Welcome! Lets get things started with { s o u n d + i m a g e }

For today, it is one of my photos.

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Quite an obvious choice when looking at the photo, but I like the idea of hearing a plane through a loudspeaker. I wanted it to sound realistic, nothing to fancy. Although I do find it much harder to get something to sound realistic then to sound surreal.

I was aiming to have the plane come closer and get taken over by the loudspeaker, then back out into the original sound of the plane. I like the idea of having the plane come closer, but by having it closer it means it sounds more distant because of the way the loudspeaker sounds (quite a mouthfull).

If you are interested in how I got the sound, read-on.

The Process:

The photo and the recording have nothing to do with each other. The photo was on a boat trip in Seattle and the sound of the plane is in Edinburgh. I was trying to record an interesting ambient of crows flying, nature and a school field trip. Of course a plane comes circling above!

To get the sound I was going for, I copied the audio file into an other track. So one was the processed (loudspeaker effect) sound and the other was the original.

Original: I EQ’d the original sound a bit. They was a lot of unwanted bass and some birds where a bit to prominent. I also normalized to -3dBs.

Processed:To make the sound appear to come from the loudspeaker, I ran it through 3 plug-ins:

“Tonebooster” from Steinberg. This was to kill all the frequencies that a loudspeaker doesn’t produce and boost the ones it does. It basically gives it the telephone sound.

“AmpSimulator” to give it that dreadful feedback that loudspeakers have.

“StereoDelay” to give the echo one would hear if a loud speaker projected in a huge open space.

The volume of the clean sound and the processed sound where automated allowing me to control the movement of the plane into the loudspeaker and out again.

The whole thing was compressed slightly for volume and fullness.