a community and blogging platform. Miguel created Designing Sound without prompting or assistance – it’s entirely his vision. It’s great to have people sharing information in this way. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead.

Humans Turning Up Volume In Oceans [NPR “Science Out of the Box”]

A new report shows the way in which sound travels through the ocean has been impacted by global warming. A growing community of artists are working in media like sound to address environmental challenges. But it seems the planet is making some “sound art” of its own. Curious to hear what people think of the report.

I’ve had some amazing meetings here in Berlin, with plenty to share with you over the coming weeks and months. I’m now headed to Dublin tomorrow for the amazing-looking DEAF festival. If you’re in or near Dublin, you may want to just clear the next few days for live music lineups, parties, film screenings, gallery events, and generally a dream lineup of electronic music events.

I’ll be part of a series of talks Saturday. I’ll be talking generally about how we can think about music visually, and how those visual metaphors in software impact music, with some new examples built in Processing (among examples of other work). I’m really excited about every one my fellow speakers, as well. Gavin from Future Audio Workshop (creators of Circle) will be talking about sound generally, complementing what I’m covering, and we have a number of terrific figures to chat. The film Totally Wired covers the scene around synth building and the modular renaissance as found at Schneider’s Bureau … well, you can see the lineup for yourself.

For the rest of the world not in Ireland, believe me, I’ll be sure to bring you as much back from this event as possible, even if I’m catching up through the end of 2008.

Saturday 25th October at The Digital Hub:

1.00pm – 1.40pm FAW [Future Audio Workshop]
1.40pm – 1.50pm Break
1.50pm – 2.30pm Peter Kirn [Create Digital Music]
2.30pm – 2.50pm Break
2.50pm – 4.10pm Totally Wired Film [Dir. Niamh Ahern]
4.10pm – 5.10pm Andreas Schneider [Schneider’s Bureau]
5.10pm – 5.30pm Break
5.30pm – 6.30pm Dave Vorhaus & Mark Jenkins [White Noise / BBC Radiophonic Workshop]
6.30pm – 7.00pm Break
7.00pm – 8.00pm Diffusion Concert / Soundings
8.00pm – 9.00pm Spatial Music Collective Concert

More details on Saturday’s lineup, at the DEAF Ireland Blog

DEAF live events

Here’s the trailer for “Totally Wired,” which also features a terrific original score:

Trailer for ‘Totally Wired’ from niamhahern on Vimeo.

Hearing over the din of noise is something that humans do a lot better than computers. A new mathematical technique promises to provide highly accurate models of sound, even with broadband noise in the picture. Why does this matter, aside from mathematical curiosity? For one, better sonic analysis could mean more realistic models of instruments and more flexible sound editing tools, inspiring a new generation of music software.

From our friend kokorozashi:

‘In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcelo Magnasco, professor and head of the Mathematical Physics Laboratory at Rockefeller University, has published a paper that may prove to be a sound-analysis breakthrough, featuring a mathematical method or â€Å“algorithmâ€Â? that’s far more nuanced at transforming sound into a visual representation than current methods. â€Å“This outperforms everything in the market as a general method of sound analysis,â€Â? Magnasco says. In fact, he notes, it may be the same type of method the brain actually uses.’

Full article:
New mathematical method provides better way to analyze noise [Physorg.com]

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time new algorithms yielded scientific advances and musical advances alike. Even the famed (or infamous) AutoTune plug-in benefits from data processing techniques used in oil exploration. (Lesson: it takes a lot of science to make Jessica Simpson sing in tune. Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Of course, the converse is true, too: better sound processing can be very useful to a broad range of sciences, because, well, sound is just about everywhere.

[Updated] Tom Duff has managed to hunt down the actual paper so you can get this straight from the source:

Sparse time-frequency representations,
Timothy J. Gardner and Marcelo O. Magnasco [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]

While I wouldn’t normally say this of academic papers, it has really pretty pictures. (Seriously: visual renderings of the analyses not only illustrate the point, but also happen to look gorgeous.)

Fashion and sound usually involves pumping soundtracks on the runway. SHOWstudio, an “online fashion broadcasting company,” has its own idea: they’re taking leading garments from this season into an anechoic chamber, where they’ll record the literal sound of the garments. “Feathers, sequins, glass crystals and beads, nylon, taffeta, leather, velvet, jacquard, zips and metallic chains” will all get recorded in this pristine audio environment. (They’re spaces that are almost entirely without echo; check out this Bell Labs story for more. John Cage was so taken by hearing the sound of his own body in a chamber that it helped him develop his ideas about silence.)

