Category: Sound Design

In this blog post, I would like to write about a fairly unusual movie soundtrack to find, the Birdman soundtrack or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

Birdman is a 2014 American comedy-drama directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

Here is a small summary, just to know what it is:

“Riggan Thomson is an actor who played the famous and iconic superhero” Birdman “over 20 years ago. Now, in his middle age, he is directing his Broadway debut, a drama called “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” an adaptation from a Raymond Carver story. With the help of his assistant and daughter Sam, and his producer Jake, he will play premieres of the show, even when a talented actor he has hired, Mike Shiner, acts arbitrarily, the internal issues between him and the other cast, the his futile utmost efforts to critics and the unexpected voices of his old character, the Bird Man, pushing his sanity to the first debut show. [1]

Besides the movie itself, what I find really interesting is the soundtrack.

There are several classical music pieces, mainly from the 19th century (such as Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Ravel) and several jazz compositions by Victor Hernández Stumpfhauser and Joan Valent. But those are just “outlines” of the real thing.

Most of the score consists of a drum score composed entirely of solo jazz percussion performances by Antonio Sánchez.

It’s a rather unusual choice for a film, as the drums are just a percussion instrument, no harmony, (almost) no melody.

But why? As the director said:

“The drums, for me, were a great way to find the rhythm of the film … In comedy, rhythm is king, and not having the editing tools to determine time and space, I knew I needed something. that would help me find the internal rhythm of the film. “

When the director contacted Sánchez and offered him to work on the film, the composer felt a little unprepared and surprised, as he put it:

“It was a scary proposition because I had no benchmarks on how to achieve this. There is no other film that I know of with a soundtrack like this.” Sánchez hadn’t worked on a movie before either.

He first composed “rhythmic themes” for each of the characters, but Iñárritu preferred spontaneity and improvisation when he said, “Man, this is absolutely the opposite of what I was thinking. You’re a jazz musician. I want you to. you have a completely jazzy approach, which improvises, which has nothing too preprogrammed. I just want you to react to the story.” [2]

After Sánchez visited the set for a couple of days to get a better idea of ​​the film, he and Iñárritu went to a studio to record some demos. During these sessions the director first spoke to him through the scene, then as Sánchez improvised he guided him by raising his hand to indicate an event – such as a character opening a door – or describing the rhythm with verbal sounds. They recorded about seventy demos and, once they finished shooting, they put them in the rough cut.

He liked the way the soundtrack complemented the action, but not how the drums actually sounded. Having been recorded in a New York studio, the audio was extremely crisp and clear, not quite the mood they wanted for a film steeped in tension and dysfunction.

So Sánchez headed to Los Angeles to re-record the tracks.

They wanted “rusty, out of tune drums that hadn’t been played in years”. Also, Sanchez purposely degraded his kit. “I didn’t tune the drums, I used mismatched heads, stuck duct tape on the heads to make them weaker, and put things on the cymbals to make them sound a little broken. I also stacked two and three plates on top of each other, metal on metal. Instead of a sustained sound, you get a dry, trashy one. It worked a lot better.”

Iñárritu also pressured his sound design team.

In these scene they pass a drummer on the sidewalk outside the theater. The drum sounds change multiple times during the sequence — first when Keaton leaves the quiet of the theater and exits onto the New York City street, then again as he and Norton approach and move past Smith. Iñárritu wanted the volume level of the sidewalk drummer to rise and fall as Keaton and Norton walked by, but they did it in the most authentical way.

“We actually brought the drums out onto the street near the studio,” Sanchez recalls. “There were a couple of sound guys a block away with mics that had really, really long cables. I started playing, and they walked the whole block, right pass my drums, and kept walking to the next block. Then they came back. That’s how Alejandro approaches his work. Anybody else probably would have just turned the volume up and down.”

“The movie fed on the drums, and the drums fed on the imagery”.

The official soundtrack was released as a CD (77 min) in October 2014, and as an LP (69 min) in April 2015.

It won the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.

Resources

[1] Birdman Plot Summary https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2562232/plotsummary

[2] Neil Janowitz – “Birdman” composer drumming out the film’s soundtrack

[3] Wikipedia – Birdman

[4] Wikipedia – Birdman (film score)

This might be interesting for all of you who want to do a live performance! 🙂

Setlist manager, digital mixer, software instrument and effects host, PDF sheet music player, multitrack audio player and highly advanced patchbay and MIDI router, these are the features of this new live performance software, Camelot, developed by Audio Modeling.

