I’m finally done putting together a Q&A site for us sound designers. I’m very, very excited about this project! Come visit Social Sound Design. It’s 100% free. SSD is brand new and freshly unwrapped, so let’s get the ball rolling with lots of questions, answers and knowledge exchange.

about the project

Sound design has many facets. As sound designers, we may step into the shoes of an artist, programmer, editor, storyteller or engineer. Because we play so many roles, we may not have all the expertise we need to carry out a project. The purpose of this site is to provide a community-driven knowledge exchange on all disciplines of sound design.

Whenever I’m busy with a project, I have to navigate through a countless number of forums and websites to find information. On the flip side, I often receive emails from people who have questions. It takes me a lot of time to respond and the information only goes to that one person instead of the community.

If we share our knowledge, we can spend less time reinventing the wheel and more time creating.

competition

The first user to receive the Nice Question badge (question voted up 10 times)
will win a signed copy of David Sonnenschein’s book Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema. He was kind enough to donate it for Social Sound Design. Thank you, David!

here’s the deal

It’s totally free for you to use, but I will soon have to pay for the service and it’s not cheap. However, I really believe it’s worth every penny! We all will benefit hugely from having a place to share our knowledge of sound design. Right now, the site is in beta. But, on the next release, the 45 day free trial will start, then they will charge for the service. To keep Social Sound Design going, I need lots of us to be involved in it. This way, I can get advertising to help buffer the cost (I will happily pay the difference).

need more information?

Read the FAQ page.
Read the Help page (how to embed media).
Read the Info page.

get connected

SSD on twitter:
@SocialSD where all the latest questions and news are posted.

recent questions RSS feed:
RSS where you can sign up to receive  the latest questions in your rss reader.

email
forum [at] soundplusdesign [dot] com

…Frightening me! Galileo, Galileo Figaro…

In summer, Johannesburg gets the craziest thunder showers. They don’t last long, but they are very vicious and sound like no other storms I’ve ever heard.

The other night I recorded a thunder storm. I just love how the thunder keeps on rolling and crackling. You can just picture the sound decaying slowly as it reflects through the whole city. Have a listen:

Thunder 01
Thunder 02
Thunder 03

It’s a pity it was raining, as it spoiled a little bit the sound of the thunder. I hope I will be able to catch some clean thunder before the rain or wind picks up.

Interested in building your own thunder generator using synthesis in Pure Data? Check out this great tutorial by Andy Farnell

[photo by Flickr user petervj]

A set of very exciting projects has come my way. I’m in South Africa for a few months recording and designing sound effects for three feature films. I’ve temporarily left New York (hopefully I will find my way back there soon) and its harsh winter for South Africa and its beautiful summer.

bye bye boom boom

Before boarding my plane, I had to choose between paying £40 to check in my boom pole or attempting to get it through security. I chose the latter.

Security suspected my pole could be used to tickle the pilot’s head from my seat at the back of the plane, so I had to leave it there. When I kindly asked the flight attendant if they could take care of it, she said, “It’s going in the trash.” Nice and sensitive.  I don’t really mind though, as it is time for a new one. I’m thinking of getting the RØDE Mini-Boompole as it is light and good for traveling. Also, thinking of getting a boom pole mount to hook up to a tripod.

how loud is the interior of a plane cruising at altitude?

I got a nice Sound Pressure Level (SPL) meter for the iPhone, it’s apparently accurate to 3db but can be off by 6db when not calibrating the iPhone’s mic. If you’re interested, you can check out the app SoundMeter. The max SPL of the airplane cabin is 89db, which is the loudness of a motorcycle, subway or lawn mower. And apparently, at a continuous SPL of 89db, the permissible exposure time before damage can occur is four hours. The London to Johannesburg stretch is 11 hours long. Scary!

Plane Interior Ambiance
I was so absorbed in recording this ambience that I didn’t even notice a man had passed out against the bathroom door right next to me until I turned to go back to my seat. Quite a shock. He was fine.

Download Airplane Ambience in HQ [loop; 24bit; 96kHz; 61MB]
This track is loopable. Recorded on the Zoom H4n with on-board mics.

and its toilet?

At its loudest point, the peak db level of the plane toilet flushing is 106db — the equivalent of a car horn or a timpani. They’ve designed the toilet perfectly though, you press the flush, and you have a three complimentary seconds before it actually goes off, the perfect amount of time to cover your ears!

Plane Toilet Flushing 01
Plane Toilet Flushing 02

Download both Airplane Toilet Flushing in HQ [24bit; 96kHz; 4.6MB]
Recorded on the Zoom H4n with on-board mics.

Last week I went to Handmade Music, an event put together by Create Digital Music’s Peter Kirn. It was super fun. Sebastian Tomczak who has a blog I really enjoy called Little scale, was there playing some sweet chip tunes while we were hacking away and socializing. During the evening a group of us got to build a one-bit synth.

The one-bit synth is as simple and basic as it gets. It uses the ATtiny85 chip, a 3V battery, a headphone input jack and two buttons. The chip already had some code on it (they had prepped them beforehand), which controls the sequence. It’s kind of like an Arduino,  you write some code and put it on the chip.

From what I understand, the chip is in either an “on” or “off” state, and it does that very quickly so you can control the pitch. The faster it switches between on and off, the higher the pitch. I think the two buttons switch between programmed sequences.

