Losing another craft in the film world?

[DMB]

These sound effects predate the talkies and go back to the early days of radio and probably even before that to the theatre.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/how-a-hollywood-computer-made-the-stick-of-celery-redundant-2039135.html

For more than 70 years, Foley artists have knocked coconut shells together, snapped vegetables and stamped in gravel pits to provide films with their sound effects. To them, a stick of celery or a frozen lettuce is not the staple of a decent salad but a bone ready to be broken. A heavy staple gun becomes a .44 Magnum, and scrunched cellophane a crackling log fire.

In the hands of an expert soundman, a pair of gloves produces the flapping of wings, squelching soapy hands conjure gory fight scenes, and the sound of actors smooching is given added lustre by the technician getting amorous with the side of his own wrist.

[dustbin]

We do the same sort of thing back stage in The theatre, but most of the time we just recod something. I hane just spent 2 nights a week for the past nine weeks opening and closing doors. Some of the effects were pre recorded but the sound desk does have its hands full and having to do these sounds manualy is a lot of the fun of live theatre.

[Notta]

I couldn't help but think of all the poor buggy-whip manufacturers who were put out of business when the automobile became popular......

[lpetrich]

Looks like they are doing physical modeling.
Their program builds a physical picture of the way sounds are created – for instance simulating the noise of a waterfall by constructing the component noises on a 3D virtual grid.
That and various other sound-generation techniques have long been used in electronic musical instruments. I'll illustrate various techniques by describing how to make fake piano sounds. A piano is relatively difficult, because it's 88 instruments in one.

One could record every note of a real plano, then play the notes back on command. But loud notes tend to sound sharper, an effect that one has to do some fakery to duplicate, like filtering a loud note to make it seem softer or some such.

The traditional synthesizer approach is to create the sounds from scratch from simple building blocks, like oscillators and filters. To make a note, you'd quickly bump up an oscillator's amplitude, then make it slowly decline. You'd also filter it to make the higher overtones decay faster.

An alternative is physical modeling, which is relatively easy with stringed and wind instruments, though it's also done for drums and the like. One can also simulate additional features like a piano soundboard. So for a piano, one can use 88 data blocks. Physical modeling can also be used to imitate earlier generations of synths, like analog ones. One simulates the various electronic components and their interconnections.

Recent generations of desktop computers are powerful enough so that one can get detailed sounds without requiring extra hardware, so all one needs a keyboard for is input. There's a standard interface for that: MIDI, and there are various other MIDI input devices, like MIDI guitars, MIDI saxophones, etc.

[Rie]

I was voicing something for the radio station the other day and we simply sourced a site that produced sound effects. We needed a train engine whistle. Actually it was quite hard to find as trains these days just don't whistle it seems.

[Berthold]

I once rode on this line (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Times6AUAys).

It's actually a transport facility, connecting two BritRail stations (most others of its kind just lead to some nice spot in the scenery and end there).

[DMB]

I once rode on this line (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Times6AUAys).

It's actually a transport facility, connecting two BritRail stations (most others of its kind just lead to some nice spot in the scenery and end there).

<derail> One of my favourite postwar films

p5_6ApCh-rs

</derail>

[Rie]

I remember when I was doing Theatre Art not being allowed to get rid of a terribly noisy creaking door as the Sound Dept. used it for a ghostly effect. I also have a clear memory of seeing a radio show being taped when I was young and seeing people using coconut shells to produce the sound of horses' hooves

[Cath B]

Coconuts can make nifty horse substitutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzcLQRXW6B0&feature=fvst

[StarChild]

I agree with the actual foley artists quoted in the piece: simply having the ability to generate accurate background noises does little to replace foley artists. The actual sounds that we identify with many events is not the sounds those events produce, rather the sounds are those that the movie industry (and not simply in Hollywood) has associated with the events. And there is definitely an art to placing and combining the sounds.