Game audio production needs standards

Our good friend Mark Kilborn, game audio guy extraordinaire has blogged an article about standards (or lack thereof) in the creation of game audio. As a relatively new industry, it would appear that it can be a bit of every-man-for-himself in terms of mastering and delivering files for games. He hopes that the AES Audio for Games Conference can start a dialogue regarding standards and tidy up the situation a bit.

Randy Thom: What is a Sound Designer?

Legendary Sound Guy Randy Thom is opening a discussion regarding the term "Sound Designer." The use of the title is apparently a very touchy subject in the film community. How is a Sound Designer different from a Supervising Sound Editor or even a Mixer? All are involved with the director of a film in the shaping of the soundtrack. Because of their titles, certain sound personnel are looked over when it's time to nominate for awards. Read the letter and start a dialogue with your sound peeps.

Dear Sound Article List:

Below is an email I'm sending to people who work in film sound. My
previous post on the list about "Dialog As Sound Design" is related to
my interest in broadening the scope of sound design to encompass all
creative work in sound. I don't expect this little piece to change
people's minds, but I hope it will help start a dialog.




Hi, All, and Happy New Year!

I'm sorry for this mass mailing, but I couldn't think of a better or
less intrusive way to air some ideas I've been puzzling over,
regarding issues we all know about, but rarely get to discuss in a
formal way. At the center of it is that relatively new, controversial
and ambiguous term "Sound Design." To begin to frame some of the
issues I want to say something about another historically
controversial screen credit. I don't bring it up to suggest that it
is an exact model for our current situation in Sound, or a predictor
of how the credit Sound Design will eventually be seen, but simply
because there are some parallels between the two that are interesting.

In 1939 William Cameron Menzies was the first Art Director to receive
the screen credit "Production Designer" on a film that made a rather
big splash. The film was "Gone With The Wind." Many other Art
Directors were appalled at the new credit, and the acrimony over the
"Production Design" continued for several decades. Why, some said, is
this new title necessary? Menzies is doing exactly the same job he
did when he called himself an Art Director. Is he trying to
aggrandize his position? Is he trying to make himself seem better,
more desirable than we mere Art Directors are? In other words... Is
this a scheme to steal our clients?... some wondered.

In the mid 1980's Richard Beggs and I (presumably because Murch and
Burtt weren't available : ) were asked to come to a meeting of the
Executive Committee of the Academy's Sound Branch so that we could
explain what a sound designer is. I honestly don't remember what we
said, but I suspect we did an appallingly bad job of it. What
follows is something close to what I think we should have said...

The credit first appeared on a film, actually two films, in 1979. On
"Apocalypse Now" Walter Murch took the screen credit "Sound Design and
Montage." About the same time Ben Burtt got the "Sound Design" credit
on the sequel to "American Graffiti." But they weren't the first to
get that credit, they were just the first to get it on a film.
Earlier, some sound people working on Broadway plays in New York had
received the credit "Sound Design," and Dan Dugan, who was doing the
same kinds of work in the San Francisco theater scene, took that
credit as well, before it appeared in the world of film.

Contrary to what many people think, the work that "Sound Designers" do
is not new. It was being done long before anyone called him or
herself a "Sound Designer." People in film had been doing what
"Sound Designers" do at least two generations before "Apocalypse Now."
The crucial question then: what is that work? What does a Sound
Designer do? Well, we know what sound is, and we know what design is,
so shouldn't it be clear? Maybe, but it's not.

When Walter and Ben took that credit they saw it as something very
similar to what a few Supervising Sound Editors and Mixers had indeed
already done... work with the Director to shape the sound of the film
beginning very early in the process, as early as production or even
pre-production, and continue that work all the way through post
production. Since those opportunities to work on a project from
pre-production through post were very rare, they thought it deserved a
new name, and Sound Design seemed appropriate. Among others, they
used Orson Welles and the way he worked with his sound crews as a
model. The idea was that if sound was to be a full collaborator
somebody was needed to work with the Director from nearly the
beginning of the project so that sound ideas could influence creative
decisions in the other crafts before it was too late, so that Sound
could be a driving creative force rather than a band-aid. That was
the grand theory in a nutshell, but it didn't catch on.

The "sexy" term Sound Design caught on in the movie biz, but with a
very different and unfortunately much narrower meaning. Somehow
Sound Design in film came to be associated exclusively with things
"high tech," with using 24track tape recorders and midi in the early
days, and a little later plug-ins. Basically the grand notion of a
sound collaborator for the Director morphed into "gadget specialist."
A Sound Designer became something like a high tech audio grease
monkey, a nerd you hired to electronically fabricate sounds you
couldn't find in the effects library. Lots and lots of people started
calling themselves Sound Designers. It quickly became an easy way to
get cheap attention, whether the attention was deserved or not.
Established Supervising Sound Editors and Mixers, especially in LA,
justifiably saw many of these newly minted "Sound Designers" as con
artists out to steal their clients with a few slick techy moves.

