Sound Of Anime Ishida Hidenori LP Vinyl Record

Found these photographs of a sound effects LP called "Sound Of Anime Ishida Hidenori" on ebay.  Looks like an ARP 2600.  Ishida Hidenori is a giant in anime Sound Design, having founded Ishida Sound in 1971, which later became Fizz Sound Creation.  Wikipedia entry. 

 

You can see a photo of a bunch of their sound design audio tape reels on their current website:
http://www.fizz-sound.co.jp/.  The first ones have Dragon Ball written on the them!

Walter Murch and The Search for Order in Sound & Picture

In the April 1998 issue of Mix Magazine, an article on the Godfather of Sound Design Walter Murch entitled "The Search for Order In Sound & Picture" is a great summary on his unique and over-arching views of aural theory and craft in movies.  Murch's approach has proven influential and thought-provoking to an entire industry, and there are just too many insights to post.  Instead, here's a link the article itself, a must read for everyone in Sound Design and Filmmaking.

http://www.filmsound.org/murch/waltermurch.htm

Director Jim Sheridan On Simple Shots

In the February 2004 issue of Millimeter Magazine, Director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot), discusses simple, clean shots in his movies:

I think it's better to have a lack of visual information than to have too much.  When you have a lack of information the audience has to become interactive with it.  They have to figure out what they're looking at.  I think a lot of films are overcrowded with information.  There's too much going on: too much light, too much acting, too much story.

...The more you put in the way that is visible, the less chance you have of getting true emotions.

Some movies spend an awful lot of time on carefully planned shots where everybody hits their marks, and it looks great.  But working that way can also take the soul out of a show.

If the audience is watching the characters and focused on the story, they're more likely to get the emotion of the moment.  The less you put in the way of that, the better.

Randy Thom Interview, April 2005

In the April 2005 issue of Film & Video Magazine, there's an interview with Sound Designer Randy Thom called "What Randy Thom Hears."  Here are some quotables:

In an action sequence, the impression you want to give the audience, typically, is that they’re hearing 50 things at once — people screaming, gunshots, explosions, the score, etc. But if you actually play all of those sounds at an equal volume, it turns into incoherent noise. The trick is to decide what you want the audience to focus on and use various audio tricks to allow them to focus on those sounds to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes it’s as simple as raising the volume on the thing you want them to focus on and lowering the volume of everything else. Sometimes you change the tonal character of the principal sound and what you want to be the background sounds. If you do it artfully enough, the audience gets the impression that it’s hearing everything all the time. But if you analyze it, what you’re hearing is a carefully orchestrated changing of focus from moment to moment, from this to that.

In reality, everything that we hear in our environments has an emotional effect on us.

...when you’re a filmmaker and a sound designer, you should be thinking about the story and about using sound in the smartest possible ways to help tell the story and not be obsessed with 5.1 and 7.1 and all that. Because I would, and most people with a brain would, rather watch and listen to a great movie in mono than a thoroughly mediocre movie in 20.1 if such a thing existed. All of that stuff, being able to pan sounds around the room and having lots of subwoofer, is the icing on the cake. And first you have to get the cake, and too many movies these days don’t start with a very good cake.
 

Production Sound Mixer Jeff Wexler Interview, Mix Magazine 2005

The April 2005 issue of Mix Magazine has a great interview with Production Sound Mixer Jeff Wexler.  Great wisdom on managing people and their expectations in the sound business.  Some enlightening thoughts:

If you very specifically define people's tasks, things will, hopefully, go more smoothly. But the way that hurts is that people often have more to offer.

On Director Hal Ashby:

He was one of the most collaborative people of anyone I've worked with, open to suggestions and ideas from anyone and very unthreatened about it... it helped me to do sound because it made me feel involved in the whole project. 

...grandstanding never accomplishes anything productive. It just causes animosity toward the sound department. Flamboyance went out of my repertoire years ago. Now I deal with things quietly, usually with a conversation early on, where we set rules and protocol and whether if a director is getting into trouble and I have a solution I should bring it to him or her.

Boom is absolutely the key position in the production sound department... They have to be listening with an experienced ear and have the ability to put the microphone in a place where it picks up the voice in a beautiful way and gets rid of the things you don't want to record.

