Process

Audio Arts :: Sound Design :: Sonic Environment :: Process _ Edward Kelly _ It wasn't until fairly late into process that I realised/noticed that I was trying to spatialise the results of a mono recording. It just didn't occur to me that using one microphone to record the environment was going to be problematic. I have a very good conceptualisation of the space involved - but it doesn't help with the birds for example. I have gone through and tried to discern individual birds from their noises, but as to whether there's but one bird of a type, or several scattered about is all guesswork/conjecture. My first thoughts on the saw, were of using a square wave as a LFO on a noise osc. I figured on a freq of about 60 Hz with a bit of a pitch envelope for velocity changes at the end of each stroke. I tried a few variations, using a pulse wave, and using FFT to iFFT (Plogue), using one amplitude source to control the other sound source. The result could do with more work.. I also automated an eq (on different sections), to emulate the changing sound of the sawing. I think this helps, but the sound itself is not very convincing. I lost track on the amount of editing I did on it. I have an approach to editing where I just keep processing, going back and forth - trying ideas, using discovered techniques on different files, jumping between software, starting again, cross modulating two files......it is slightly challengin to attempt anything but a broad documentation of what I did. The ladder noise I sort of gave up on. I think I would have like to have done some foley for the ladder, clanks and creaking would have been quite easy to achieve, also the sawing. The major bird noise I had the most "fun" with. I went through and sequenced the bird melodies, then automated pitch and modulation. I spent a while in Plogue trying to create an appropriate voice, then I tried a random VSTi or two. The voice I used is basically a default setting with a small amount of adjustment (mostly on the modulation settings), probably the second VSTi I tried. The car noise is pretty much an envelope driven slow filter cutoff and pitch variation - in retrospect the pitch content could be lower in both volume and pitch, and perhaps a bit more complex. Studio 5 is quite a challenging space in which to work. Apart from the ambient noise level which is quite high and distracting, it is quite a live room. It's very hard to get a good idea of the spatialisation of a sound. To a certain extent, positioning a sound has been more visual (ie in the surroun pan box in Cubase) than aural, and automating moving sounds has been similar.