sound design
It was lovely to spend an evening with so many audio creatives at the British Podcasting Awards 2018, and see the way the medium is flourishing. I attended with Lance Dann, creator, writer and director of techno thriller audio drama, Blood Culture, which was nominated, and won Silver, in the Best Fiction category.
I now have a list of new podcasts I need to check out.
I worked with composer Andrew Phillips on series 2 of the BAFTA nominated crime documentary The Detectives. The first of four episodes is broadcast tonight on BBC 2 at 9PM.
“The access is staggering, the stories heartbreaking, the storytelling magnificent”
Back in January I completed the sound design for a series of 10 second branding idents, directed by Chris Turner, for the Horror Channel. I'm excited to say that they have now launched, so tune in to see/hear them. Sound wise they are a mix of electronic sound design and foley (thanks to Sue Harding for the fire advice) and I had a lot of fun conjuring up suitably dark sounds on the Buchla Electric Music Box and Oberheim OB-6, of which the latter features heavily in this production.
““When Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson were writing the screenplay for ‘The Shining’ they kept referring to Sigmund Freud’s book ‘The Uncanny’; a book which explores the way an image or scene where something is not quite right can make the skin crawl and quicken the pulse in a much more visceral way than mere shock and gore. We took the same approach. Each of our idents provides the thrill Horror fans love without ever making the source of that emotion explicit.””
A new online radio drama that I've worked on with a lovely team of talented people, is being released on April 20th. Here is the trailer.
More information here.
I've been making these trailer videos for Akiha Den Den. You can find more at the Akiha Den Den website. A huge amount of sound design and foley went in to this series, so much that I sometimes forget little bits and then I'm pleasantly surprised. This episode uses a recording of Brighton's Palace Pier Ghost Train that I made for this.
I just completed my first VR project, working with Salesforce on a training experience for their staff. Making sounds for an experience where a talking raccoon guides you around a giant structure made of shipping containers, was certainly one of the more unusual things I've done but I'm not overstating it when I say that the possibilities for sound within VR blow my mind. Since the development of Stereo sound, us audio engineers have been faking it to convince the listener they are within a realistic acoustic space. With my work in radio I spend a lot of time positioning sounds within that stereo space, trying to create realistic (sometimes purposely unrealistic) scenarios. With 3D sound for VR, that job just got a lot more interesting and challenging.
VR 3D sound map
As you can see from my sound map above, the new canvas is multi-dimensional. Rather than a flat space in which to position sound, where the only choices are Left/Right/Loud/Quiet, we now have a 'real' world where we can place our sounds. As the player moves through the forest, the sounds will shift depending on his movement. A flutter of wings in the tree as a bird takes flight, the whistle of wind at the base of the building growing louder as the player moves towards it, the forest now receding in to the background (using binaural techniques it actually sounds like it is behind). The possibilities are exciting and endless, but with this new power comes new challenges. It is easy to overwhelm and create a muddy mess of sounds. One very useful function of sound in an experience where the player can look anywhere, is to use sound triggers to gently guide the players attention.
I've spent most of my career making immersive 'worlds of sound', carefully crafting and manipulating sound to enhance stories. With VR I think I've found my spiritual home! I hope to have a video walkthrough of the Dreamhouse VR experience soon, which I'll share here.
If you are looking for immersive sound design, foley, voice and music for your VR project please get in touch.
Below is a piece of music I created for the end scene of the VR experience.
Myself and writer/director Neil Cargill are very busy producing 6 episodes of this adventurous radio drama. It won't sound like anything on Radio 4. Find out more at our website www.akihadenden.com and sign up to our mailing list for updates and extra story material straight to your mailbox.
In the meantime here is a trailer featuring two of the main characters played by Ian McDiarmid and Joy McAvoy.
There will also be a very limited edition lathe cut 7" vinyl featuring the Akiha Den Den opening music, available around the launch of the series mid September.
During the 2014 Brighton Digital Festival, Persistent Peril and Paul Hayes created their very own miniature 'dark ride' (an indoor amusement ride where riders usually travel in some kind of vehicle) using Lego Monorail. The ride traveled through fantastic lands created by Lucy Irving, and members of the public could even 'ride' aboard the Monorail using virtual reality goggles.
Following The Simonsound Monorail trip in 2013 (a journey in electronic sound, released on 10" vinyl with a map of the ride) I've been pretty obsessed with theme parks and Imagineers - the men and women behind some of best immersive ride experiences at Disney Theme Parks. In the team behind Persistent Peril, I found kindred spirits equally mad about such things. I gladly provided a sonic treatment, featuring Buchla Electric Music Box and Aalto Synthesizer for this on board video.
For more like this take a ride aboard Monorail SS MkI and don't forget to purchase your souvenir record and map!
I've been doing some sound design for a multi platform interactive game, and this week it went 'live' at a 3 day conference in Brighton. The theme of the game itself is science fiction with technology at the forefront (particularly the early home computing period of the '80s). Part of my brief for this event was to produce a cover of the Robert Wyatt song, Lullaby for Hamza (actually the cover was closer to the Unthanks version). The song formed the climax of a performance/puzzle element, representing the unlocking of a message from a lost team.
I put my Prophet 600 poly synth to good use on the wash of pads, running various layers of it through Eventide Space, Roland RE-201 Space Echo and for added disorientation, the ZVEX Instant Lo-fi Junky. The synth solo was a mix of Moog Voyager via ZVEX Fuzz Factory, and the fantastic Aalto plugin running through voice resynthesis plugin Bit Speek. I spent a lot of time treating the vocals (Becky Randall of black channels - more on that later) to give the feeling that we were hearing a transmission from far way with all the interference and drop outs you would expect. Multiple takes were run through Space Echo, Buchla 200e and bit reduction plugins. Drones and effects were supplied by the Buchla 200e's 'Twisted Waveform Generator'.
Keep ears peeled for a full black channels cover.......
Hans Zimmer used these amazing sound sculptures, created by Chas Smith, for the upcoming Superman film. I've bowed a few things (cymbals, bells, egg slicer) but nothing this elaborate. How prominent these sounds end up in the film itself I can't say, but it's inspiring to see and hear them in action behind the scenes.
