Revealing a deeper understanding of what sound means in our world, how it works as “currency” and “ghost,” Performance Artist Christine Sun Kim explores sonic media without the benefit of hearing. She finds how to make its presence more physical, to find greater dimensions of movement, and to make a personal connection beyond what most of us might find in the everyday sense. As she describes it to NOWNESS:

There are social norms surrounding sound that form our speech development and our way of handling sound with care. They’re so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without sound.

In a beautiful short film, you can watch her process in her studio, thanks to filmmaker Todd Selby:

Cult photographer and filmmaker Todd Selby’s latest short is a revealing portrait of performance artist Christine Sun Kim. Deaf from birth, Kim turned to using sound as a medium during an artist residency in Berlin in 2008, and has since developed a practice of lo-fi experimentation that aims to re-appropriate sound by translating it into movement and vision. “It’s a lot more interesting to explore a medium that I don’t have direct access to and yet has the most direct connection to society at large,” says the artist. “Social norms surrounding sound are so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without it.” Selby filmed an exclusive performance from Kim in a Brooklyn studio as the artist played with field recordings of the street sounds of her Chinatown neighborhood, feedback and helium balloons, and made “seismic calligraphy” drawings from ink- and powder-drenched quills, nails and cogs dancing across paper to the vibrations of subwoofers beneath. Working with sound designer Arrow Kleeman, Selby carefully choreographed the film’s ambient score to reveal the Orange County native’s unique relationship with sound. “Her work deals with reclaiming sound because it’s a foreign world to her and one she’s not comfortable in,” explains Selby. “I wanted the film to act as an artistic conduit for her to tell her story to the world.”

Interview, via NOWNESS Facebook Page

Via our friend Rucyl on Saturn Never Sleeps, by way of Rashid Zakat’s The Awesome Farm.

Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim [Nowness.com]

I was once a speaker at DEAF, which stands for Dublin Electronic Arts Festival. Not thinking, I told the customs officer in Ireland that I was a musician attending the DEAF Festival. He had some cheeky comment. In this context, of course, what he took for granted can take on an entirely different meaning. If you have background in understanding accessibility and design, for people with different sense capabilities in vision and sound alike, I’d love to hear them. The world of sound technology most of us inhabit describes a very narrow range of expectations for vision and sight.

It’s not in any way digital – we’re in paper and needle territory – but clever design transforms packaging and notecard into playable music device. Create Transducer Music, anyone?

Designer Kelli Anderson concocted a novel approach to the wedding invitation for her friends Karen and Mike: turn the paper invite into a playable sound device. The couple even made and recorded their own song for the occasion. (The story of the individuals is worth mentioning – Karen advocates for the rights of makers and coders and Mike is a Grammy-nominated engineer.)

The device itself plays music without electricity or circuits. You may recall the FlexiDisc, the inexpensive records (normally made of vinyl, not paper), as seen in magazines, books, and comics. Here, a sewing needle is the entire playback mechanism, amplified by the paper and the kinetic energy of a person using their hand to rotate the disc. Working with her partner and music podcaster Daniel, Kelli turned to the power of geometry. (And I never miss an opportunity to work geometry into this site.)

A major breakthrough came when we realized that the ideal sound was produced when the tented page created a perfect right triangle with the flexidisc. The needle needed to be perfectly perpendicular to the flexidisc. (@Pythagorean theorem: at long last, you are an ally!) We also discovered that the “tent” needed two loosely-swinging bends to allow the record needle to travel as freely as possible. By creating two parallel folds, we essentially made the angle at the peak of the tent variable as needed. At the beginning of the track, the ideal angle of this peak is about 15 degrees. By the end of the track, the arm needed to stretch further towards the center of the flexi, with an ideal peak angle of about 35 degrees.

If you do want to play the results on a proper turntable, you can drop the same flexidisc on your (electrically-powered) record player for better sound.

Details on Kelli’s (beautiful) blog:
A Paper Record Player

And listen to the song the couple wrote for everybody

Aside from being a chance to nerd out about sound, I’m going to take this as yet another example of inventive packaging for musical objects. I’ can also imagine it as the way we’ll listen to music should environmental catastrophe mean that we don’t have access to electricity on Earth any more. File this away for your next post-oil-crisis sci-fi short story, a la the (excellent) book on that theme, The Windup Girl.

