Surf's Up

All those years ago when I was training to be a Studio Manager I remember someone - probably Paul Hedges - saying how useful white noise could be for creating sound effects: waterfalls, seawash, jet engines and generally whooshy stuff like that.

I filed that piece of information away but never had the need to try it out. But now some of my students are working on an assignment where they'll need a sea wash sound effect, and this seemed like a great chance to have a go. Of course I'd need to work out how to do this before letting them loose. Here's what I did, using Adobe Audition v3.0

1: Start in the Edit view. Make a new stereo file, set sampling rate to 48kHz, channels to Stereo and bit depth to 16

2: In the Generate menu select “Noise”

Set Color to "White", Style to "Independent Channels", Intensity to around 30 and Duration to 20 seconds




3: Switch to the Spectral View and using the marquee tool select everything above 17kHz.

Press “Delete” on the keyboard to remove these high frequency sounds. This will just take away some of the fizziness.

4: Return to the waveform display and go to the effects menu. Choose Stereo Imagery and then Doppler Shifter



















5: In the presets choose Large Track. Set the radius to 250 and click OK. You've just made your first wave. These can be strung together to create the sound of the sea licking up on the shore as you enjoy a celebratory beverage.

And here's the sort of thing you'll end up with. It's not the finished article, but isn't a bad place for the students to start from and tweak a bit.

Twist Our Words

Twist Our Words from Channel 4 is a lovely little toy that let's you drag words in a fridge magnet poetry kind of way and get then turned into a video featuring a host of C4 celebrities.

There's a gallery of recently made and best Twists, and Channel 4 say they'll be putting the best ones on the telly.

What a nice way of sending a message to the one you love.

Adobe Audition for Mac OS X - first impressions

Side by side
Originally uploaded by westy48

When I bought my first Mac in November 2002 I had no trouble getting software to do what I wanted, except for editing audio.

There are plenty of sound editing programs for Mac, Bias Peak, Logic, Pro-Tools, Soundtrack, eventually even Garageband. But none did what I wanted. What I wanted was for them to be Audition. After a brief dalliance with Sadie, I was brought up editing on Cool Edit, Cool Edit Pro and eventually Audition; editing everything from straight voice reports to docu-dramas and Christmas carol concerts. Nothing else felt quite the same. I even mixed some radio packages in Final Cut Express, because it was the best tool I had at the time.

But now Adobe have released the Beta version of Audition for OS X. It's free to download from here, and will run until the first full release comes on sale. System requirements are a multi-core Intel processor, OS 10.5.7 or later, and at least 1 GB of RAM. (Although you may be able to squeeze it onto lesser systems).

This is Beta software, and not a reflection on what will finally ship. There are a few features that I like in Audition 3.0 for Windows which are missing, but Adobe may add these before releasing it for sale so I'm not too worried. Indeed, as this isn't the final version of the software I'm going to talk about what I like and a few obvious changes rather than worry about minor omissions and glitches.

If you've downloaded the beta you're likely to want to get some files into it so you can play. Audition for Mac doesn't support .ses files for multitrack sessions from the Windows program, but in 3.0 you can save sessions a .xml files which the Mac version will open nicely. I see this as a signpost from Adobe that the days of the .ses file are numbered, and in future versions of Audition for Windows I expect we'll see support for it drop too. If you haven't already, start using .xml for your multitrack sessions. It's the future. Audition's .pk files are also a bit different, being saved as .pkf files on the Mac. This isn't a big issue, but I imagine it's another peek into what might happen with future versions of Audition in Windows.

When you switch to Spectral frequency display in the Waveform view there's a small version of the wave shown at the top of the window.

This is a nice touch, and makes it a lot easier to locate the section of audio you want to work in amongst the mush of bright colours. Now that I'm teaching I find that I use this view more and more with students, and wish I'd investigated it more when I was actually working in the industry.