And, of course, since the thing looks so cool they’ll be filming the recording process.

The Sound of Clothes: Anechoic [SHOWstudio, via 21f Yahoo Group]

Live broadcast June 1, and I expect there will be archival shots, too. Oh, and don’t miss the clothes.

By architectural music, I don’t mean some sort of funky digital installation. David Byrne’s new installation uses the pipes, metal beams, and girders of the Färgfabriken space in Stockholm as a musical instrument. It is definitely an installation (though the curator tries to say it’s not): there are automatic blowers forcing air through pipes, motors vibrating crossbeams, and solenoids (mechanical devices for, well, hitting things) striking the columns.

But David Byrne’s installation is as notable for what’s not there as what is: no amplification involved. All the circuitry is exposed. It’s basically just a building, controlled by an organ. And you get to play it — cool. Come at 6pm to hear the former Talking Heads front man speak, then come back at midnight for the party. Anyone here from Sweden? Let me know how it goes!

Playing the Building [Färgfabriken, Description, photos, curator comments, opening party]

Via We Make Money Not Art

Two things most people don’t care to understand: physics and how the heck your car works. But you’re different. Why, you probably already know that phase cancellation occurs when a sound source is delayed slightly (by a real-world reflection, or in recording and mixing), so that two coherent waveforms of opposite phase are superimposes and cancel each other out. (Er, in plain english: one wave’s crests cancel out the other’s troughs and vice versa.)

Now, did you know this principle is what keeps your car’s exhaust from making a racket?

How Mufflers Work [Howstuffworks]

Basically, the muffler is a chamber designed to create lots of echoes, and thus lots of destructive interference.

See an extended discussion above, plus some variations on the design used in luxury automobiles (think active cancellation, as in noise-reducing headphones). And, of course, this is exactly what doesn’t happen when your remove a muffler and get that ear-splitting noise.

Got other candidates for acoustic science in the real world? Let me know!

Rope and Sound is an installation that uses rope tension to control sound. Pull on a cord, and the change in tension triggers electronic thuds and mellow chimes. The trick is conductive fibers braided into the rope; as the tension changes, the conduction of the rope changes, as well.

I got a chance to try out the installation at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The show is up through October 30 and well worth a visit if you’re passing through town. The installation is beautiful and the concept brilliant, but the sound aspect was somewhat disappointing. The sounds themselves were compelling, but the ropes act like simple buttons: sounds are triggered as you cross a set threshold. If the whole point is the ability to monitor stress, why doesn’t that translate into sound? A velocity-sensitive keyboard is more expressive. That said, I think the underlying concept is terrific, so expect to see more use of conductive fibers in new sound interfaces.

If you’re near Emoryville, California, you can meet up with the Squid Labs folks who built this and other projects. (via O’Reilly Radar) And you can even one-up them by showing your own project. If you go, let me know what goes down!

[UPDATE:] I went to the source and asked Ben Recht (MIT Media Lab) about why the strings weren’t sensitive. In fact, they were! The reason they modulated timbre and not velocity was that he felt velocity was too hard to calibrate for different visitors. (And, obviously calibration is an issue, since I didn’t notice the timbre modulation.) This certainly demonstrates the challenges in designing new interfaces. And it also suggests that even with new designs, you need musicians to become adept at using the interface expressively.

Before the invention of radar, you'd need a large dish or
horn to track sounds of your enemy. "Acoustic radar" (aka "acoustic
locators" or "sound mirrors") captured sound via large dishes or walls,
or steerable horns not unlike the cones on early record players.
Douglas Self has a reference guide to this curious technology with links as part of his Museum of Retro Technology. (via near near future) Check out the fluidic gramophones, too!

I know what you're thinking: could you sample the sounds captured by
such a dish? I leave it up to our UK readers to head over to the ruins
of some of these things to try it out. Let us know.

Hartmann is making its MODELmaker software free to software Neuron VS users, so they can take their own samples and convert them to Hartmann's fascinating Neuron format.

Huh? What? What did that just say? Erm?

Imagine a synth package that uses new adaptive algorithms to create new
sonic morphing possibiltiies, and you're beginning to scratch the
surface — Hartmann's Neuron
package does that, and now instead of being limited to preset samples
you can add your own. See their site for more. CDM is working on a
review as part of our soon-to-be-launched Reviews section. If we can
devote enough neurons to it, anyway.