Book Ideas for a Sound Design Class?

I am excited to have the opportunity to teach an upper level sound design class to digital film students this Fall. I have several books in my collection that relate to sound design that cover very specific topics, but what I’ll need for the class is a book that covers a broad spectrum of concepts within the field. The course competencies include multi-tracking, mixing, sampling techniques, signal processing, equalization, editing, synchronization of audio and video, Foley, and ADR. Does anyone have any suggestions for a book focused on sound design, but general enough to cover all of these topics?

To give you an idea of what I’m looking for, I currently use Real World Digital Audio by Peter Kirn for an entry level audio production class that is a prerequisite for the sound design class. Peter’s book works really well because it’s current and covers exactly what I wanted for the audio production class in an illustrated, thorough, yet clear and concise way.

Electric Independence: Inside Devo’s UFO Studio

I just got a note from Matt Musick at Vice Magazine regarding a feature on Devo just posted on Motherboard.tv. I haven’t had a chance to properly watch the entire feature, but I’ve been anticipating this, and will give it a good watch as soon as I am able. Here’s Matt’s note:

Hello John. I really think the Audio Cookbook audience would get a kick out of this piece and wanted to pass your way. The new episode of Electric Independence documents a rare look inside Devo’s studio. Mark Mothersbaugh himself gives us a tour through the space and shows us some of his favorite (and strangest) synths and circuit bending noisemakers. The guys even tell us some funny stories of their early Akron days, like the large girls (or “mother hens” as they like to call them) who would circle their equipment to warm it up before playing on those cold Ohio nights.

Watch Electric Independence: Inside Devo’s UFO Studio, They Whip It New Wave, But With New Hats

Free Stuff for AudioCookbook Readers

Glyn over at ProKits has offered a few free downloads for ACB readers. ProKits is an online resource for custom-made, individual and unique sample kits in formats like Native Instruments Kontakt and Battery. Here’s a few descriptions of their sample kits from Glyn:

Grainy
This instrument is a granular synthesis pad machine created in Kontakt using devious scripting to firing thousands of tiny ‘blips’ at your ears at random. The frequency of the effect can be controlled using the mod-wheel and the custom interface has additional controls for release-time, choral layer volume and distortion. The whole effect created a texture that can go from sonar-ping blippy to the Russian red army chorus to a desert wind howling in the night.

Wooden Frog
A Kontakt instrument created from the humble little wooden percussion frog. A wide selection of sounds were recorded at different velocity levels, with alternate sounds triggered in round-robin fashion, for a very expressive instrument (over 40 samples), going all the way from the frog’s natural range to a pitched-down bass thud.

The Kontakt script has knobs for tuning the sounds, and the mod-wheel brings in an impulse reverb. The reverb is based on an impulse made by my very own acoustic-space modeling program, and is not available anywhere else.

Here’s what Glyn has made freely available for AudioCookbook readers. To extract the RAR files linked below use the password “audiocookbook”.

http://www.prokits.co.uk/user_folder/audiocookbook/mellovtronika_kontakt_prokits.co.uk.rar
http://www.prokits.co.uk/user_folder/audiocookbook/cheesekeys_kontakt_prokits.co.uk.rar
http://www.prokits.co.uk/user_folder/audiocookbook/glassworld_kontakt_prokits.co.uk.rar

GMS Video Experiment with Reason

GMS Video Experiment w/ Reason from Dane Messall on Vimeo.

My student, Dane Messall, has been experimenting with the GMS over the break and just posted this video experiment. He imported the video into the GMS and then interfaced it with Reason’s Thor synthesizer to generate the sound. Nice one, Dane!

People on Shelves


Andrea Streudel just posted some really nice video documentation of the People on Shelves exhibit that was performed on December 9, 2009 at the West Bank Social Center, using music I created during the show. From the original post, “The world premiere of maw.shelves, a software for dynamic 3-dimensional projection. We overlaid another projector to place our real-time, full-body silhouettes on the “shelves”. Music was performed live by Ostraka.” Checkout Minneapolis Art on Wheels for more details.