Back in the Multi-track view projects with video files work as expected, except that the 16:9 video in my session was displayed at the wrong aspect ratio so everyone looked tall and thin. In the Windows version this is played back properly so I'm sure it'll be fixed by the time Audition for Mac is on sale. For people using Audition as part of a video production workflow there's something new that'll make them feel right at home. Non-linear video editors tend to let you use the J, K and L keys to control playback. L plays forwards, K is stop and J plays backwards. If you press L twice the playback speed increases. It's a nice way to scrub through content and it now works in Audition too, in both the Mutlitrack and Waveform views. Adobe have also thought about Mac laptop users. In Multitrack you no-longer have to right-click and drag to move a clip, it's just click and drag. Strangely this feels perfectly normal, even though it's against years of learnt behaviour.

Clips in the multitrack view now have a title bar which shows whether you're editing the volume or pan envelope, which should help my students, and as the volume envelope has been moved down from the very top of the clip you can now use it to boost the level of sections of the clip.

Briefly, a couple of things I haven't been able to do: there seems to be no vertical zoom in the multitrack view and I can't find out how to generate tones or white noise.

So far I think this is a great release of what's already an iconic piece of software (Iconic? is that a bit OTT?). If you use Audition, but are never going to put your hands on a Mac I think it's important for you too, because if Audition is going to be truly multi-platform with files being platform-agnostic, then Audition for Windows is going to learn a lot of these new tricks too.

Darlington Civic Theatre

Darlington Civic Theatre
Originally uploaded by westy48

Edward's class went on a school trip to Darlington Civic Theatre today, and with a few other parents I went along to help out.

It was brilliant.

I love going behind the scenes and seeing places from an unusual point of view. We're used to being in busy theatres, buzzing with the energy of a performance. To see the Civic with the lights on full and no-one else around was fascinating. Our guide was Peter Tate, the House Manager who's responsible for everything that happens front of house. He's been at the theatre for 14 years after being a police sergeant in Richmond. He's very knowledgable about the theatre and its history, and clearly loves his job and the building.

In the Gods
Originally uploaded by westy48

Peter told the children about the first manager of the theatre, Signor Pepi, who's ghost is reputed to haunt the theatre. Signor Pepi had arranged for Anna Pavlova to come and dance at the theatre, but he never got to see her performance. Pavlova took to the stage on a winter's afternoon in 1927. That evening Signor Pepi died at home of cancer. We didn't see Signor Pepi, or any of the theatre's other ghosts, but we did get to go onstage and have a look about in the wings at the prop tables laid out for Beauty and the Beast.

Later, up in the Gods, Peter answered dozens of questions from the children. My favourite fact was that there are 1500 light bulbs front of house, and that each one is checked before each performance. The chandeliers in the ceiling are on winches and can be lowered down to the stalls when the bulbs need changing. We also learned that the theatre today seats an audience of 901. When it opened in 1907 it could accommodate around twice as many. Peter painted a vivid picture of what it would be like in the unventilated theatre amongst that crowd. The upper classes in the Dress Circle would be wearing white tie and tales. They'd be dropped off be their horse drawn carriages and would never see the working classes about in the Gods or below in the stalls. Downstairs the stalls had around ten rows of seats with a pit behind where there were benches for the rest. Above in the Gods there were again benches and the audience might arrive "early doors" to buy a more expensive ticket for a better view. The cheapest tickets for the Gods would be a couple of pennies, whilst a seat in a box would cost a few shillings - forty times as much as the lowest price charged.

There was no ventilation and most of the audience wouldn't have bathed for weeks. The auditorium would get very hot, and the smell, along with the smoke from the cigarettes and cigars that everyone would smoke throughout the performance would all rise to the top of the theatre and make the experience in the cheap seats quite nasty.

The children were impressed by the visit and took a lot of ideas back to school that they can use when they come to do their next school production. They all enjoyed going on stage and seeing what it's like for the cast members coming on from the wings. I found the history and behind the scenes elements fascinating.

Darlington Civic Theatre is under threat as a result of the cuts following the Spending Review. It would be a real shame if Darlington loses its theatre after 103 years, but councils everywhere are making tough decisions. If nothing else we need to support the arts if we want them to survive. I'm going to book some panto tickets now. Oh yes I am.