...a lot of people are doing their job for the first time without an understanding of the discipline and with the protective arrogance that can sometimes accompany that.

We've gained the ability to shoot a lot of film and record a lot of tracks, but we've lost the sort of focus that needs to happen before you film.

On the Schoeps MK 41 supercardioid capsule with the CMC amplifier he uses:

We did tests with a shotgun mic and with the Schoeps and the Schoeps sounded like the real world. You heard the background, but in a coherent way that made sense. The extremely directional mics cut down the level of the background, but also negatively affected the sound of the voices.

Equipment comes and goes... If you haven't established the necessary skills, personal relationships and clarity of thought in your approach to your work, all the latest equipment won't amount to anything.

Quentin Tarantino on the Importance of Music in His Films

In the April 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Quentin Tarantino explains that music is hugely important to his films.

"...I actually figure out a lot of the music before I start shooting.  It's actually part of the hook that commits me to doing a film."

Tom Holman's musings on Walter Murch, Ben Burtt, and Skywalker Sound.

In an old article in Surround Professional magazine entitled "Something in the Water" Tom Holman writes about the pedigree of Skywalker Sound and its Sound Designers.  Some highlights:

On Walter Murch isms:

"Sound is like a three-ring circus; you don't find any five-ring circuses because the mind can't follow five things at once"; "Sound comes in the back door, while picture comes in the front; so sound has a subtle storytelling character about it that can be used to move an audience in certain ways without their conscious knowledge, and the corollary to that 'sound people will never get the recognition they deserve'"; and "We can think about sound as having a sharp foreground and an out-of-focus background, just like a camera does" (Side note: this shallow depth of field effect is achieved by opening up the iris, but lenses aren't always set up this way.  Citizen Kane is well-known for being shot with a deep depth of field).  These are paraphrases of classic Murch concepts, except the recognition issue corollary, which is added.

And then came Ben Burtt.  Hired out of USC by George [Lucas] about a year before Star Wars came out, it was certainly unusual to start on sound a year ahead of release.

Sound Can Improve Picture Quality

In the January 2005 edition of Videography Magazine, Mark Schubin in his article "More Than Just Numbers" writes:

Sound may not seem to have anything to do with picture quality, but don’t be too hasty to come to that conclusion.  Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts conducted experiments in the 1970s in which focus groups that heard stereo sound with certain programs rated the picture quality higher than groups who saw the same programs without stereo sound.

Why Movie Mixes Don't Translate Into The Home

In an old article in Surround Professional magazine (I believe it's in the April 2002 edition) titled "Scaling the Experience: Considerations for Bringing Movie Sound Into Homes," Tom Holman explains why mixes in the theatrical dub stage don't translate into typical home theaters.

Theater mixes played at the same physical sound pressure level at home are perceived as much louder.  "This is due to a psychoacoustic scaling function: we come to 'expect' certain sound levels in certain spaces."

Best movie theater listening seats are between 50 and 70 percent of the critical distance (the distance from a source along its axis where the level of the direct sound and reverberant sound from the source are equal).  He's saying dub stage listening positions are dryer because "cinemas are much deader for their room volume than other spaces" and "use directional screen loudspeakers," counter to what we typically think of for large reverberant spaces like churches and halls.  For a typical 3000 cu. ft. living room (approximately 20'x20'x8'), the combination of reverberation time and lack of speaker directionality (he mentions the fronts are "direct radiators"), the listening position is the equivalent of 1.8 times the critical distance, so much wetter compared to the 0.5 to 0.7 times the critical distance of theaters.  Much of the translation problem is therefore attributed to the theater listening position being direct field dominated and the home being reverberant field dominated.

Another issue is that in the home, speakers are more directional at higher frequencies, where reverberation times fall, causing the soundfield to "reach out and touch you."  Material mixed on the mixing stage will thus sound brighter in the living room.

Good stuff!

To Determine Appropriate Loudness Use Speech Not Footsteps!

