Sound design, sound designer, sound effects made to order, sound engineer, live sound mixing, recording and production.
The workshop was held for theaters’ staff and lasted two hours. The workshop was organized as a part of Teatterilaiva theater festival.
By lightly discussing about the general principles of sound design the attention was drawn to available technology and digital sound processing. Sounds and soundscapes were created by using generally available free software and sound libraries. The workshop provided to be a source of interesting ideas for coming shows.
The Finnish Aviation Museum organized an exhibition about flight related myths and legends. The exhibition is called Myyttinen Lento or Mythical Flight in English. The exhibition was designed to spur imagination of kids (and adults). One of the objects of the exhibition was a magic carpet you could ride yourself.
For the design I co-operated with Marko Ahokangas from Dept. of Lighting and Sound Design of Theatre Academy of Finland. Marko created the sounds and I programmed the player. Plogue Bidule was used to create an ever changing and never repeating soundscape, which was fed to an eight channel PA-system, which encompassed the exhibition space.
The location of the sounds in space was controlled by four separate eight channel linear output selectors, which were modulated by independent sine wave oscillators. The sounds were divided in two categories – fast and slow sounds were panned and controlled by separate sub-programmes.
One layer of the soundscape was a synthesized wind like instrument, which picked its pitch (Via FFT) from the other sounds and acted as the musical element. For example when a sound of an airplane was playing and the synth was trigged the synth picked a frequency from the sound of the airplane and generated a musical tone that was in tune with the sound of the airplane.
Provided here is a two channel sample of the completed soundscape.
The sample is from the second song of the three song set Muutos performed at Gospel Savo event in 2009. The drums were electronic and their sound was available only in two channels, so they couldn’t be mixed in as properly as would have been best. All of the other instruments were recorded individually.
The show was produced by Blind Frame Productions. It was performed at the Solid Tricular LAN-party. The sci-fi inspired show used themes from Star Wars, Terminator and Transformers. The second half of the show was a lightsaber battle.
I checked out readily available material for the lightsaber sounds, but concluded that the available material didn’t sound evil enough and was inflexible for the show’s purpose, so I decided to create my own.
The lightsaber sound was created with Plogue Bidule. The fundamental waveform consists of PWM sawtooth and synced sawtooth waves. Envelope modulated PW creates the ignition effect. The waveform is put through and mixed with a couple of filterbanks, which add a bit of distortion too. The core of the sound is the fundamental waveform put through a customized and monophonic formant filter. In total the sound consists of three different layers.
The sound of movement is created by putting the original sound through a new set of filters, which mix with an amplitude modulated copy of themselves. An energy field rips through atmosphere. This second signal path is mixed to the original via a crossfader. The crossfader and a few other parameters were programmed to be controlled by the modulation wheel of a midi keyboard.
I originally envisioned to record the output of the process and replay it at the show. I ended up manipulating the process live with the midi keyboard, because it was much easier and I could better react to the action on stage. The contact sounds are adjustments of the original process, and they were launched with the keyboard. Besides the lightsabers a multitude of other sounds were created for the show.
The sound is not supposed to be an emulation of the original, but a unique rendering for a unique purpose. It sounded awesome through the party’s PA.
A set of sounds to be used in a file sharing tool. Water-like and cool as requested. The source was an upright piano improvisation, from which single notes were extracted and heavily processed as part of the overall sound design.