Thanks to Howard Shin for this great tip – and Howard, Kelli, Daniel, Karen, Mike, and Pythagoras, I owe any one of you a drink if I see you.

As for music, the Pythagorean Theorem and Trigonometry are always your ally.

Previously: Reclaim the Album’s Soul: Tips for Handmade CD Artwork

Last Days of Compact Disco: Album Lovers Hand-Make Musical Objects

Sometimes things look interesting even before you can fully grasp just what they mean. Such is the case, I think, with what’s happening with SoundCloud’s on-the-go tools. Now, back in the beginning of this service, I predicted it’d become the Flickr of audio, and I wasn’t alone. But it’s becoming something else, something that really involves mobility.

The SoundCloud crew are out at South by Southwest, as good a gathering as any for the intersection of Web nerd culture with music and film. And they have something to show for it, too: they’re unveiling new Android and iOS mobile apps, among other updates – and location, with FourSquare.

Android phone owners certainly no longer need to feel like second-class citizens, with bug fixes, track commenting, and Twitter and Facebook sharing. You can also add widgets to your homescreen, a feature that iOS lacks. (I have to say, for all of iOS’ sophistication, the one thing Android does very well is make apps integrate with one another, and with data and the cloud.)

There are updates not only for Android, but iOS and desktop, too, detailed in a blog post geared for South by Southwest:
Create & Share (Even) More Easily

Both Android and iOS users get Foursquare interaction. That could mean … well, something. The ability to make recording a sound an event, to tie it to a place in the real world, is theoretically compelling. Exactly what you’d do with this data I think has a lot to do with the content itself. Might this be a way to tie, say, a live set to the venue at which it was played, or sound samples of an interactive art gallery installation, or an open mic night that has recordings and not just pictures? Possibly – although there’s nothing saying you really need a fancy tool to do those things, either.

With the Interactive portion out of the way, SoundCloud now gets unleashed on South by Southwest’s Music Festival, which has grown to an extent that it feels like all musical output has collided on one point. It’s a quantum singularity as much as a music festival. So we’ll see if SoundCloud does something interesting at those events – or if it’s just another eager Web name against the backdrop of a lot of booze-drenched music parties. And to me, it’s an open question how to use these tools to get more people in person, in the flesh, at live events, which I think for many musicians is the goal. (That is, you’d use SoundCloud to encourage people to get off their computers and go hear some live music!)

SoundCloud isn’t sitting around hoping you’ll figure it out, though; they have some tips:
SoundCloud 101: How to host your events sampler!
SoundCloud 101

Any of you in Austin or elsewhere in the musical world, if you do catch cool stuff happening with SoundCloud or other Internet-enabled audio, we’d love to hear about it.

The Internet, as the subject of one Oscar-nominated film, is full of short attention spans and flirts, social dysfunction and lust. But there’s another side of the Internet. Someone interested in finding expressive inspiration, in learning the craft of music and sound, can virtually apprentice themselves to artists and engineers they love. There may be no substitute for stepping into a studio with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, or sitting face to face as Greg Russell to talk mixing. But barring that, for the aspiring sound and musical creators of the future, you have immediate access to astounding hours of collected knowledge, to the same technologies that produce the films grabbing the Oscars, and even to simulated, augmented-reality dreams on your phone.

That revelation might not make a good movie, but it’s sure a great thing. And who knows, from Indiana to India, the next studio to craft a great score could be your own.

Rounding up some of the better resources on the Internet, I’m in particular indebted to a couple of great sources, particularly on the previously-unsung craft of mixing and sound. I don’t have a statuette to give them, but I will introduce them:

Designing Sound by Miguel Isaza and Jake Riehle is a fantastic, advertising-free blog dedicated entirely to the craft of sound design in film, television, games, and other media. I’m honored to host the site on Noisepages for CDM, and equally pleased to get to sit back and just read (and not write or edit) the content. This is a perfect opportunity to cull some of the sharp, savvy analysis and exclusive interviews from that site. You might find you have something to do during ad breaks on the Oscars, film lovers.

Soundworks Collection tells the story of sound production in extended-format, high quality videos. You can watch video about just about every major release. In fact, their collections may become to those of us who are sound enthusiasts as invaluable a companion to movie-watching as popcorn.