There's an interesting chart on loudness in "Intelligent Program Loudness Measurement and Control: What Satisfies Listeners?" presented at the 115th AES Convention in 2003: 

When listeners were asked to evaluate what they felt were appropriately loud in speech, 19 out of 21 were within 1dB of each other. When asked to evaluate footsteps, they disagreed with each other up to 12dB! I think even among audio professionals who mix for a living, there are wide differences in what the appropriate loudness levels of footsteps (and Foley, sound effects, and music) are.

Luc Besson On Sound and Music For Film

In the June 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Director Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element) talks about music and audio for his films:

They're huge and so important to me... I really enjoy pulling all that together because it can change what you see on the screen so much.  I was probably the first one in France, 30 years ago, to care for sound and music so much.  When I began, French directors didn't care much about it.

On music:

I saw very early on how it's this amazing tool that allows you to say so many things when it's placed with an image.  So you have the story, the dialogue, the actor's performances, the frame -- and you still have so much room for the music and the sound effects...

Tidbits Gary Dystrom's Interview With Mix Magazine 2004, Part 2

Part Two of the edited tidbits I noted from the interview with Sound Designer Gary Rydstrom in the February 2004 issue of Mix Magazine:

Sound comes to us over time. You don't get a snapshot of sound. Therefore, what you notice with sound, the essential building block, is change. So in... making a basic sound, I'm always thinking in terms of how it is changing over time. Even the simplest sound can have a rhythm to it, dynamics, changing pitch. Orchestrators must think about these things all the time.

So dynamics become a useful tool for getting a sense of contrast. In an action film, say Terminator 2, contrasts, sometimes even massive contrasts, are essential.  But it's also about how frequencies work together. There's a trick to making a gunshot big using multiple layers of elements. You take the high snap of a pistol and add to it the low boom of a cannon and the midrange of a canyon echo. You orchestrate it. On an über scale then, we do that to the whole soundtrack, making sounds work together.

I remember a scene in the first Mission Impossible in which Tom Cruise breaks into a computer room... for which we'd added all these sound details for equipment... Yet the idea was that if he made any sound... he would trip the alarm. Brian De Palma ultimately said, "No, take it all out." ...I went to see it with an audience and it had the desired effect: It made everyone lean in, pay closer attention, get nervous.

In a big action scene, the biggest challenge often is to make the track articulate. The mixing and editing challenge is to make the track not turn into mush.

On Cast Away ...there are stretches of that movie in which very little ...sound ...is used. And there's no music. No place to hide sounds, so they have to be the right sounds. Every detail becomes awfully important. 

Alan Splet (The Black Stallion, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune) was the best at using sound effects in an overtly psychological and musical way. His ambiences were stunning: applying rhythms and pitches of sounds as evocatively as a composer would.

Sometimes we'll get more punch from a mix by being less loud, by putting big moments in the proper context.

The sound process is a big funnel, narrowing tracks and making choices as it goes forward.


I agree, generally, with the trend to do sound jobs with a smaller core group of creative people who collaborate and cross over traditional roles.

Tidbits Gary Dystrom's Interview With Mix Magazine 2004, Part 1

Here are the edited tidbits I noted from the interview with Sound Designer Gary Rydstrom in the February 2004 issue of Mix Magazine:

On Cocoon, we had to do alien glow sounds... so I did the glass harmonica trick by rubbing my finger on the top of these glasses that meant a lot to me. A little echo and pitching and layering, and it became an alien glow sound.

I wanted to give the lamps in Luxo Jr. character through sound... I experimented with taking real sounds — a lot of it as simple as unscrewing a light bulb or scraping metal. Every once in a while, a sound would be produced that would remind you of sadness or glee. I always think of sound design being like prospecting for gold. Start by, say, goofing around, making lots of sounds, then find the one percent that has something interesting about it. Put this against the film, and there's a magical moment when the sound, if it's right, merges into the image, brings it to life.

With sampled sounds in RAM, you can instantly pitch-bend it and layer it and play it and shape it, without using any processing time. You can layer on the same key and very finely manipulate the pitch and delay and merge them together in ways that were harder to do in the tape-to-tape days. It allowed me to create the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, in which I took several layers and blended different animal sounds into what sounds like one animal.

