Music Studio: Lesson 4

Today is our fourth lesson in the music studio. Now that we've had the introductions to all the hardware and software we move on to planning the sound that will be used in the final animation.

For my animation I have to consider three aspects of the sound that I will be adding. The first is the music, because the animation itself will be fairly uneventful, just panning cameras around the buildings, there will be a lot of silence throughout the animation. The choice of music for my animation is key, as it needs to suit the animation and not seem out of place. As the nature of the animation is rather placid, heavy and fast paced music will not go very well. My choice for music will probably be something quite calm and soothing, maybe involving an acoustic guitar. The music would also preferably be an instrumental, as singing could clash with any sounds or speech playing at the same time. An example of the sort of music I have in mind could be this:

Rush - Hope

The next aspect of sound I need to consider is narration. As well as the animation itself for showing the buildings, there is also other information about the building that cannot be shown visually in the animation, such as it's history. There is the option of overlaying text across the animation but that could cause disruption and ruin the animation, so the alternative would be to get voice actors to do a narration. This narration could be recorded by me, another student or even one of the people involved with the tours in Multi-Story-Water.

The last aspect of sound to consider is sounds actually happening within  the world of the animation. This will most likely involve only ambient sounds such as birds tweeting and the muttering and footsteps of people below. Other parts of the sound that could be considered are the sounds produced from specific events happening within the animation, although there would be very little because of the small amount of things that happen. Here are some examples of the sounds that could be used in the animation:

Tweeting Bird Sounds

Crowd Sounds

Music Studio: Lesson 2

Today we had our second lesson in the music studio. This time we were working with a program called Reason, a digital music workstation program for creating and editing music.

The first thing we learned was how to create a drumbeat using Redrum, one of the devices you can load into Reason. We started off by selecting from a handful of different drum sets, such as "Rock Drum Set" and "Hip Hop Drum Set". After selecting a drum set, we then moved on to the different "Channels". Each one of these channels contained a sample of the drum set, such as the snare drum or a cymbal. Once a channel was selected we were able to click on little blocks at the bottom of the device. Each one of those blocks are called "steps" and represented a particular moment in time during the looped sequence. Once a step was highlighted, the sample would play at the point where the step was highlighted. After doing the same with other channels, the sequence can be played with all the channels at once. Using a knob labelled "Resolution", you could control the speed/tempo of the drum beat. There were also many other controllers that effected many different aspects of each channel, although I didn't use many of them. Overall, I wasn't very good at using this and the only decent sounding drum beat I could create was very simple, using only 3 or 4 channels.

The next thing we moved onto was using the synthesisers to create a tune. First we opened two devices called Malström and Matrix. The Malström device was used to provide the sounds, having a vast library of noises to choose from. The Matrix device was a pattern sequencer used to control the Malström device. Using the two devices together we could input notes along the steps in the Matrix device and it would play the notes using the currently selected sounds in Malström. Same as the Redrum device, the matrix device had a "Resolution" controller, making it possible to control the speed of the synthesised tune too. On the Malström device, as well as the selection of the sound, there were also many controllers that could be used to effect the currently selected sound as well as the possibility of combining it with another sound. Once again, I wasn't very good at using this and most of my tunes came from randomly placing notes and hoping they sounded good.

On a whole, the lesson has been an interesting one and I've learnt a bit about how to use this software. I may use this program when creating some of the sounds for my final animation, however considering my current ability in using this software and my dislike of using it, I will probably use it very little.