And from the world of paper, Mix Magazine has been doing loads of coverage on the production side in film.

Forgive me for not looking at the “Best Original Song” category this year; arpeggiators everywhere lament the absence of Daft Punk’s “Derezzed,” but what can you do? (I definitely didn’t envy Daft Punk the challenge of trying to live up to Wendy Carlos’ landmark original score.)

Original Musical Scores

‘The Social Network’
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

I’ll come right out and say it: I think this is the film, out of this extraordinary bunch, that deserves the award. In a way, the score embodies the ideas of the film, emotionally and conceptually, more than the movie itself can. From the now oddly-famous small batch synth invention Swarmatron to air conditioners and pianos, Reznor and Ross concoct a sonic and compositional world. It’s relevant, topical, and now, like Facebook – but it may have greater lasting power.

Speaking of dreams and lost, The New York Times got to do what I imagine we all would love to do: step into the Reznor/Ross studio.

And long after the movie is forgotten, I expect this soundtrack will have a beloved spot on the playlists of many readers of this site.

Mashable Interviews Trent Reznor

As it happens, I wound up by coincidence in a conversation with Jeremy Peters, who does licensing for Ghostly International. His thoughts on why this score deserves special mention:

It was great to see them go a bit outside the box and hire Reznor, and I felt like it did what the score was meant to, which is tell the story that is not being told in the visuals and dialogue, and it did it really, really well, so my vote has to go to that score.

Peters also laments, as a person in the licensing business, that so many original songs “stick out like a sore thumb,” when better musical collaborations and licensing are possible. That makes it doubly nice to see fresh faces in the nominee category here.

More Swarmatron, for good measure:

‘Inception’
Hans Zimmer

It’s hard to say much about Zimmer’s stunning score for ‘Inception’ that hasn’t already been said. But it’s worth noting that, outside the film, a ground-breaking interactive app took the dream space into mobile, generative and reactive form. Built on open source technology at RjDj, Inception is the first app to use the libpd embeddable Pure Data library seen here previously. Aside from the musical achievement here, the technical advancement is that delivering interactive music to nearly any platform is no longer just a dream.

In fact, ‘Inception’ could be seen as interactive music’s first blockbuster, topping the charts on iOS. on iTunes

’127 Hours’
A.R. Rahman

Boy, it’s a tough year to compete in soundtracks – and a great year to listen. A.R. Rahman’s fluid, genre-crossing ambient soundtrack is as expansive as the film’s desert landscapes. And it’s another achievement for the connection between India’s titanic film industry and Hollywood’s. (Rahman also contributed “Slumdog Millionaire,” a process about which he spoke to Apple’s Joe Ceillini, since it was done entirely in Logic, from laptop to studio.) The first interview that follows is more specific to this film, but the second, Indian-produced interview I think is … well, better.

‘How to Train Your Dragon’
John Powell

So, the adult dialog was Scottish, the kids are American, and the music was Celtic, even as all the characters were Vikings. It was nonetheless a lovely score (though I’m sorry that last year’s animated ‘The Book of Kells,’ set in historical Ireland with Irish accents and Irish music, didn’t get more coverage, as far as Celtic scores). For more on this movie’s sound – even if Randy Thom didn’t need another nomination this year – see Designing Sound’s interview.

Composer John Powell himself comes from a Scottish background, and says he was influenced, too, by Nordic folk music. In an interview, he explains how he lent the film a lot of its character:

John Powell Goes Epic to Score ‘Dragon’ [The Wrap]

‘The King’s Speech’
Alexandre Desplat

Understated and elegant as the film it scores, Desplat (“Deathly Hallows”) has another beautiful soundtrack. The only bad news: he’s partly overshadowed by one Ludwig van Beethoven. (Desplat says that was originally a temp track. You try out-composing Beethoven.)