(To this day, I think the biggest advantage to the Synclavier is it's ability to so quickly pitch individual sounds in a layer for tuning.)

When we cut on mag... we had three dubbers available. We could cut up to three tracks — very limited. But you learned to work within this limitation ...if you go right to Pro Tools, you have almost too many possibilities right out of the gate; it's harder to focus on the essence of what sound editing is through all the bells and whistles.

I remember on Saving Private Ryan, I was trying to come up with weird sounds for these incoming tanks as they approached the village. Spielberg wanted scary, odd sounds bouncing between the buildings. I put sounds of metal scraping and engines beating on quarter-inch tape and rocked the tape back and forth by hand — like record scratching — and coming up with strange sounds and rhythms. I could only do that with a quarter-inch tape deck.

There has been no revolution in sound to parallel the revolution in visuals in the last 10 years... I can't go into a computer that I know of and create a lion roar, synthesize it entirely and make it a believable, interesting lion like ILM can make a lion. I would think that creating a lion visually is harder than creating a lion roar, but I guess I'm wrong.

Tom Tykwer Talks Sound and Music

In the January 2007 issue of Post Magazine online, Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Cloud Atlus) discusses his approach to sound and music for his movies.  There's more of his conversation in the print issue.  Here are some of the bits paraphrased:

The musical aspect of film in general is of course something that relates much more to the abstract relationship leading us to emotional perception. We were trying to establish a movie that somehow, not only through the sound but through the way that sound and image are intertwined, gives us a certain feeling: it's how the person the film is describing actually experiences the world.

For us, the music has to start first. I'm already starting to compose while I'm working on the script. We start composing alongside the script, so we find the sound in terms of the music of the film while we're in the writing process. When we arrive on set, we already have a substantial part of the music composed, and we've hired a small orchestra to play it for us, so we can really play it to the actors and get it 'into the scenery' of the actual shooting, as it were. So people could already explore the atmosphere and the acoustic world of the film while they were acting in it.

Sound design is often appreciated in films that create a lot of noise, but I'm a big admirer of the quiet movies. I know how difficult it is to mix a convincingly quiet film, because quietness has so many levels. It's much easier to produce a very loud, effects-driven and music-overloaded movie. I remain a fan of films that were made in the very early days of sound design and that can still deliver interesting results. The Exorcist, for example, has an amazing soundtrack, and in more modern times, what David Fincher does is really impressive. The entire suspense of his film Seven is really built through the soundtrack, with music and sound so well intertwined.
 

Brian De Palma on Sound and Music

In the October 2006 issue of Post Magazine, Director Brian De Palma states:

"Music and all the audio is also a very important part of the post process for me, and I like to spend quite a bit of time on that.  So much of what an audience sees and feels is actually created by the music and all the sound effects."

Audiences, not Videences

In the July 2007 issue of StudioMonthly.com, Jim Freeley provides tips on improving the image quality in motion picture, and one such tip includes audio:

Sound isn’t picture, but poor audio draws so much of an audience’s attention that it doesn’t matter what’s on screen. People gloss over or ignore small visual gaffes, but any drop in audio quality pulls the audience away from the image and, more importantly, the story. That’s why they’re called "audiences," not "videences."

Writer/Director/Producer Len Wiseman on Sound

In the July 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Len Wiseman (Underworld, Total Recall, Live Free or Die Hard, Sleepy Hollow) answers the question, "How important is music and audio for you?"

"Huge, half the experience.  It amazes me how you watch a cut with no music or sound design and you want to kill yourself.  It has no pace, you've done a horrible job and then they add sound, and it's like night and day.  Sometimes a scene will just not work, even though you tweak and tweak, and then it hits you -- it needs sound."

Danny Boyle on the Importance of Sound

In the August 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Danny Boyle, in an interview on his movie Sunshine, says about sound:

"I actually feel it's 70 percent of a film.  You turn the sound off on any film and most are unwatchable!  They just don't work.  It's extraordinary, and sound recordists get treated so badly on sets."

