Creating The Perfect Take

Legendary producers have often gone to great lengths to bring visitors into the recording booth to get that extra edge into the song (for example, Jim Morrison’s vocal on LA Woman).

Sonicfinger have now created a plugin that allows you to recreate the effect of visitors being present in the studio, without having to go to all the hassle and expense of actually physically bringing them in.

Visitor Modulation

There are a number of presets available, ranging from Stephen Hawking to Ex-Boyfriend/Girlfriend. If you would like to create your own customised influence, there are additional controls for setting how much the artist hates, fears or respects the visitor, as well as a slider for determining the levels of sexual involvement.

Keeping It Quiet

Sonicfinger have other plugins also, such as the Quietenator, which digitally recreates a range of silences, including “highly sought after vintage silences previously unattainable”.

For those of you who feel your recordings need a bit more space, this plugin transcends gate technology to create new levels of resolution in transparent silence. If you really believe that great music is about the spaces between the notes, then I doubt you’ll be disappointed with this one…

PS: Although Sonicfinger is very entertaining, it’s probably the most SEO-unfriendly site I’ve ever seen. There’s no text content whatsoever - although the search engines have recently begun to index text within Flash sites, it will be a long time before this is as effective as properly optimised semantic HTML. For some tips on making your music sites findable, check out the free ebook on seo for musicians at Linkdisco.

Foley’s Choice Of Scream

Screams can be hard to get right, so rather than bringing in an actor to record a new scream, producers will often choose to pull one from stock. In terms of popularity, and the number of films in which it has appeared, the Wilhelm scream stands out as a clear leader.

Wilhelm’s Silver Scream

The Wilhelm scream was given its name by Ben Burtt when he was creating sound effects for the first Star Wars movie (1977). Whilst searching the audio archives, he came across the original recording of the scream, made in 1951 for the film ‘Distant Drums’.

The scream was originally called ‘man getting bit by an alligator, and he screams’, but Burtt decided to call it Wilhelm after the character of Private Wilhem in the 1953 movie ‘The Charge At Feather River’. Wilhelm emits the scream after being hit in the leg by an arrow, and the producers decided to use the scream from ‘Distant Drums’, beginning a chain of appearances for Wilhelm that continues to this day.

Burtt liked the scream so much that he used it in several films, including all of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. Quentin Tarantino used the Wilhelm scream in ‘Reservoir Dogs’, and Peter Jackson included it in ‘The Two Towers’ and ‘Return of the King’.

Is It A Screaming Sheb?

The identity of the artist who performed the Wilhelm is not exactly documented, but the most likely candidate is Sheb Wooley, an actor and musician who appeared in several Westerns, including ‘High Noon’ (1953) and ‘Distant Drums’ (1951).

However, he is most famous for his song ‘Purple People Eater’. This is a novely song that went to number one in the United States in 1958 and stayed there for six weeks, selling 3 million copies in the process. It was so successful that it was even made into a movie, in which Wooley also starred.

Measuring The Value Of Music

This is the question the Post’s experiment was designed to test. The premise was simple; if one took an exceptional musical perfomance and placed it out of context (in a metro station), would anyone recognise it?

The Finest Tunes Known To Mankind

For the test, the credentials of the performer, his instrument and his choice of music were beyond reproach. The violinist was Joshua Bell, an uncannily gifted performer whose playing, according to Interview magazine, “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.”

Bell’s violin was crafted by Antonio Stradivari in 1713, during the apex of his career when he had access to the finest materials and a craftsmanship that had been meticulously refined. The pieces of music Bell chose to perform included Bach’s “Chaconne”, which Bell refers to as “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It’s a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect.”

If Nobody Listens, Are You Any Good?

So Bell went out and performed for forty-five minutes in a subway station. Of the thousand or so people who passed by, seven people stopped to listen, at least for a minute. Bell earned about $32 for his virtuosity. No crowd gathered, there was no weeping, hushed silence or rapturous applause.

The results of this experiment are hardly surprising; but they are revealing. The article in the Washington Post is well worth a read, and includes some video footage of the performance.

Through The Ears Of A Child

Of particular note is the one demographic that, without exception, tried to stop and listen to the performance - children. Every child that passed by sought to stay and absorb the performance, but in each instance they were hurried along by their guardian.

Perhaps we should listen to children more - not only that, but to our surroundings and ourselves. There may be great benefit to be gleaned from listening to the world more closely, and actively seeking out those who can express through music the underlying grandeur of spirit that is so often repressed by the incumbence of accumulation.

If you feel you need a reminder of the beauty of classical music, this TED talk by Benjamin Zander is a remarkable reintroduction to the emotion and power of spectacular performance…

Music Sharing Becomes Music Shares

The basic idea is that fans can buy a ’share’ in an artist’s album, and when enough shares have been bought, the fund is invested in having the album professionally recorded, produced and distributed. Shareholders then get a copy of the album, and if the artist becomes popular and the album sells well, they can even make a profit on their investment.

These sites provide a forum for generating fans, as well as leveraging existing ones - at Slice The Pie, all submitted songs are subjected to blind reviews by a pool of reviewers, with the top 2% of artists being put forward to the showcase stage.

Taking Stock Of The Music Market

These ‘music stock’ models are not currently available in the USA due to stricter laws regarding gambling and unregulated stock markets. Slice the Pie is based in the UK and is approved by the Gambling Commission, and Sellaband has similar authorisation in the Netherlands.

However, it is likely that legislative changes will be made to enable such sites stateside also - Amazon are very interested in getting onboard, and Amazon UK have already created a section for Sellaband CDs.

Putting The Music Up Front

The idea is intriguing, and represents a very low-risk solution to music monetisation for all involved. For labels, they can easily identify which bands have an actual paying fanbase (rather than the mystical and often artificial play count index of sites like MySpace), and use this to gauge whether they should invest in an artist.

For artists, it provides an opportunity to generate new fans, or a motivation for existing fans to get involved in a fundamental way with the development of the band.

Finally, for listeners and fans, it provides an opportunity to decide for themselves which acts they want to be successful - and they can even make a profit from getting onboard with a great artist from the beginning.

In theory, it just might work - if it can get enough momentum to reach that ‘critical mass’ required for mass adoption. This is another space to watch with interest…

Layering Different Sounds - And Crystals

These ‘metamaterials’ do not exist in nature, but the team led by José Sánchez-Dehesa have figured out a method of creating arrays of sonic crystals that allow some sound waves to pass while blocking others.

Although the original research in this area was focused on designing light-maniupulation materials, it was discovered that the principles could be also applied to sound. In effect, sound waves would flow around a cloaked object like water around a rock. Anyone inside the cloak would not be able to hear these sound waves flowing around them.

The image above shows a planar sound wave moving around a cylinder covered with the acoustic cloak. The number of layers used is critical to creating an effective cloak - the image on the left shows the cylinder with a 50-layer acoustic shell, and the image on the right shows the same cylinder with a 200-layer shell. As you can see, the extra layers render the cylinder non-destructive to the progress of the soundwave.

An obvious application of this would be in making ships ‘invisible’ to sonar, but there are many more possibilities. Creating a perfectly silent recording studio is one that springs to mind here…