Interview by Scott Holleran

Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

‘Inception’
Sound Mixing: Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo & Ed Novick
Sound Editing: Richard King

Known in particular for its use of Edith Piaf in the score, Inception is clearly our star here (and perhaps a shoe-in, as a result), a film that creates entirely different imagined worlds. Videos and interviews, via Designing Sound:

“Inception” – Exclusive Interview with Richard King

I feel it’s very important to get new sounds for each film. It’s so important to get the sounds which you feel and imagine could be there. There’s always a lot of manipulation afterward of course, but recording new raw material is so important. I’d love to record everything every time, but the most important thing is to find the sound which provides that feeling you’re looking for regardless of where it comes from.Richard King, to Designing Sound

Gary Rizzo Talks About “Inception”

Mix Magazine on the Sound of Inception

Bruce Tanis Answers Reader Questions (a foley and sound effects editor on Inception)

‘The King’s Speech’
Sound Mixing: Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen & John Midgley

‘Salt’
Sound Mixing: Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan & William Sarokin

Greg Russell has an astounding fourteenth nomination for ‘Salt.’

Interview: Greg P. Russell on “Salt” and Mark P. Stoeckinger on “Unstoppable”
More About the Sound of “SALT”

‘The Social Network’
Sound Mixing: Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick & Mark Weingarten

Some of the grand achievements in sound may not be immediately noticeable – like making a loud club party scene where you can actually hear the dialog.

Ren Klyce Talks “The Social Network” Mix

‘True Grit’
Sound Mixing: Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff & Peter F. Kurland
Sound Editing: Skip Lievsay & Craig Berkey

Skip Lievsay Talks “True Grit” Mix

‘Toy Story 3′
Sound Editing: Tom Myers & Michael Silvers

Toy Story 3 may have gone unnoticed by many this year, but it required major innovations in surround sound, making the interviews below must-read. (For the opposite, low-fidelity end of the spectrum, see the exclusive interview for a fascinating story about the “futz boxes” used to make the little snippets of dialog the toys produce.)

“TOY STORY 3″ – Exclusive Interview with Tom Myers, Michael Semanick, and Al Nelson

With Gary Rydstrom we continued the conceit that when the toys are interacting with humans, (when they are inanimate objects), they should sound smaller in scale compared to the human “real” world. But when they are interacting with each other, and walking and talking, they have a larger, almost human scale to their sounds.
Tom Myers to Designing Sound

Dolby Surround 7.1, Toy Story 3 and The Future of Sound In 3D Films

‘Tron: Legacy’
Sound Editing: Gwendolyn Yates Whittle & Addison Teague

More About the Sound of “TRON: Legacy”: Score and SFX Mix

More About the Sound of “TRON: Legacy”

‘Unstoppable’
Sound Editing: Mark P. Stoeckinger

Yes, even Vanity Fair cares about sound editing.

Vanity Fair: Mark Stoeckinger Talks Unstoppable’s Sound Editing

For all the wonderful tools and toys for sound out there, sometimes you want to find the couple of tools that, like a great kitchen knife, can accomplish the majority of what you actually need. (And as with the kitchen knife, while it may not eliminate your desire for all those other gadgets, it’s worth some sharpening.) So it is with something like Csound, the tested-and-tried, free synthesis tool. Jim Aikin looked at the QuteCsound front end recently, which puts the power of Csound in a more friendly work environment.

Via Synthtopia, there’s also now a screencast series that covers using QuteCsound, starting with digging into presets. (Yes, that’s right – presets. And here you thought you were going to have to do a lot of coding to have any fun.)

I find two YouTube users uploading how-to screencasts:
http://www.youtube.com/user/mantaraya36 (author of the series starting at top)
http://www.youtube.com/user/ketchupok (start with “Where to start?”

Also worth following is Jacob Joaquin’s excellent Csound Blog, hosted on Noisepages:
http://csoundblog.com/
and on Twitter, follow @TheCsoundBlog

It’s very early in development (“alpha”), but Jacob is already doing amazing things integrating Processing, the non-coder-friendly, artist sketchbook-style coding language, with Csound, in a new library called Csoundo. That’s an ideal combination, because you can do logic and visuals quickly in Processing, then turn to Csound for audio. This is where I imagine work in two of Csound’s most popular rivals – the object-oriented, OSC-savvy SuperCollider and visual patching, Max-descendent Pure Data – may lead, as well. Check out Jacob’s roadmap for more.

By the way, I hear some folks are having some trouble building QuteCsound on Ubuntu, so I’ll see what the issue is, and write up some instructions and send them over to Jacob for his blog.

