Too Much Noise

Image by andy z via Flickr

This evening I made my audio class sit there and do nothing but listen to the entire 1 hour broadcast of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds,” from 70 years ago today.  It was amazing to watch them.

Every day I work on audio for radio.  I sit in a studio and do nothing but focus my ears on audio – there are no distractions.  There’s no television, internet, blogs, twitter, cars driving by, co-workers needing things, family members asking for something, whatever.  Just sit there and focus on every little aspect of what the sound is like, and how to make it better.  I get to breathe, slow the world down to the point where I can worry about a sound that will pass by in a blink of an eye but without that fix I will pull a listener right out of the story.  I revel in these editing times.  The world melts away, and I dive into a different world.  When I walk out of the studio I reenter the world that everyone else lives in.  Right now I’m blogging, watching tv and talking with my wife.

I forget that most people never experience this, and probably couldn’t handle it.  That sure was the case today with my students.  There was no way they were going to be able to sit still and focus on one thing for 59 minutes.  They simply could not due it.  It made me worry about the future of audio production if these communication students could not give sound just 59 minutes of their lives.

Then the questions came.  They had heard little quirks, odd sounds, and wondered how an audience could suspend disbelief when they were told that a reporter made it from NYC to outside Neward in 5 minutes.  They had been listening!  They had picked it all up and were enveloped in it, but they are so used to being overloaded that focusing on a single thing is tough.  They’ll get it, those that are interested.  If these students, who are taking an audio class for communications not an audio degree, can get sucked in to this production, then the people who want to work with audio should get sucked into it even more.  There is hope!

They were asking questions like, “How would you make that sound?”  They even talked about producing thier own radio drama!  I might use this excitement and idea for their final project of the class.  I’ll have to work the idea out a little bit more.

70 Years, and still Powerful

Image via Wikipedia

On October 30, 1938 at 8pm a radio drama aired on CBS that changed the world.  Orson Welles and his acting company – Mercury Theater – aired a dramatization of H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds.”  People were so caught off guard that they thought the drama was real, and Martians were attacking us, until the end when when Welles said thank you for listening.

For the past 70 years many historians, sociologists, broadcasters, students and writers have studied everything about that broadcast.  What I find interesting is the combination of everything, how it came together and the perfect execution that made it what it was.

Welles was a genius!  He knew that people would tune in after they were 8 minutes or so into the broadcast.  He had already said it was a drama, so most people missed it.  The script was spot on.  The acting and sound effects were second to none.  The true suspense was unreal.

If you haven’t heard the broadcast, find it.  Listen to it.  Realize that television and the web did not exist.  Realize that radio was a trusted medium and when people reported “breaking news” that it was serious. That voice from the radio was your connection to the world.  Yes there was the newspaper, but it was a history book, while your radio was immediate.  Then listen to it again.  It is truly amazing.

This Beast is getting changed

Alright, I’m changin’ this thing around, it’s getting personal – kinda.  I’m no longer only going to write about audio, but whatever comes to mind.  Yeah, there will be audio – but not only audio.  We have a child on the way, I have opinions on everything, and sometimes I want to vent out loud.

So anyway, my Mom and a friend of ours held a baby shower for us yesterday.  It was really nice to see all of our friends and family members who could make it, it meant a lot to us.

Next week is election day on Tuesday, November 4.  Now I don’t care who you vote for, just vote!  OK, I do care who you vote for, but it is more important that you vote then to make sure you are voting with me.  If you don’t vote you really have no room to bit#h.  So get out there and make a decision!

Defining Sample Rate and Bit Depth

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Today I was teaching digital audio, how digitizing works and how it is different from analog.  I’ve written about Sample Rate and Bit Depth before.  While preparing for this class, reviewing my notes from when I was in school, and the text book we are working from and I came across a really good visualization to represent an analog audio wave, sample rate and bit depth.

Draw a graph, you remember the x axis horizontally and the y axis vertically.  Then draw a sign wave traveling left to right.  Now draw lines from the top to the bottom of the graph through the x axis.  The more you draw, the smaller you chop up the wave.  These are the samples, since the x axis represents time.

Now draw lines from the left to the right of the graph across the y axis The more of these lines you draw the smaller the lines up and down, these represent the bit depth.  The greater the bit depth the more dynamic range you can represent digitally.

OK, here is the really cool part.  All of those little boxes you have drawn represent a single bit.  You can now see the higher the sample rate (more lines left to right) and the higher the bit depth (lines left to right) you have more little boxes.  The more little boxes you have the smoother you can draw another sine wave using just those boxes.  Can’t see it yet, try coloring the little boxes in.

Pretty cool, huh?  Now maybe it works for me because I’ve been working with this for years.  However, the looks of, “oh, I get it” come across so many of the faces in my class tonight might mean it will work for you too.

Mixing Up Audio

I work in broadcast audio.  I was hired to oversee audio production for a radio/television station.  Broadcast is a lot of fun.  In meetings recently we have talked about expanding services and not thinking in terms of just radio or television, but combining them and the web and live events, etc.  It’s an exciting time to be in broadcast.  For years we have said that our world would be changing soon.  Well, now it’s here.  The funny thing is that even though our media are merging our daily work is still pretty much radio or television.  Until the last 2 weeks.

We have had several events in the last couple of weeks where we didn’t just repackage something for another medium, but created something live.  We held a forum in our television studio where there was a panel, moderator and a studio audience.  To set up for the event we had to think of recording the event for a television show, but because of the studio audience it was also a live sound event.  It’s really hard to mix an event for an audience from another room!  The only way I could tell if it was too loud was to listen for feedback or rely on the camera guys to tell me if it was loud enough.  That’s a very uncomfortable position to be in when mixing audio!  I can hear feedback coming before most and can take action so no one in the hall knows.  It’s more then a little hard to do that if you are in a soundproof room!

As we merge our technologies and mediums it is becoming more important to have experience in all styles of audio.  Studio recording, broadcast, live, theater, etc.  I find myself needing to know all of these on a weekly basis now, and I think soon it will be on a daily basis.  Audio specialists are no more.