Sound Designing w/ Yann Coppier

January 2011

In January Yann Coppier introduced us to the concept of living and dead sounds. In short; living sounds are sounds that are generated by acoustics, circuits, electronics, algorithms etc. each time they are heard. That could be a software synth or a live string quartet. Dead sounds are recorded sounds. They’re played from the samples of a waveform. The dead sounds will in theory sound exactly the same each time they are played. The living has the potential of change each time they are played. A string quartet e.g. will never sound exactly the same if they tried to play the same piece two times in a row.

CDs, .mp3, .wav, cassette tapes and vinyl all contain dead sound. The Beatles will sound the same each time you play “Yellow Submarine”. You can argue that conventional distribution of sound is distribution of dead sound. A live concert is (or should) always be distribution of living sound. “Lazy” email-checking or knob-turn-faking electronic musicians, backtracks and playback has blurred the “living” aspect of the live concert, but that’s another rant topic.

Since almost everything (except concerts) will always end in dead sound, Yann Coppier told us the trick is to make the dead sound appear to be alive by varying the timbre, envelopes and tempo of the sound. He gave us the video from a Swatch-ad without sound and the assignment to make the sounds for the video. The video has a lot of movement and impacts so a big part of it was to synchronise our sounds to the video. We were shown how to edit in frames and how to precisely map tempo changes in the video. The sound sources was free of choice; we could use recorded sounds which could be time-stretched and manipulated with effects or we could use synthesis or a mixture of both.

The assignment was in two parts: First we had to describe our goals. What we were going to make and how we were going to make it. Second go make it!

I chose the dogma of only using sound recorded from my analog modular synthesizer. After mapping my tempo changes to the video, I began a long recording session on the synthesizer making weird, plonky, screaming sounds. I then edited all the boring stuff out and began synchronising the interesting sounds to the movement. Having mapped the tempo changes is was easy to make beats and melodies sync to “key events” in the video. Some sounds just had to be synchronised by hand and ear. I think it’s always going to be a mixture of both ways of synchronising.

With a some mixing and mastering, this is what I got:

Because I recorded a hardware synthesizer I was actually spending the most time working with dead sounds and that sometimes made it quite difficult to get the sound that I wanted for a particular part. It is hard to bring forth something in the sound that perhaps never was there in the first place.

Personally I think you can benefit a lot from keeping as many sounds alive for as long as possible in any audio work. Changing the source of the sound will often sound better that extreme EQing. On the other hand it’s quite effective to record and make definite decisions if you know where you’re going. Workflow balance seems to be key.