It’s a good time for Csound and free synthesis in general. With this work accelerating, I think doing a series of absolute-beginner tutorials will be very doable soon. And there’s no reason you can’t integrate a tool like this with your favorite host of choice, from Ableton to Cubase.

For this book review, we welcome guest writer Andy Farnell, who himself has a terrific book on interactive sound design and free modular patching environment Pure Data, entitled Designing Sound. It began as a review of a book on using free software – but it could be, more than that, a chance to fight procrastination. And while this runs the gamut, including graphics and design and not just sound, that could be even more relevant to those of us who need to delve into those other areas for our creative work. -Ed.

We all have a stack of things to get round to one day. Building a website. Making a video. Writing a book or recording an album. Allow me to share with you ten days that will transform your list of could do, would do, always going to do… into a list of exciting projects you’ve started.

That’s how long it took me to flick through Daniel James’ “Crafting Digital Media”, a light-reading compendium of software wisdom published by APress and weighing in at just under 400 pages.

It takes two of the major excuses for procrastination, “I don’t understand the interface, so I’m waiting for someone to show me.” and “I don’t have the money to buy the latest software”, and stomps them in the face with a giant boot.

There are roughly eight topics, or chunks of knowledge covered.

The first is about photography, with demonstrations in F-Spot, GThumb and GIMP — all the free tools you need to transfer, manipulate, and polish high-quality digital images.

Every software package in the book is a free, open source product that can be legally downloaded and used. These are not shareware or limited trial programs, but full versions of powerful, standards compatible applications — all modern free software with reliable, polished interfaces and powerful features. The book also comes with a CD containing Ubuntu 9.04.

The second chapter concerns illustration and font design. This is a whistle stop tour of modern scalable vector graphics tools and techniques, touching on Inkscape, FontForge, and GIMP again, showing you how to import, export, convert and edit high quality multi-layered scalable graphics.

Next comes 2D animation, where KToon and Synfig are demonstrated, showing the basic concepts of frame sequencing and tweening. And naturally, 3D modelling follows, with a look at Blender, the immensely-powerful 3D object design and rendering package with auxiliary game engine.

Although each section covers a complete production concept, it isn’t tiring or exhaustive. Just enough guidance is given to launch the program, explore the features, introduce the key concepts and leave you to play. If you actually follow along with the software examples, it’s a truly exciting journey, as you go to sleep each night with your head exploding with possibilities.

The art of publishing is the next adventure, with explorations of page layout, document structure, creating PDFs, posters, books and flyers. Subjects like fonts, typography, kerning and color processes are explained through examples with the Scribus application.

As a musician, you might be wondering where the audio tools are. The book doesn’t disappoint. There’s something for even experienced users in this compendium of tools spanning three chapters. Packages such as Mixx, Hydrogen, Jack, Seq24, Alsa Modular, Audacity, Ardour, and JAMin are explored in the context of all the common tasks like podcasting, recording, sequencing, effecting, compressing and mastering, EQ, CD production, and creating your own streaming server.

As an old fart who has just discovered YouTube, I found the next section on video editing to be very helpful since I’ve just started to explore making video tutorials. The now comical proliferation of incompatible video formats and codecs, a depressing indictment of the failure of standards, are cut through in short order. Daniel lays down the basics of formats and their conversion using AVIdemux, cropping and resizing while preserving high quality, and basic editing using Kino and the Open Movie Editor. A quick treatment of audio sync, titles and effects wraps up the section nicely.

Web development is the last chapter on software packages. Arguably there are so many choices for Web2.0 site design that it’s hard to justify any particular one. This book opts for solid and proven Drupal, along with a tour of the industry standard Apache web server, MySQL back-end, and Icecast media server to give a user-driven internet radio station as the chapter example.

Each of these topics is an entire profession in itself, about which shelves of books could be written, so don’t expect to become much of an an expert in any. What “Crafting Digital Media” does is open the door and get you started producing content very quickly. From there the opportunities are up to you.

As well as gently throwing in up-to-date anecdotal knowledge and asides from his encyclopaedic knowledge of modern media software, Daniel ties together the various threads into a whole that leaves you feeling empowered to start any new digital production project.

Let’s face it, the key to most pieces of software is a few simple steps, a few core commands, that seem so easy once you know them that you want to kick yourself for not trying sooner. Getting over that initial barrier is what this book offers.

