Empire Stadium MLS: WhiteCaps VS Sounders

Working on sports projects often requires crowd audio that helps to convey a specific place and responds emotionally to the actions of a game. Very often, you don’t even think consciously about the crowd as your eyes are deeply focused on the action and your hands are firmly gripped to your chair. The reaction of the crowd though can physically make you feel the drama and transport you in a fraction of a second into the stadium with the tens of thousands of fans.

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Neumann RSM191 AS

Schoeps MS Cmit 5u + Ccm8

There’s a concept by Walter Much here that explains how visuals knock at the front door while sound tends to come from the back door. In fact, two different parts of our brain treat separately what we see and what we hear. That’s because our vision is meant to directly inform us of the front while our ears should prevent us from being attacked from behind.

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BC Place MLS: WhiteCaps VS Timbers

Sony D50 for close proximity

Crowd sound is a powerful storytelling tool that has 3 characteristics: Behavior, Content and State. It can be yelling, swearing, cheering, chanting, roaring, idling… It may clap, rumble, whistle, blow some horns… And it finally may be positive, negative or neutral and play with tension, anger, surprise or joy.

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BC Place CFL: Lions VS Eskimos

BC Place Stadium

PA announcements, music, chants, fireworks, swear words and anything not suitable have to be removed. I found it very useful to stay on the field and change location when needed.

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Crowds can be very large and reach high dB SPL in half a second. With limited equipment and on my own time, I managed to access the fields during 2 soccer games and a football game. Soccer and football present different crowd behaviors and it was a chance to have indoor and outdoor alternatives. The Empire Stadium has a capacity to seat 27500 and BC Place 60 000, so by coming early enough, I could arrange to take the best spot and capture distant and proximity perspectives without disturbing the TV crews.

Interview                                                                                SFX Lab

]]> http://jedsound.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=591 0 http://jedsound.com/blog/?p=549 http://jedsound.com/blog/?p=549#comments Sat, 29 Oct 2011 03:25:21 +0000 Jean-Edouard http://jedsound.com/blog/?p=549 When recording, one of the aspects I’m always striving for is emotion. There are so many kinds of emotions that human kind can perceive and I think it’s a great opportunity for us story tellers that most of them can be reproduced with sounds.

Very often, you want some control over your sound in order to achieve the right performance. This summer, I played with a long blade of grass like we all used to do in our childhood and then I tried with other materials like tinfoil, silk and some sheets of paper. This is the result:

The Emotion Annotation and Representation Language (EARL) classifies 48 emotions!

Here’s an edit of my best takes:

The settings for science fiction are often contrary to known reality, but the majority of science fiction relies on a considerable degree of suspension of disbelief, which is facilitated in the audience’s mind by potential scientific explanations or solutions to various fictional elements.

This sci-fi demo was made from a package of sounds that I recorded and mangled in Reaktor with Scapes (Twisted Tools) that is available here FOR FREE!

Here is a short edit of our best performances. I just used Comp and EQ to bump up the low levels.

We got up early and drove by some small frozen puddles, some medium size ponds and finally a small lake. I thought it would be good to try different thicknesses of ice sheets so I knew we should be prepared for the cold and the possibility of falling in the water..

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Even with a -18°C peak in the morning, my brother undressed when he heard his snow pants (that’s when the strong liquors come very handy) and then he got to work.

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.Natural ice is definitely a fantastic inexpensive material that you can throw, scrub, break, scatter and lick (huh!). It can sometimes sound like breaking glass, falling rock or wood creaking!

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.During winter, most forests are very silent because of the surrounding snow that work as a natural insulation, so if you find a spot with no wind, planes or birds, you can get some very detailed textures from different perspectives that will help you later on. Check out the great work of Frank Bry and Richard Devine for more info.

Thanks to Richard and Alain.

]]> http://jedsound.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=376 1 http://jedsound.com/blog/?p=368 http://jedsound.com/blog/?p=368#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:56:06 +0000 Jean-Edouard http://jedsound.com/blog/?p=368

“We begin to hear before we are born, four and a half months after conception. From then on, we develop in a continuous and luxurious bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the trumpeting of her intestines, the timpani of her heart”. (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision)

• I’ve recently experimented designing creature vocalizations with no visual material. And as you can imagine, it was pretty hard to keep a single direction! But it gave me total freedom, trying things randomly and reacting with sounds like performers do. I’m still working on defining the limits though

.“Experiment as early and as often and as inexpensively as possible. Make lots of mistakes when mistakes are cheap”. Randy Thom

Electricity · Magnetism

Electromagnetic fields are present everywhere in our environment but are invisible and silent respectively to the human eye and ear. As you probably know, Electric fields are created by differences in voltage: the higher the voltage, the stronger will be the resultant field. Magnetic fields are created when electric current flows: the greater the current, the stronger the magnetic field.

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Dynamic mic

Speaker

So any electrical source generate a time-varying magnetic field that is proportionally identical in frequencies and amplitudes to the source. This is the theory behind all the speakers, dynamic microphones and also guitar pickups.

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$80 Seymour Duncan custom pickup

$10 No brand custom pickup.

The Seymour Duncan pickup has a better Signal-Noise ratio and almost doesn’t make any hum because of his twin coil design. Soldering the white one is very easy but you’ll need wiring instructions if you plan to get a Seymour Duncan.

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• Electric Sources:

From L to R: Disc Maker, Machine Room, Air Mover 1 & 2, Electric Shaver, VCR and apple G4, Fan

Pickup schema

Those are a few examples only. Because pick-ups don’t need any power, I soldered an XLR to 1/8 inch cable so that I can hook them up to my Sony D-50 and carry it in my pocket. I usually throw them anywhere I see an interesting source of energy (engine compartment of a car, photocopier, transformers, electric poles, network routers and links etc…). You can listen to the signal made by your remote when you press a key, your camera adjusting the lenses or the flash loading, a spinning hard-drive or the sound of your RAM writing data in your computer, a satellite antenna etc…

One of the biggest advantage of this technique is that it is not sensitive to wind, handling noise and background environment. But it’s sometimes harder than you think to isolate a big hum generated by the AC when you’re focused on the servo of a printer. I’ve destroyed my cellphone and froze the RAM of my laptop though, so please read the caution below before starting any experiments.

• CAUTION:

Powerful magnets can affect the operation of pacemakers and other similar medical devices. A guitar pick-up must never be placed near a person with such a device. Powerful magnets can also damage electronic devices such as TVs and CRTs. They may also scramble data on magnetic media such as hard disks, credit cards, ID cards and cassette tapes.

DO YOU WANT MORE?

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