He continues:

"You watch any Pixar film and the sound is phenomenal!  Everyone raves about the animation, and it's great, but the sound's staggering.  It's because you can't see sound.  Your eyes are so fast and powerful, that you can't trick them.  They spot bad CG a mile away.  The only ting that tricks you is sound, because the ears are blunt instruments.  If you watch a CG film without sound, however good it is, you can spot the CG right away.  But once sound's added, it gives the images weight and starts fooling the eyes."

Klaus Heyne Philosophical Tidbits

In the May 2007 issue of EQ Magazine, microphone modder Klaus Heyne had some interesting philosophical tidbits.

"There was magic when sounds sounded good.  They touched you.  When sound didn't sound good, it went to your brain to analyze, to maybe appreciate it on a cerebral level but certainly not on a visceral level."


"A major manufacturer approached me last year and said 'We want you to design a $1,000 microphone.'  I said that I can't do that.  It's impossible.  He said, 'Make a few compromises, it will still be better than any other kind of microphone in this price class.'

I said, ''True, but I cannot live with that.  I must be able to plug it in and feel good about what I hear, whether it's my design or somebody else's.' I can't say 'for what it is it sounds pretty good.'  That's not how I live my life."


"...the best microphones work not by being the closest to how our ears work, but by having the best euphemistic additions or alterations that make us feel good about what we hear."


"My definition of a good mic is: the musical experience never even wanders away from my pleasure center to my intellectual side, to where I might think: 'oh yeah, I can really hear the cymbals, they're right over here...'"

This is similar to poor movie mixes de-suspending reality by making the audience think: "hey there's a sound coming from the left surround speaker!"

http://repforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php?topic=19045.0

Paul Verhoeven on Image and Music

In the April 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Director Paul Verhoeven says:

"I always feel that any image is open to interpretation, but with music you look at it in a very specific way, and if you want that, then music is very helpful."

Tony Gilroy on ADR for Michael Clayton

In the March 2008 of Post Magazine, Tony Gilroy talks about ADR on Michael Clayton.

"I've been obsessed with sound for years, and from the first day I told everyone, 'I am not looping one line,'" he recalls.  "I cannot stand it.  I've been involved in post for years as a writer, and I know what I like,and that's virtually nothing that's looped.  And of the looping sessions we did, every single one was a disaster and I couldn't stand it.  So we ended up going with our original tracks."

Director Paul W.S. Anderson on the Importance of Audio

From the August 2008 issue of Post Magazine:

When asked how important audio is, the Director and Producer of several Resident Evil movies, he replies:

"Hugely, and if you make action and horror films, which I've done almost exclusively, you soon realize how vital sound is. It's a cliche, but it's true. Make a scary movie and turn the sound off, it's just not scary anymore. Make an action film, turn the sound off, and you're just watching a lot of fast cuts. So the sound is what makes it an immersive experience..."

To: Directors, From: Your Sound Department

Another article I saved from the original print Mix Magazine I found online now:

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_open_letter_directors/

The online version is titled "An Open Letter To Directors From the Production," but the original version is titled "To: Directors, From: Your Sound Department."

I think it's a great read for anyone in movie-making.

Sound Design on Disney's Dinosaur

This article I saved from the print publication Mix Magazine is now online. 

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_dinosaur_disney_chris/

Lemurs:
- penguins for whoops for excited movement
- a fox named Socks the Fox for mournful yips and yaps for happy and sad Lemurs
- capuchin (a type of monkey) for chirps
- human vox for happy bellows

Raptors:
- 10-year-old Chihuahua with emphysema (trills and growls for menace) + goose hisses + yellow-blackbird caws

Carnotaur:
- pissed leapord in Florida (mic'd close for guttural, wet snarls, breaths, and chuffs) + elephant for regal, growling sound
- leopard + large boar + macaw for high shrieking element for terror

Making A Case For Index Fund Portfolios

Richard Ferri and Alex Benke have recently published a great article entitled A Case For Index Fund Portfolios.  The article is available in this month's Journal of Index, here.  In essence, you are statistically much better off investing in a portfolio of index funds versus a portfolio of actively managed funds.  And as additional asset classes are added and as your holding period becomes longer, this index fund portfolio beats the portfolio of actively managed funds 90% of the time, even with low-cost actively managed funds.