The book would be a fantastic companion to new users of Ubuntu Studio, Pure:Dyne or 64Studio distributions, though several of the packages are multi-platform, so are available for Mac and Windows too. Ed.: Indeed, a large number of the tools are cross-platform – GIMP, FontForge, and Inkscape run on Mac and Windows, and Ardour on Mac. But then again, if you’ve got a Mac or PC, this is a great time to explore Linux a bit as a second OS, and all this software is available to you. Graphics software should even run acceptably virtualized. -PK

Title: Crafting Digital Media
Author: Daniel James
Publisher: Apress
Year: 2009
ISBN: 9781430218876
Price: $29 (RRP:$40)

Ed.: Make no mistake about it: digital sound tech, from mixing to processing, has evolved to a fidelity on par with its analog predecessors and opening possibilities well beyond what they offered. But the making of that evolution wasn’t easy, and it was more than a technical challenge. You can thank the creative spirit of people like Paul Frindle. As contributor Primus Luta explains to CDM, his work is about more than just engineering or tools – it’s driven by creative, musical energy. -PK

Author’s note: I wanted to bring this piece to the CDM audience because, whether we know it or not, if we Create Digital Music, we are indebted to people like Paul Frindle.  While this piece is on the technical side, one of the things that I hope readers will pull away is his creative spirit. May Paul inspire you to bring that same energy to the work that you produce in the digital realm.  You can read the full interview, with war stories from Virgin Records, Trident Studios, SSL and more at AvantUrb.

In the world of audio, Paul Frindle is a legend.  During his tenure at Solid State Logic, he was responsible for the channel electronics of the SSL G Series Console.  He was also a part of the team that broke the “damnable black art” of digital conversion.  He went on to cofound the (pre-dot=com) startup Oxford Digital Ltd. Their first contract was with Sony (who would eventually take over the company), developing the application design of Sony’s flagship digital mixing console.  The result of this work was the OXF-R3, to this day regarded as the pinnacle of digital mixing consoles, not only in music, but also in film.  Like everything Paul has worked on, as much of a landmark as the OXF-R3 was, it proved to be but merely a stepping stone.  Where it was leading, however, could have been much different.

“I think there was a fantastic opportunity to revive the large studio concept, by integrating non-linear storage and editing into the OXF-R3,” Paul says. “It was already a massively-powerful workstation, wide open [enough] to accept it. This would have been amazingly powerful and creative, and would have knocked underpowered workstations off the map for many years to come, restoring a much-needed differential to the elite studios against the upcoming project studios.”

The OXF-R3 has only continued to blur that line in favor of the project studios.  Strapped for the kind of clients who could appreciate — let alone could afford — high-end studios, the great studios of their time have faded away one by one. If those studios could have stayed on the leading edge of digital tech, would it have been enough to halt those closures? We may never know.  Fortunately for all studio buffs, high-end and project alike, there was another avenue of exploration left for Paul that would give his work the broadest audience to date.

“The design of the OXF-R3 was amazingly ahead of time. It was a great big, highly flexible processor with a whole load of software running on it, which was restricted and presented on a panel just for conformity and convenience. It was already ‘software in a box’. It could even be controlled remotely. All of the design systems and debugging tools I was using on it consisted of on-screen GUIs.”  This was a dramatic, yet understated shift from the way technical engineers had previously worked.  It was a physical product, but the brains of it was moving into the virtual space.

“I was warning that the OXF-R3 product concept was obsolete even before we finished it. The large digital tape recorder was nothing more than a very costly and highly delicate ‘bit bucket’ organised like an analogue machine. With the meteoric rise in performance of digital technology, it was fairly easy to envisage a time when a unit bought for £1000 would be capable of doing a large chuck of what a mixer needed.  In the near future, we would be able to make art without all this paraphernalia, at a miniscule fraction of the cost. I was far more excited about this than doggedly hanging onto established formats and design constraints.”

Not one to let this excitement lay dormant, Paul and a few others started their own pursuit.  “The plug-ins project was initially hatched from humble beginnings, almost by us working in our spare time and at nights. My colleague actually did the first proof of concept EQ plug-in over the Christmas break and it all grew from that.