So what does one-bit audio sound like?
Warning: LOUD!
1-bit sound 01
1-bit sound 02
download both files in HQ [24bit (haha, irony); 48kHz; 33.1MB]

Portishead has just released a new song called “Chase the Tear” for Amnesty International. You can purchase the song for $0.99, all the earnings  go towards Amnesty’s human rights work. So you can do yourself and the world some good! The synth sounds great!

Listen to “Chase the Tear” here
Buy “Chase the Tear” here

And according to Amnesty International:

‘Chase the Tear’ is a reference to a paper tear-style ‘tear’, not a tear from an eye!

[via Pitchfork]

Here’s an interesting project that Gabriel G aka AlphaCore is doing. He is coding live using the Ruby programming language to create MIDI events, which are then played through Tweet A Sound.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff, Gabriel has shared his work on the live Ruby music system:

The 3 required files (released on Pastie.org for free):
Music.rb
scales.rb
Song_player.rb

Software:
Midipatch Bay
Tweet a Sound

And of course, check out his site: Alphacore

I got my new computer, and I’m up and running again! I’m so happy. It’s still going to be a little while until I can catch up with everything. So in the meantime, I will share an old project from last March.

In the beginning of the year, I really got into Andy Farnell’s book on procedural audio, Designing Sound. It’s one of my favorite sound design books, and I strongly recommend it.

This book really got me excited about being able to separate and control each element of a sound. This inspired the Mini Mood, an iPhone application that allows you to create your own personalized mix of cozy sounds. I chose three ambiances I thought made for a cozy athmosphere: fireplace, weather, and old record player.

You can download the Mini Mood for free!

Concept and Sound Design: me (Andrew Spitz)
Programming: The awesome Mel Gray
Icon Design: The great Thomas Hancock

how it works

For now, the interface is a bit plain and confusing, but we may go back to it, design a new interface, and add more sounds.

There are four windows. The first is the Master Mix of the other three windows.

The second is the Fireplace Mix, which is where you can mix together each element of a fireplace: the roar, crackle, and hiss.

The third is the Weather Mix, which is where you can mix the rain (hitting the window), the wind, and the thunder.

The fourth is the Record Player, which is where you can mix the noise and the crackle of a record player. You’ll notice there is a missing slider.  I wanted to add an E.Q. slider to make your music sound like an old record, but at this moment, you can’t access the iPhone’s music library from an app, so we left it empty.

the process

In March, I put together a patch in Max/MSP to serve as a prototype. Mel Gray over at Clever Collie took over the coding for the iPhone/iTouch.

As an iPhone/iTouch app, the Mini Mood triggers looped samples and the user mixes the volume of each element. Nothing very exciting, but it was valuable for understanding the process of submitting an application to iTunes. The procedural aspect involved creating each separate stem to bounce into a loopable track. One advantage of modeling procedural synthetic sounds is that the recording is clear of all unwanted sounds. However, some of the synthesis didn’t sound convincing enough to me, so I mixed in some real-world recorded sounds.

This has been a good experience, especially seeing Apple’s side of things. Future plans include adding more sounds and improving the interface.

I am so excited! I can hardly contain myself. As I’m typing this, I’m downloading the Max for Live public beta.

You can download it here. Hurray!

Since Arduino 17, many people have been having issues with getting Arduino and Max/MSP communicating. Hans-Christopher Steiner posted a comment in the tutorial How to Set up Arduino and Max/MSP saying that he has released an update, which should sort some bugs out.

Here’s what Hans-Christopher wrote:

The StandardFirmata in 0017 turned out to be kind of buggy, unfortunately. We have things mostly fixed in SVN, but would love to have more testing and bug reports! So here’s a new release. I fixed all bugs that I knew about, including the one where analog pins sometimes acted like they had a log curve on them.

http://at.or.at/hans/pd/objects.html#pduino

Just download the Firmata.zip and then install the StandardFirmata included in that. I tested this on a Diecimila, I hear there are troubles with the Arduino Pro and others, but I only have the older ones, so testing and bug reports on those are very helpful.

In the Max forum he writes:

The maxuino version should work with Firmata 2.1 as long as the baud/bitrate is set to 57600.

I still can’t try anything myself until I get up and running again with a computer. But if you do try it and it works/has bugs, please post the bug reports and feedback in the comments or directly to Hans-Christopher via his site, which will help him with the testing.

[photo by Fatty Tuna]

My beloved girlfriend went back to the States for the time being,
but I have my computer so I’m OK…

I had an opportunity lined up then it fell through,
but I have my computer so I’m OK…

I almost got scammed selling something expensive on Ebay,
but I have my computer so I’m OK…

My computer broke,
but I have… oh wait, I’m not OK!

This sucks. Literally a day before releasing Sound Doodle, my computer said “au revoir” and wouldn’t switch on. After a long wait, Apple told me the motherboard is dead, and it will cost €1100 to fix, eerrrggg! So I apologise for the delay. I have backups and it seems my hard drive is fine, so the second I get a new machine I will get Sound Doodle out.

I’ll put it out there: my bags are packed and I’m ready for an opportunity. If you or anyone you know is looking for someone, please contact me andrew(at)soundplusdesign(dot)com.

P.S. In dire need of some feel-good comments…

[photo of my dead computer]