In my view, the word design applies to all the creative work we do in
sound. Fabricating and manipulating sounds is sound design. Editing
existing sounds is sound design. Brilliant sound design can be done
using unmodified sound effects from the most basic commercial library.
Breathtakingly beautiful sound design can be done and has been done
with dialog alone, no sound effects at all. Supervising is also
design. It's a crucial kind of sound design in my opinion because it
consists of guiding the creative process. And finally, Mixing is
design. Despite the sometimes questionable use of the term by
"wannabees," I think Sound Design is a credit very worth preserving.
The "grand notion" is worth preserving and spreading as well. We
should all be pushing, to the degree we can, to make Sound a full
creative collaborator in the storytelling process.

The most important part of the work that Editors and Mixers do is
making creative decisions. The word "design" makes it easy to
distinguish us from engineers and administrators, whose work is
extremely important but not focused on artistic creativity. Oscars in
the Sound categories are awarded to those people who make the final
creative decisions for the Director's approval. If someone has acted
as a creative supervisor for sound all the way through post production
until the end of the final mix I feel strongly that he or she should
be eligible for Oscar nomination regardless of whether the person's
screen credit was "Supervising Sound Editor," "Mixer," or "Sound
Designer." The borders between editing and mixing are rapidly
disappearing as technology allows both kinds of work to be done with
nearly identical machines. Given that "mixing" and "editing" are
becoming one thing, wouldn't it be better if the people supervising
the creative decisions in Sound were called "Supervising Sound Designers?"

Randy Thom
January 13, 2009

Original post on SoundArticleList.

A Case of the Jitters

"How sour sweet music is / When time is broke and no proportion kept!"
—William Shakespeare, King Richard II, V, v, 42

From Stereophile.com:

"Bits is bits!" goes the cry from skeptics when audiophiles criticize digital sound. In other words, the digital bits that constitute the music, as they make their way from disc to sound via the technological marvel of digital/analog conversion, are immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous analog fortune. What is often forgotten is the fact that not only must the amplitude—ie, what the bits describe—of the converted analog signal be correct, but the timing of the conversion of each digital word to analog must also be correct. The right bits at the wrong time are equivalent to the wrong bits at the right time. And if the bits are, as a result of the timing uncertainty in the conversion to analog, the wrong bits, then the recovered analog signal will be distorted, and will not sound as good as predicted.

The timing uncertainty in a digital audio system is called "jitter," and was described in full in a tutorial article by Barry Blesser in the October 1978 issue of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society."

Read more at:

http://www.stereophile.com/features/1208jitter/

Listen Up: Foods and Supplements that Could Improve Your Hearing

From Associatedcontent.com:

"If you tend to travel via plane often, or live close to the mountains, you may have noticed significant pressure in your ears lately, which could have any affect on your hearing even on the days you're not traveling. Or, if you like your music loud, and live and work in a noisy environment, your hearing could be suffering on a daily basis. But, what if you could do something about it? What if you could plan meals that will actually help to improve your hearing?
Here are some super foods and supplements that can give you super hearing, even if you've had some problems in the past.

Foods: Spinach, Potatoes, Broccoli, red meats, liver
Supplement: Alpha Lipoic Acid -

This substance is created in very small amounts in the body, but if you find that you are hard of hearing, you may want to add these foods to one meal each day so that you can start to see (and hear) improvement... "

Full Link:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/387917/listen_up_foods_and_supplements_that.html

37/11 at the DSO

Under 37 years of Age? Get tickets for 11 Dollars!

CHECK IT OUT!

Chinese Democracy Chooses Dynamics over Stupid Loud.

Bob Ludwig of Gateway Mastering in Portland Maine, has posted an article about the mastering process of Guns and Roses' latest album The Chinese Democracy. Producers Axl Rose and Caram Costanzo chose Bob's sans-compression version, preserving the full dynamics of the original mixes. Nice work to all, after 14-ish years and 14 studios(!) used to make the recording.

Well done.

Visualize Music Analysis software

Searching through the internet looking for Metadata tags, found this cool blog about turning music files into visual representations using pitch, loudness and other attributes. It primarily uses an open source codec that analyzes the uploaded file and creates visual music scenes. Check it out:

http://www.flyingpudding.com/projects/viz_music/