It is also designed not to have the need to have a manual, everything is clear and with just a quick guide you can have access to all the features.

As they stated:

“Camelot is an application created to address the most complex live performance needs with a simple and guided workflow. What in the past could only be achieved with a complex configuration of several applications and devices connected together, Camelot achieves in a single comfortable and well-designed workstation. Song in Camelot gathers all your configurations of hardware instruments and MIDI routing, software instruments and FX instances, sheet music and audio backing tracks.

It is also quite cheap for all of its features and there is also a free version, in which only a few features are missing.

If you are interested, you can take a look here:

https://audiomodeling.com/camelot/overview/

What is it?

Bela is an open-source embedded computing platform for creating responsive, real-time interactive systems with audio and sensors.

Bela was born in the Augmented Instruments Laboratory, in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. Bela is now developed and produced by Augmented Instruments Ltd in London, UK.

It provides low latency, high quality audio, analog and digital I/O in a really small package that can be easily embedded into a huge range of applications.

It can be used, for example, to create musical instruments and audio effects.

It is built on the BeagleBone family of open-source embedded computers, Bela combines the processing power of an embedded computer with the timing precision and connectivity of a microcontroller.

In computing, “real-time” refers to any system that guarantees response within a specified time frame. This is called the “real-time constraint”. Bela’s real-time constraint is processing audio frames at audio rate, which is 44,100 frames per second.

There are different types of real-time systems, often called soft, firm, or hard. A firm or soft real-time system can miss a few deadlines, but performance will degrade if too many deadlines are missed. A hard real-time system is one that is subject to stringent deadlines, and must meet those deadlines in order to function. Bela is a hard real-time system, meaning that it must process audio frames at audio rate in order to function.

Bela features an on-board IDE that launches right in the browser, making it easy to get up and running without requiring any additional software.

It has just 0.5ms latency while retaining the capabilities and power of a 1GHz embedded computer running Linux.

Why choose Bela? Because no complicated setup or complex toolchains is needed. Just connect Bela to your computer, launch the on-board IDE in a web browser, and start coding right away.

Bela comes in 2 version, Bela Board and Bela Board mini.

Bela Board has 8 channels of 16-bit analog I/O, 16 digital I/O, stereo audio I/O, and 2 built-in speaker amplifiers.

Bela Mini is 1/3 the size of the big one. It features 8 16-bit analog inputs and 16 digital I/O, as well as 2 channels of audio input and output.

It runs a custom audio processing environment based on the Xenomai real-time Linux extensions. Your code runs in hard real-time, bypassing the entire operating system to go straight to the hardware.

What’s really great, is that you can code in various languages such as C++, SuperCollider, Csound and PureData. This makes it really user-friendly!

Bela is ideal for creating anything interactive that uses sensors and sound. So far, Bela has been used to create:

• musical instruments
• kinetic sculptures
• wearable devices
• interactive sound installations
• effects boxes
• robotic applications
• sensorimotor experiments
• paper circuit toolkits
• e-textiles

Here some examples:

Light Saber

of Nature and Things – de Shroom (the Shroom) – Sound Art Installation

Microtonal subtractive synthesizer (Bela Mini + Pure Data)

SoundInk (Bela Mini + Pure Data)

Noise do not Judge (Bela, Trill Craft + Pure Data)

Sonic Tree (Bela + SuperCollider)

Resources

bela.io

Music for Solo Performer is a composition from the american composer of experimental music Alvin Lucier.

Mr. Lucier was a music professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and also a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union (a collective of experimental musicians).

His works explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception and is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media.

He is mostly know for the piece “I am sitting in a Room” from 1969, in which he plays with the resonence of different rooms.

But the proper beginning of his compositional career is defined by his 1965 composition Music for Solo Performer.

This composition is also reffered to as the ‘brain wave piece’ and is considered to be the first musical work to use brain waves to directly generate the resultant sound..

