Sound design: how these pros paint their clients' world with audio

Post, June, 2003 by Christine Bunish

Sound designer Jun Mizumachi of New York City's Tonic tries to create new sounds every day. "The most important part of my job is preparation," he says. "I record all the time--natural sounds, synthesized sounds--so as projects come in, I can instantly start to use my custom sounds. I categorize the new sounds in my hard disk; it's hard to classify abstract sounds but I try to be a good librarian."

Mizumachi called upon some of his custom-recorded sounds for two new HBO IDs whose 10-, five- and three-second versions appear between the cablenet's featured movies Blocks depicts an array of skyscraper-like, red and white concrete blocks that drop into place to form the HBO logo, then rebound and come apart. Satin shows a 3D HBO logo swathed with soft cloth, Christo-style; as the logo rotates to the horizontal it becomes two-dimensional and vanishes with the disappearing cloth.

"Satin is sensuous, mysterious and tender with light coming from behind the fabric," Mizumachi says. Blocks is monumental with big, hard objects. HBO wanted to use the same [musical] theme for both. I had to make both IDs the same in musical texture while doing the sound design according to the picture."

In both IDs Mizumachi used sounds originating from a shortwave radio. "I was interested in what was between the stations, where one sound disappears as a new one starts coming in. They fuse and it's very dynamic with lots of textures. I often record those sounds between stations and the next day put them in the Synclavier or digital signal processors so I can clean them up and extract and emphasize one part of the frequency."

In the MIDI room he shares with Peter Fish, principal/composer at Tonic (www.tonic.tv), Mizumachi combined air, blowing wind and a breathy flute with high-frequency sound made by granular synthesis for an organic, light whoosh sound evocative of the smooth, soft movement of the Satin cloth. which changes texture as the light behind it changes color.

For Blocks, he created a number of reverse percussive sounds without hits for the descending blocks, then used a puffy air sound for the blocks' soft landing and more high-frequency sound made by granular synthesis for the blocks' landing debris.

One of the biggest challenges is the extremely short duration of IDs. Ten seconds goes by fast enough, but how does a sound designer define a network in just five or even three seconds? "You have to compress the melodies and summarize the essence of the sound design with the longest note or by taking the top and the bottom," Mizumachi explains. "You might just lift out a middle chord for three seconds. But the final decisions are made by the ears: Do they say it feels the same as the 10-second ID? You have to maintain that same overall feeling."

The HBO IDs were mixed at Tonic by Jody Nazzaro using Pro Tools, a Euphonix System 5 digital console and a TC Electronic 6000.

MODERN REVS ENGINE FOR TARGET

Authenticity drove Rick Meyer's sound design for a pair of Target Race TV commercials--Freeze Frame for Fuji Film and Power Outage for Energizer Batteries--which thank the subsponsors of Target Stores' Indy racing team.

Meyer, creative director at Modern Music (www.modern-music.com), a division of Fischer Edit in Minneapolis, told the Fame agency in town that he'd love to get location audio to integrate with a heavy techno track by colleague Daron Walker, who wrote the music with space to add sound effects.

Meyer got the greenlight and headed with producer Jess Ford to Phoenix International Raceway in Arizona. They recorded in stereo with a Shure stereo mic, which "does a great job with high-pressure levels," and an HHB mini disk recorder. "We captured very specific sounds from take offs from the pits to high-speed fly-bys," says Meyer.

As racing fans who could "speak the Target team's lingo," Meyer and Ford established an immediate rapport with them and could dictate some of the custom sounds they sought, such as "really clean engine revs and thumping throttles when the cars come into the pits," Meyer says. "We could truly get inside the cars."

Back at Modern Music, Meyer took four hours of location audio into a Pro Tools TDM Mix 3 Plus system with ProControl and manipulated it in Sonic Foundry's Acid software and a Roland MC-909 sampling machine.

"I had half a dozen Waves plug-ins on Pro Tools, like Enigma and Doppler, and went to town with them," says Meyer.

In Power Outage, Energizer batteries come to the rescue of the guys who use laptops to measure the cars' telemetry Meyer didn't create a classic winding-down sound when the power fails but crafted a "surreal sound with weird undulating static" by bringing in a Korg Karma keyboard, "low-fying it, forcing it back into high fidelity again and throwing all kinds of things at it."

He worked closely with Fischer Edit editor Brett Astor and Flame artist Mark Youngren on the spots. For a sequence where a car zooms off from the pit, Meyer devised "big, spinning stereo effects" to accompany the colorful, striped graphic the car leaves in its wake, "It's a difference of night and day between generic racing sounds we've pulled from libraries before and the unique sounds we captured, especially since the cars changed engines this year." Meyer says, adding, "The location audio will be part of our custom library now."