Compost It
YLTLSBCers note: I wasn’t able to post last night because my web-host was down.
So here’s a rough outtake of an experiment I made a few months ago as a possible submission to Third Coast’s “Book Odds” ShortDocs Challenge:
(You can listen to the piece I ended up submitting here.)
In related news, I (finally) registered to attend the Third Coast Conference this year!
Making it sound old
If you’ve followed my blog before I began the YLTLSBC post-a-day thing, you may have noticed I haven’t been sharing as many Onion videos lately. Rest assured I’m still designing sound for ONN, but for the time being I’m only posting the videos that feature interesting sound design or prompt me to say something interesting about the sound design process (or anything else for that matter).
O-SPAN Classic: CIA Accidentally Overthrows Costa Rica
Congress, 1924: Rep. Demands Horses Wear Dresses To Hide Foul Penises
I’m surprised at how inauthentic the “vintage audio” simulations I hear on television or the radio often seem. Sometimes it sounds like the producer simply applied some EQ to cut the bass/treble frequencies, boosted the mids, and called it a day. While the result sounds more boxy and nasal than a clean recording, it usually lacks the character that gives old recordings their unique sound.
For these Onion videos, I was initially asked to transfer the digital recordings to an analog tape and try degrading the sound by making a copy of a copy of copy… But I didn’t do that. First, I listened to a bunch of examples of historically similar recordings to use as a references. For “CIA Apology,” I primarily used a recording of this famous JFK speech.
And I used William Jennings Bryan’s 1923 “Cross of Gold” speech as the model for “Horse Dresses.” (“Horse Dresses” is set in 1924, so I should note here that film with synchronized sound is more or less an anachronism.)
Then, I thought about how I could digitally model each step of the analog recording process to in order to mimic the various changes and distortions that might have occurred in an “actual” recording from the 1960s:
The press secretary would be speaking into a dynamic mic, so I applied an EQ plugin set to roll off the bass and treble, with some very subtle boosts to the upper midrange, mimicking the mic’s frequency response. Then that mic’d signal would go to a P.A. system, so I used a guitar amp simulation plugin to distort and further modify the EQ. The P.A. would project into an auditorium, so I added some room reverb. Then I figured the sound would be recorded by a reporter with another dynamic mic (so I repeated the first step). They would record to tape, which can change the sound in all sorts of subtle ways; tape hisses, varies in pitch/speed, compresses and distorts. (I used a few different plugins to model these, but here’s a good free plugin that gets you part of the way there.) Then the tape would then be broadcast, so I added some more heavy compression and EQ to simulate an AM radio.
At this point, my simulation sounded pretty good, but as a final step I used a special plug-in in Logic called “Match EQ” to help me check my work. Match EQ analyzes the frequency characteristics of two audio files and and creates an EQ profile designed to make one file sound more like the other. Again, I used my references as models.
In “Horse Dresses,” I used the same kinds of effects but to a much greater extreme along with a healthy dose of record crackle.
A First for Everything
Apparently I had never been on the receiving side of the “just wanted to let you know I’ve starting seeing someone new” conversation before this evening. That’s why this post is both late and short.
I’m fine.
In other news, did you hear D-plan is getting back together? Feels like a good night to revisit some of those records.
Occasionally radio producers in other parts of the country hire me to do “tape synch” recordings. For any non-radio folks reading this, a tape synch is a way producers can interview people remotely without having to rely on the scratchy sound of “phone tape” (recording the actual phone line). Instead, they’ll hire a guy like me to go to the interviewee’s home or office. They’ll conduct the interview over the phone while I sit unnaturally close to the interviewee getting a high-quality recording of our end of the conversation. Afterward, I’ll upload the audio file so the producer can synchronize recordings of both sides of the conversion on a computer, as if the conversation had taken place in person. It’s the next best thing to recording an interviewee in a good studio and transmitting the audio feed via an ISDN connection. So the next time you’re listening to All Things Considered (or whatever) and you hear, “Mr. X comes to us from his home in Brooklyn Heights,” that’s how it happened.
(In case it’s not obvious, these aren’t “live” conversations. In fact, the majority of public radio is very highly edited. Most people don’t realize Car Talk isn’t live. True live shows usually rely on some combination of phone tape or a remote studio via ISDN connection.)
I’ve recorded dozens of interviews with authors, politicians, actors, musicians, and heads of corporations. Every now and then (twice so far this week) I’ll be listening to the radio and hear some of the same people on-air again. I don’t really know these people, of course, and most of them certainly wouldn’t remember me. But I’ll hear their voices and remember the hour or so I spent with them, the small talk before and after the recording.
His grandfather clock was ticking loudly throughout the recording.
I biked to her apartment. It was raining and she offered me tea.
I was allergic to his cat and holding back a sneeze the whole interview.
Our block party
One of the contributing factors to my outburst of block pride yesterday was also the primary factor in a spectacular hangover today. (It was worth it.)
Other factors included:
- Waking up to a bouncing reggae bass-line. Someone shouting out their window, “Good moooooorning, Prospect Place!”
- Neighbors taking turns on the mic MCing, toasting one another between airhorn samples and dancehall grooves.
- A seemingly endless supply of jerk chicken.
- My one of my neighbors, Rachel, loaning her digital camera to a five or six-year-old neighborhood girl. The girl ran around for the next hour taking everyone’s portrait, experimenting with the zoom and framing. “Say CHEEESE!” she’d say, regardless of how intoxicated you were. Who could resist smiling? Before you could recover from the flash, she’d flip the camera around to show you your beaming mug on the LCD screen. “See?!” (Needless to say, she got some great poses. Every shot is taken from a low angle, a kid’s eye view.)
- Chatting with Bernadene, Prospect Place’s block association president/grand matriarch. She’s lived here over for 30 years, owns two apartment buildings and began the annual block party tradition. She said she was initially drawn to the first building because it had a long driveway where her kids could play, protected from the street by a heavy iron gate. The gate is usually open, now. Now her grandson tears up and down the sidewalk on his tricycle.
- Bernadene had boxes of white T-shirts with the phrase “THINK WE BEFORE ME” printed in bold green letters. Almost everyone was wearing one by the end of the night, which (I think?) was around 4 a.m.
I mean it: the best in Brooklyn.
I live on the best block in Brooklyn.
Defense of the statement above to follow.