Coffee-Shop Background Noise Generator

The noise without the social distraction

Love that claim, the concept and the Mess slider! And it has presets 😉

Brian Eno – Imaginary Landscapes 1989

He is always a true source of inspiration …

oldschool sound design

lost & found

Stuff to share from the interwebs. All related to music making, sound design, audio production.

You know you’re getting old if you once were used to those:

• The Museum of Endangered Sounds: Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. Imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV …
• »Conserve the sound« is an online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds. The sound of a dial telephone, a walkman, a analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a cell phone keypad are partially already gone or are about to disappear from our daily life …
• And also this:

Modern scoring: ‘Tenet’: Ludwig Göransson Put Chris Nolan’s Breath in His Score — and Rethought Composing Altogether

About the future of audio mastering: How AI is solving one of music’s most expensive problems

FerricTDS is about glueing things together and not about distortion (I already told you):

Weird sound devices:

A short review of the LIRA 8 VSTi

While currently having the original SOMA Lyra-8 hardware here on my desk I was curious how the VST emulation created by Mike Moreno DSP might appear in comparison. The release is available in VST formats for Mac and PC under “Pay what you want or download for free”.

In case you never heard of the hardware Lyra, it’s basically a 8 voice drone synthesizer, providing some LFO and FM modulation capabilities plus a basic delay and distortion FX. It does not provide any Midi control but solely relies on manual interaction with it’s analog interface (plus some quite limited CV support). It also does not have any sort of filter, mod matrix or effect structure. However, it perfectly fits for different styles of experimental electronic and ambient music as well as all kinds of sound design e.g for film scoring and such.

The VST plugin resembles the overall appearance and usage concept almost identical to the hardware. All parameters are accessible via host automation in your DAW which indeed turns out to be really useful. To trigger the sensors, Midi notes C1 to G1 can also be used instead of clicking the interface. Since the original sensors are sensitiv to skin capacitance/resistance, I would have expected the plugin sensors to have some sort of velocity or aftertouch control accordingly but this is not the case.

Soundwise the plugin was a real surprise. While it might not stand an A/B test with its analog counterpart, it amazingly captures its overall sound aesthetic and gives instant gratification in this regard. Wobbling drones, shimmering soundscapes and fizzling FM weirdness – it can all do that and much more. But maybe even more important it is real fun to twiddle with and it appears to be very inspirational, exactly like the HW does.

What the plugin itself can’t give you of course is the tactile experience. Beside that there is an issue when it comes to tuning sounds. The oscillator tune parameters actually do have just very imprecise control given the huge frequency range across all octaves. This becomes even more of an issue if you try to finetune something in its FM sweetspot area.

Overall verdict: Highly recommended for all sorts of sound design or pure inspiration – if you can live with its constraints.

Johnnyrandom | Bespoken

Composer Johnnyrandom breaks new ground with musical compositions made exclusively from everyday objects.

(via)

portrait of a sound design artist

A man standing alone in a shed hitting a bath with a mallet could be seen as mad, but in the world of sound design, it’s the norm. Ali Lacey is an eccentric sound design artist, and this short portrait allows us a closer look into the world of sound design.

(via)

the sound of Gravity

In this exclusive SoundWorks Collection profile we talk with Director Alfonso Cuarón and Re-recording Mixer Skip Lievsay about the sound teams work to create a dramatic sound scape to a dark and vast outer space environment.

(via)

Beach Sampling

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/52369363 w=660&h=495]

Music made with sand, rocks & water

silence

The ultimate metaphoric sound is silence. If you can get the film to a place with no sound where there should be sound, the audience will crowd that silence with sounds and feelings of their own making, and they will, individually, answer the question of, “Why is it quiet?” If the slope to silence is at the right angle, you will get the audience to a strange and wonderful place where the film becomes their own creation in a way that is deeper than any other. – Walter Murch

(via designingsound.org)