Finding Sounds In Humble Places

I have a terribly old fridge with a busted light that probably chews up more than its fair share of power, but its unexpected worth lies in the freezer.  Specifically, the lack of 'frost free' capabilities.

After six months without defrosting, I have a winter sound wonderland ready for recording in my kitchen.  Northern counterparts might scoff, but it's extremely difficult to get snow or ice sounds in Australia, even in the dead of winter.  It's simply not economically feasible to cart yourself and a recording rig up to a ski resort in the remote reaches of Victoria and New South Wales - or waiting until Winter to do it.

This is typically what sound libraries are for - the sounds you can't go record yourself.  And certainly sound libraries do a good job of covering a wide variety of snow types with footsteps, but we've all heard those sounds a hundred times, and even if you dress them up differently, in the end you're just skinning the same cat in a hundred different ways.  And while the standard footsteps and snow sports are covered fairly well, they can't cover everything.  Human footsteps, certainly - what about a fox?  Or a horse?  A Yeti?  Or the sound of a hand brushing away frost from a frozen metal nameplate?  And even if you can create these sounds by hodge-podging something that sounds right out of what you have, you'll often wind up turning that nice clean high-end crackle we associate with ice and frost into a mash of white noise.

This is where the freezer came in.  After a bit of experimentation with microphone placement, I discovered stabbing a butter knife into a centimetre of hard frost can sound just a convincing as a stock ice pick recording.  Maybe even better, in some cases.  In such a small space, you can't get particularly large scrapes and impacts, but I came away with some lovely high end ingredients to layer on top of those staid library ice sounds, and a good collection of smaller icy foley that work well on their own.

Moments of discovery like these, the sound equivalent of smoke and mirrors, are some of the most rewarding and satisfying for a sound designer.  It reminds me of back when I was a kid at Movie World, and seeing the foley artists running around a sound stage, occasionally using the most unexpected of surfaces to create the desired effect.

What's in a Title?

I've started work again, in the building next to the old one, with a team comprised largely of people I've worked with before, doing more or less the exact thing I was doing at the previous company.  Funny the way things work out sometimes.

My new contract listed my position as an 'audio engineer', instead of a 'sound designer' as I've always called myself.  While I was job hunting around various studios, I saw both titles turn up in almost equal measure.  Some of the 'audio engineer' listings were, of course, advertising for DSP engineers and sound programmers, but just as many seemed to cover sound design with no programming requirements whatsoever.

What then, is the difference between these two titles?  Is one purely concerned with asset creation, and the other purely concerned with implementation?  This makes the most sense, but in the games industry I'm not sure if any one role should exclude the other.  (And indeed, many companies only employ one soundie, so the separation of roles is impossible.) Will this splitting of syntax cause confusion in the industry in the future?

Or possibly I'm overthinking matters, and in terms of job listings 'sound' and 'designer' are both such common words that it makes looking through sub-par search engines onerous at times.

Identify This Bird

My sleeping hours shifted several timezones recently, which had the unexpected delight of exposing me to the calls of wildlife that apparently only make noise at 3am.

Normally I consider myself a fair hand at identifying the local bird calls, but this one has me stumped.  Possibly a cockatoo?  Those aren't usually nocturnal, but it's about the only thing I could think of that would make this horrendous sound.  Does anyone know what this bird is?

Throwing Your Voice

I've been meaning to get this blog going for a while - now I actually have the time!  Obviously, the focus will be around the three things I find most interesting - sound, writing, and games.  Hopefully I'll be able to put up something about some personal projects I've been working on here too.
On the subject of sound, last night, I had the opportunity to go see David Strassman, the ventriloquist almost everyone in Australia has probably seen at least once in their lives.  He's unusual in that he actually performs out in all of the regional locations instead of just the capital cities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB3g7PcF1vs&feature=related

With ventriloquism - and puppeteering in general - seemingly an almost dying art, it was rather amazing to watch and listen to someone at the top of their craft.  Voice acting is a difficult discipline in itself - to add to that throwing your voice all around the stage while operating a puppet and controlling your own reactions is enough to send your head spinning.

There was one point when he had three puppets answer simultaneously.  It would be interesting to know precisely how he did that - it must have been pre-recorded, but the cue timing was so perfect.  (Once after a particularly long day at work I actually stopped and spent a good twenty seconds trying to speak in stereo before remembering that it's impossible.)  For that matter, one of the puppets had a synthesized voice - how to cleanly switch the effect on and off when the voice is coming from the same source and so rapidly switching back and forth?  Or when that source is on the other side of the stage?  Or was it purely vocal chord acrobatics?

It was really nice to see that kind of mastery of an art still alive, with only just enough smoke and mirrors to make the puppets seem independently alive.  We become so used to performing these tricks digitally, but just like orchestral performances, no matter how excellent the virtual instrument it will never quite be able to catch the same warmth of tone of the real thing.