“What people needed most were high-quality, refined and indispensable applications; the EQ and Dynamics were adapted to provide that. Making them identical to the OXF-R3 applications was a link to our existing reputation. Of course running these in 48bits for TDM or double float in RTAS actually provided better performance than was available in the OXF-R3 32-bit, fixed-point environment. And it has to be said that we ironed out a few bugs along the way too, so these were actually better than the applications in the large format console.”

For users, this resulted in what are still being called the best equalizer and dynamics processing plug-ins on the market.  For Sony, however, the greatest deliverable was the system they built to create both the OXF-R3 and the plugins.  “It was a complete hierarchical graphic design system running on a specially-designed processor, which allowed real-time interaction and analysis of the action for almost every instruction in your processing design!”  If this description sounds familiar, it is because what Paul is describing is a modular environment for signal processing, much like tools like Max/MSP, AudioMulch and Plogue Bidule.

“Not only did it allow engineers without formal programming skills to build highly complex applications, it also very crucially allowed us to experiment freely and actually listen to what was happening in real time! It was this system that enabled me to delve so deeply into what we could hear and why, exploit that knowledge and realise the applications for the OXF-R3 console and subsequently the Sony Oxford plug-ins. Quite simply, I was able to ‘play around’ with all sorts of  wacky processing models to get the behaviour that matched the all-important sounds in my head.”

This freedom of experimentation allowed Paul to move from traditional audio utilities like EQ’s and dynamics processors into more creative arenas.  “The Transmod was something that I have always wanted since the mid-1970s, and over the decades had tried on several occasions to make out of analogue technology. But it was doomed to failure because of the relatively poor accuracy and stability of [analogue] components. During a lunchtime, I knocked up a digital version of my old idea as proof of concept, and it just worked!

“The Inflator came about because I received a late night call from a friend who had been doing high-profile sessions in L.A. with Eric Clapton and BB King. He had slogged away for months doing recordings and mixes, but had been beaten into production by another engineer who managed to make it louder. He wanted to know if there was anything he could possibly do to make it louder without wrecking the sound completely.  I was reminded that I had to make my first transistor power amp design in 1970 twice as powerful as the previous tube amp design to get the same volume and impact. All I had to do was to apply all this old knowledge into a digital process and the same effect would be available. I used a combination of math packages and the OX-R3 design system to experiment and extract the salient details of what made the tube amp louder. This was definitely a walk on the wild side, since for the first time in this employment I was making something whose sole purpose was to generate a heap of distortion!”

After leaving Sony Oxford, Paul set out on his own again to further explore the creative possibilities opening up through digital audio.  The result is his latest venture Pro Audio DSP.  “This initiative was conceived as a way of getting this stuff done without too much interference from marketing executives and sales infrastructures.”

The first product is the Dynamic Spectrum Mapper plugin.  “It was yet another object I had always wanted to have, but the idea was given greater urgency from listening to what people were trying to achieve in their productions using greater amounts of compression, the kinds of character they were trying to produce, and the difficulties they were battling with along the way. This, and a deep personal dislike for the artefacts produced in conventional multi-band designs, gave impetus for the design of the DSM. Digital processing seemed to provide the possibility of actually making it at last.

Dynamic Spectrum Mapper introduction from Paul Frindle on Vimeo.

“I am particularly pleased with the DSM because it’s exactly the sort of thing I want to bring to the marketplace – serious processes that have groundbreaking practical purpose and facility.  They are, at the same time, artistically capable and great fun! Such things excite me because they bring genuinely new capabilities and artistic power to the production process.”

If there is a theme to be found throughout Paul’s career it is a continuous effort to push forward this idea of the technology as art.: “I don’t want to waste the rich experience of the past in some manic push for ‘newness,’” says Paul. “Neither do I want to simply try and blindly copy what was there, in the hope that it does the same ‘kind of thing’. I want to understand it and use that understanding to produce new stuff, which is truly creative and actually advances our art. We should be carrying the past forward with us in a continuous process of advancement, not writing it off to history, or reverting to it in a religious search for past success.”

Speaking with Paul, his mind is so focused on the present or even the future, it’s easy to forget his historical relevance.  Working dilligently to realize the ‘sounds in his head’ and put them out into the world, he is not only an inspiration for the work he produces, but for the creative ethic it exemplifies.

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.