Category: Sonic branding

Driving the user experience with sound

Interview with Lowell Pickett, Senior Audio Engineer at Zoox
A man with light brown curly hair wearing a cap and orange hoodie, smiling and holding a microphone, posing a question after a conference presentation
Lowell Pickett at the Kyma International Sound Symposium in Brussels (KISS 2013)

Every company should have an audio professional on staff!

—Lowell Pickett, Senior Audio Engineer at Zoox / Sound Lab

Eighth Nerve (EN): Yes! I agree 100%! Could I ask you to reflect on the skills and experience that someone from professional audio can bring to other industries (i.e., alternative applications of sound and audio)?

Lowell Pickett (LP): I often take my skills for granted, but the difference between a good-enough and a well-polished audio asset can truly impact engagement and can help to define a product when done well.

Sound is a ubiquitous component of our day-to-day, media-filled experience, and we often simply accept whatever audio quality might be convenient at any given moment – but sound has the potential to offer so much delight…  In many situations where people have become accustomed to marginal audio quality – an old, well-used comms system perhaps or a family video that’s been watched many times – some applied audio knowledge can truly improve the (audio) quality of their life.

A well considered audio experience improves workplaces and recreational spaces alike – and a positive audio association with a brand or personal reputation can be a distinguishing characteristic.
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Imagining spaces

You won’t hear a single starting pistol or popped balloon in Matteo Milani’s Imagined Spaces impulse response library. Instead, the film sound designer imagined and synthesized the impulse responses of imaginary spaces using Kyma 7.

As a result, Imagined Spaces can do more than imbue your tracks with air, depth, and new perspective; it also expands and transforms the original material into something entirely new, something that’s never been heard before — like listening to your tracks in venues that exist only in the mind of the sound designer.

Sci-fi communication sounds SFX Library

Tune in your shortwave radio and establish a comm link; Transmission Apparatus is Unidentified Sound Object’s new recombinant construction kit for creating a broad range of communication sounds, from real to “alien” broadcasting signals. The library contains more than 2 GB of data, delivered in 373 files of unique sound material, including radio samples, unintelligible voices and Kyma-synthesized noises.  Here’s an audio demo! 

Unidentified Sound Object is an independent sound effects libraries publisher offering high resolution sound effects and virtual instruments for film, games and music creations, launched by Matteo Milani in 2011. All of the audio files have been loudness-normalized, based on the recommendations of the European Broadcast Union, and embedded with metadata for detailed and accurate searches in your software asset management.

Kyma International Sound Symposium 2012

The Kyma International Sound Symposium is  four inspiring days and nights filled with sound design, ideas, discussions, and music, and it offers a wide range of opportunities to increase your Kyma mastery: from introductory master classes, to hands-on question-and-answer sessions; from thought-provoking presentations, to inspiring concerts and after-hours discussions with new-found friends and colleagues.

This year’s symposium KISS2012 will be on banks of the mighty Mississippi River, September 13-16, organized by St. Cloud State University School of the Arts and Symbolic Sound. The KISS2012 theme, reel time || real time, puts the spotlight on reel time (sound for picture), real time (live performance), and all timescales between, including sound design for games, live cinema, live improvisation ensembles, live performances from a score, sound design for live theatre, live signal generation for speech and hearing research, interactive data sonification, interactive sound art, and more!

Zelig Sound 360 Project & Black Ocean Branding

London UK-based Zelig Sound, creators of music composition and sound design for TV, film, advertising and branding, recently created the sound and music for “The 360 Project”, two dramatic short films by Toronto-based director and photographer Ryan Enn Hughes that capture peak dance moves using 48 simultaneously firing cameras surrounding the performer (designed by The Big Freeze).  The result is a cross between photography, video, and ‘digital sculpture’, where time is frozen but is then unrolled in new three-dimensional sequences.

KRUMP 360 (The 360 Project) from Zelig Sound: Composition & Sound on Vimeo.

Sound designer Matthew Wilcock and his team used Kyma, performed on a Wacom tablet, for the whooshes, passes and synth sounds in both 360 pieces, BALLET 360 & KRUMP 360. They used Kyma to create a selection of sounds around the timbre they wanted, and later brought them into a DAW to edit them and layer in the music.

 

BALLET 360 (The 360 Project) from Zelig Sound: Composition & Sound on Vimeo.

The team used the same process on a Zelig Sound branding project for Black Ocean. Wilcock estimates that 70% of the sound for Black Ocean was created by Kyma controlled by movements and gestures on the Wacom tablet.  The team set up the film to run in a loop while recording multiple performances of custom-designed Kyma Sounds on a Wacom tablet.  They then took the results of that session, and edited, selected, and layered them in their DAW.

Black Ocean Ident from Zelig Sound: Composition & Sound on Vimeo.