INTRODUCTION TO SOUND
Written by Michael C. Bungay, 8th January 2016
For this half-term, we are creating an audio book, the Main Elements of an audio book are:
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Voice Actors
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Sound Effects
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Music
There are two types of music:
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Diagetic which is music that is heard on screen
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Non-Diagetic which is music not heard on screen
We first watched a documentary on YouTube about how the works of Roald Dahl were made into Audio Books and read out by the likes of David Walliams and Kate Winslet. The sound effects used in the Roald Dahl audio books included the sound of hot soup bubbling on a hot stove in The Witches, this was created by blowing into a pan of water through a straw. One of the actors bit into a banana with the skin still on which is often used to simulate the sound of vampires biting their latest victims and another walked around on a concrete surface to simulate Grandma footsteps.
We then watched a two-part documentary on how the sound effects for the 2008 film WALL-E created, presented by Academy Award winning Sound Designer Ben Burtt who has been providing sound effects since the 1970's where he designed the sound effects for the original Star Wars. His sound effects have included attaching a weight to a spring to simulate the sound of a laser gun as a laser is silent in reality. The documentary also explained how Walt Disney and his head of sound effects Jimmy MacDonald built lots of props to create sound with as the equipment they had at the time was too bulky to move around. They used music to create sound effects and experimented with Mexican peas, balloons and violin bows for example. If Disney and MacDonald needed wind then they would use a wind machine and cylinders of wood and they banged sheet metal to make thunder.
We learned that how the audience sees and hears what is on screen matters more than the physics. Different sounds were orchestrated together for WALL-E and an army generator was use to simulate WALL-E when he moved slowly. Some of the important things I got from this documentary was Sonovox, Vocoder, Modulating and Acoustic Surround.
Acoustics work in the following principals, Reverberant or Wet Spaces include a Hall, a Church or Concert Hall, all big rooms with high ceilings and Non-reverberant or Dry Spaces include a cupboard or a dead room in a recording studio or any small room with a low ceiling or with lots of absorbent material. We also learned the recording chain which is Microphone>Recorder (In this case, a Zoom H4N Stereo Field with 2 Mics)>Speakers/Headphones. To conclude, I volunteered to be the Narrator in a short audio experiment in which another student (cannot remember who) and I took turns to read the first few lines of The Gruffalo, which took a bit longer than intended as I had a cold at the time. When we finished, Ollie Samuel edited our experiment, using Adobe Premier Pro which is not ideal for Audio-only material.