Manipulation & Environment

Music Tech || MT CA4 - Sound Creation

What is digital sample manipulation?

• This is when you control a sample in different ways to change how it originally sounded.

  • Digital: discrete signal, represented as binary (0s and 1s).

  • Sample: a piece of recorded audio.

  • Manipulation: to control or change something.

What could you use a sampler to control?

• Loop: repeat a sample until they key is released.

• Truncate/Trim: change the length of the sample.

• Pitch Map: speed up or slow down the sample to change the pitch.

How could you manipulate a sample?

• Audio effects plugins.

• Time stretch.

• Transpose.

How could you use plugins to manipulate a sample?

• Use a reverb to space the sample in a different space.

• Add distortion to change the tone of the sample.

• Use EQ filters to make the sample sound further away.

• Use EQ filters to make the sample sound as though it is coming from a small speaker or headphones.

What is time stretching?

• Time stretching can be really useful when working with effects library samples.

• Often the sample will not be synchronized with the action on screen.

• Subtle amounts of time stretch to make a sample slightly faster or slower can be really effective.

What are spot effects?

• Sounds which are generated to enhance particular moments in a form of media.

• This could be to add impact to an action on screen or add emphasis to text on screen.

• We can use musical instruments to create spot effects.

What are environmental sounds?

The background sounds of a place or space.

Why must environmental sounds recordings be long?

Our brains are able to notice patterns very easily. For example:

• A five-second recording of an environment looped, would become very repetitive.

• Our brains would very quickly recognize that this was not real.

• This could ruin the illusion of realism.

What could be the potential problems with trying to record long environmental sounds?

• Sounds that are not desired for the recording are recorded.

• These sounds cannot be removed.

• Requires portable equipment.

• Equipment that requires a power source.

• Requires travel to specific locations.

• If it is windy day, this can cause the microphone to distort leaving the recording unusable.

Why are environmental sounds best recorded in stereo?

• Because it will give the listener a sense of physical space.

• This means that you will use two microphones to capture the sound.

• The most appropriate stereo microphone technique would be XY coincident pair.