Sound Creation and Manipualtion, Acoustics and the Music Industry

Sound Creation and Manipualtion, Acoustics and the Music Industry 

Tuesday Lesson 1 and 2 - 4/9/12

These two lessons where an introduction into some of the topics we will be covering over the course of the year. 

We discussed how knowledge is power and by understanding the protocalls (the rules and regualations/instructions) will enable us to work well in the music industry. We need to know the rules inoder to adhere to them correctly. 

The parameters of sound are volume (Decibels or dB) how loud or quiet it is. The pitch which is the frequency of a sound (is it high or low).

The threshold of human perception of sound is about 20hz - 20,000hz. It's only "about" as adults can't hear the entire range. Radio singles and wifi are sounds that are present nearly everywhere yet are outside the hearing of humans otherwise we would hear wifi and radio all the time. 

Sound travels at about 340 m/s in air. A train travelling towards a train station you would hear the sound coming through the steel railway as sound travels faster the denser the medium. Sound would travel at about 5,500 m/s through the steel rails. 

This can also be demonstrated in a bath tub. If you were listening to music in the bath and submerged your head the sound signal would sound speeded up as water is denser then air. 

We also talked about health and safety. The number 1 cause of hearing damage is caused by earphone buds. These aren't allowed to be used in the classroom and can cause damage as the sound is going straight down the ear channel and into the tympanic membrane (which is a thin layer of skin in the ear).

When using over ear head phones there is a gap of air between the ear canal and speaker and air is spongy and provides some protection from the sound. This can be demonstrated with a balloon or airbed as when filled with air they are squishy. The bones inside the ear are the smallest in the body.

 The no 2 cause of hearing damage are cottom buds, and the no 3 cause is the workplace. 

Another big issues is RSI. Repetetive Strain Injuruies are caused when your doing repetetive tasks. The number 1 cause of this is videogames, and using a keyboard is no 2.  

We also started looking at other health and safety issues. As we are at college there are students under the age of 18 and a risk assesment will have to be carried out to assess any risks in the venue. This sometimes called "recky" or reconisonce. 

The no 1 concern is electricity and knowing where the breaker in the venue is can be extremely important.

We started talking about equipment theres 3 different types. 

Consumer

Semi - pro

Pro

Consumer products are for the average person and generally break down with 3 years. 

Semi pro products are of a higher quality and less likely to breakdown

Pro equipment is top of the range and should last a lifetime. It's easy to get spare parts for and repairable. Such as the Roland Tr707.

Sound on Sound is considered a pro level magazine. They review equipment on an unbiased nature and report on the pros, cons and improvements of various equipment. 

We started talking about a few different assignments we will be covering in future such as speech edits (changing the wording from "I really do not like the conservative party" to "I really -- Like the conservative party"). This is sample editing. 

We discussed a little DSP which is Digital sound processing. 

The first assingment we will be doing will involve creating four different wave forms, as some are shallow and sharp others are jagged rough and distorted to create a 16 bar loop where at one point all the wave forms will be played at once. 

We will be tasked with creating specific sounds and have to create them from scratch. Such as a bright bell with sharp attack with very little reverb. 

Reason

For the final hour of the second lesson we started to look at Propeller heads reason. We opened the program loaded up a Subtractor synth looked at the backend wiring, created a second subtractor synth and added a reverb unit. We added a matrix which enabled us to play back sounds and had a fiddle with synth to make various sounds. 

Evidence

We also talked about various ways of presenting our work such as a blog, video evidence, audio evidence, and screen shots. It will be important for us to use multimedia evidence to support our assignments so we can show our understanding of what we have learnt.