The mechanics of the piece were although simple: alpha brain waves are picked up from electrodes attached to the performer, and the low frequency thumps (typically between 9-15 hertz) are first sent into amplifiers to amplify the pulses’ volume. Then, a bandpass filter cleans up the signal, which is sent by a second performer at a mixing board through a number of loudspeakers attached to percussion instruments and other objects to be activated by these massive, low frequency thumps.

This work, anyway, doesn’t attempt to use or show mind controll, but more like how to creatively use the mind controlling the “consequencies”, as Luier said:

“The idea was that I didn’t want to show mind control… Discovery is what I like, not control… So I completely eschewed that form… and let that alpha just flow out, and the composition was then how to deploy those speakers, and what instruments to use.”

How does this performance look like?

A man sits in a chair in the middle of a concert hall, perfectly still and dressed in a suit and tie, surrounded by a veritable orchestra of percussion instruments. Timpani, gongs, bass and snare drums and cymbals without performers to bring them to life.

Out of nowhere, thunderous bass sounds bring these instruments into vibratory oscillation, their sonic activity spreading around the space in an ever-morphing wash of sound. The man sits calmly at the center. His eyes are closed as he listens to this remarkable spectral orchestra, which, is being played by his brain.

How did this idea start?

In 1964 Lucier was teaching at Brandeis University and he was trying to find his own path, to work on composition, on his own language.

At the time, physicist Edmond Dewan was working at a lab near Brandeis doing brain wave research for the US Air Force. Dewan was an amateur organist and used to visit the Brandeis music department and was eager to share his ideas and equipment. Also, Lucier spent many hours working alone in the Brandeis electronic music studio working with Dewan’s gear such as  two Tektronix Type 122 preamplifiers in series, one Model 330M Kronhite Bandpass Filter set for a range of 9 Hz to 15 Hz, an integrating threshold switch and electrodes.

After learning how to produce alpha waves quite consistently, Lucier had to decide what he was going to do with them. They are between 10-14 hertz (below the normal human hearing range) so they could be somehow perceived as physical rhythmic impulses. His colleagues suggested that he could record the alpha waves and create a piece of tape with the material by manipulating the recording. But Lucier regularly used a recorded track of accelerated alpha waves during the performances of the piece to bring the waves into the audio range, the main material of the piece remains raw alpha generated in real time.

This work was also influenced by the strong impression that a Trappist monk’s meditation practice made on Lucier:

“I remember going into the chapel and watching a Trappist monk in the act of contemplation… he was thinking – deeply. It looked like somebody just thinking as hard as he possibly could. I remember I went back an hour later – he was in the same attitude – and I thought, “Well, if there’s any such thing as pure thought, that guy is doing it.” And that impressed me a lot… So when I did the brain wave piece, you’ve got to sit and not think of anything; because if you create a visual image your alpha will block.”

Here is a video of the performance:

Resources

Volker Sraebel, Wilm Thoben – Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer Experimental music beyond sonification

Wikipedia – Alvin Lucier

Wikipedia – Sonic Arts Union

Andrew Raffo Dewar – Inner Landscapes Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer

MetaSynth ist ein von U&I Software für das Macintosh-Betriebssystem entwickeltes Sounddesign- und Musikproduktionswerkzeug, mit dem sich aus Bildern Töne erzeugen lassen. Es wurde bei dem Film “The Matrix eingesetzt, ist aber auch auf der Single “Windowlicker” des Elektronikkünstlers “Aphex Twin” zu hören.

Metasynth+Xx ist die neuste Variante, welche auch auf allen gängigen Betriebssystemen läuft.

Das Programm besteht aus einem Bildsynthesizer, Spektrum-Synthesizer, Bildfilter, Effekträumen, Bild-Sequenzer, eigenen Instrumenten, Wavetables, Oszillatoren und Metatrack (Mixing Room).

Das Programm bietet eine riesige Auswahl an Möglichkeiten auf unkonventionelle Art mit Sound zu arbeiten. Es kann mit der Software Sound Design Produziert oder Musik durch Improvisation erzeugt werden. Außerdem ist die visuelle Komponente einzigartig im vergleich zu anderen Software-Plugins welche Teile der Funktionen auch beherrschen.

Anbei ein Beispiel für die Vielfalt des Synthesizers:

Literatur:

MetaSynth + Xx