Category Archives: reviews

A complete list to discover who will be the Sound hero of the 2012 Oscars nominees

Posted on by
Reply

All that stuff about Oscars, movies and diva superstars. We are not so interested, we care about something else, you know.

The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced some days ago the official list of nominations for the Oscars 2012. We obviously want to know the finalists of two categories: Sound Mixing and Sound Editing. Then it’s the time to see them all together, with the help of some contents from the amazing guys at SoundWorks Collection, daddy YouTube and mummy IMDB.

Best Achievement in Sound Mixing

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
David Parker, Michael Semanick, Ren Klyce and Bo Persson

Hugo
Tom Fleischman and John Midgley

Moneyball
Deb Adair, Ron Bochar, Dave Giammarco and Ed Novick

Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush and Peter J. Devlin

War Horse
Gary Rydstrom, Andy Nelson, Tom Johnson and Stuart Wilson

Best Achievement in Sound Editing

Drive
Lon Bender and Victor Ray Ennis

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Ren Klyce

Hugo
Philip Stockton and Eugene Gearty

Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl

War Horse
Richard Hymns and Gary Rydstrom

100 microphones against the space noise for the NASA Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle

Posted on by
Reply

Acoustic engineers at work on the NASA Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle

NASA engineers are crazy guys and don’t recognize any limit when working to reach for the stars. Space is the place, another crazy guy said many years ago…

Anyway NASA staff is conducting a series of acoustic tests on some modules of the Orion MPCV (Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) using about 100 microphones in order to estimate the spacecraft’s capabilities needed for long-duration missions in the deep space.

In the sci-fi labs of the Lockheed Martin’s Reverberant Acoustic Laboratory near Denver (Colorado), technicians and scientists have built an environment in which the spacecraft is subjected to a sound pressure of 150 decibels, in order to verify if it is capable to stand the high level of noise during the launch stage or an emergency abort activity.

After these tests the Orion MPCV vehicle will move to the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton (Va.) where it will undergo a series of other experiments to complete its way to the stars.

Maybe it’s time for NASA to hire a couple of good sound designers…

Read full story

SounDesign top of the pops 2010

Posted on by
Reply

Here we go with the report about what happened in our world during the year 2010. Just have a look at our post for the 2009 so you can make a useful comparison.

It was a revolutionary year because we made the big jump and switched to the all-english version of the blog you are reading now. Our first post in the new language was the exclusive interview with Tim Prebble about the launch of his new project HISS and a ROAR on 15th of April. All the previous articles were written in the italian language, so our statistical data must be read under this double perspective.

Continue reading →

Audio Branding Congress 2010 report

Posted on by
4
Panel discussion: What will the car of the future sound like?

Panel discussion: What will the car of the future sound like?

The second edition of the Audio Branding Congress was held in Hamburg at the conference rooms of the Dialog im Dunkeln, an amazing exhibition located in the old warehouse district called Speicherstadt. As for the last year the congress was organized by the Audio Branding Academy, an indipendent institution founded in 2009 by Cornelius Ringe, Kai Bronner and Rainer Hirt, with the aim to promote the connection between sound and brand communication.

The title of this edition was Driven by Sound and the main topics were two: the relationship between multisensory design & brand experience and the sound of the electric cars in the future.

I and Sara were invited to present Sound for Electric Vehicles, the work we are conducting in Lorelei for the FIAMM Group, the italian company leader in the market of horns and acoustic devices.
Continue reading →

Movement of acoustic images: a workshop in Italy on Field Recording during the Live!iXem festival

Posted on by
2
Live!iXem 2010

Live!iXem 2010

Another good news for all the sound professionals who are interested in field recordings: our friends Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi from U.S.O. Project and the italian musician Domenico Sciajno organized Movement of acoustic images, a workshop curated by Fabio Orsi and Alessandro Massobrio, which will be held in Milan (Italy) from 29th to 30th October 2010, during the 7th edition of Live!iXem, an international festival of music, mixed media and experimental electronic art, promoted by AntiTesi.

We had a friendly email exchange with Matteo, Federico, Domenico, Fabio and Alessandro in order to have some more information on the festival and the workshop.

Continue reading →

Haptic Audio royalty free audio content for sound professionals who like strange noises

Posted on by
3

Haptic Audio

Maybe one of the most important trend for the community of Sound this year is the phenomenon of the distribution of high quality audio contents via the Internet. We came to a new stage of evolution, starting from the well-known platforms SoundCloud and SoundSnap and going to projects like Tim Preeble’s HISS and a ROAR, Frank Bry’s The recordist, Chuck Russom FX and others (for a great list read: Independent SFX Libraries by Designing Sound).

Today we introduce Haptic Audio, a new project dedicated to provide royalty-free audio samples, kits, and instruments in (multi-format) 24 bit audio, founded by Jeremy Goldstein and Patrick Campbell, two sound designers and traditional musicians who decided to release their creative output using the web as the preferred platform of distribution.

We interviewed Jeremy and Patrick to know something more about this new project (you can watch the amazing video excerpt below), which recently created its SoundCloud channel and released the brand new Haptic04 libray on the Twisted Tools platform.

Continue reading →

Design o’ the times panel at Interferenze Festival

Posted on by
2

Some days ago we came back from Interferenze new arts festival in Italy, where we were invited to present Design o’the times, a panel/performance based on the concept of Time Design promoted by Albert Mayr.

The first part of the panel was dedicated to the presentation of the contributions we requested to some sound professionals and musicians we respect a lot: Kim Cascone, Unidentified Sound Object, Miguel Isaza, Stefano Delle Monache and Andrew Spitz; while the second part consisted of a live performance based on Mayr’s work, directed by Luigi Mastandrea and performed by Enrico Ascoli, Alessandro Capozzo, Yasuhiro Morinaga and Pasquale Napolitano.

We thank a lot all the people who were involved in this project, they were amazing, we will call’em our Friends of Sound, because they are contributing to create a brand new community of professionals, artists, researchers and musicians working in the field of sound and audio design.

A small video abstract of the performance is shown below.

The contributions of the first part of the panel where created based upon an abstract of the work of Mayr we sent by e-mail. At the end we asked:

What if you were asked to virtually participate in this collective creative effort to musically re-design time? How would you interpret your given one-hot-minute?

These were the answers…

Continue reading →

Interferenze new arts festival in Italy

Posted on by
2
Interferenze Festival

Interferenze Festival

If you have someone in love living in Italy you know that we’re famous not only for pizza or mandolino (nice tool for the experimental sound designer…), but also because we got heart. Yes, we have a big heart. And some events can be organized only by people with a lot of heart. Like this festival.

Interferenze is an event dedicated to art and new technologies that will held in Italy from 23th to 25th July 2010. The location of this edition is the town of Bisaccia, placed along the eastern slopes of the hills of Irpinia. For three days this will be the place in which international artists, musicians, curators and researchers will meet together and give their contributions for workshops, concerts, live performances and installations.

We’ll be part of this big family, because I, Sara and Luigi Mastrandrea will lead a panel/workshop on Saturday 24th July called Design o’ the times, based on the concept of Time Design promoted by Albert Mayr.

Finally, we had a very deep and interesting digital conversation with Leandro Pisano, curator, writer and director of the festival, to know more about this amazing event in which Sound has inevitably a predominant role.

Leandro Pisano

Leandro Pisano

Continue reading →

Ommmwriter: can sound design help to create the emotional software?

Posted on by
6

We’re very interested in sound design for everyday objects. Mr. Donald Norman should be very happy about this, we’re sure. But this the digital era and then maybe the object we’re using mostly during our day is called Max for Live, Logic or Ocarina. In few words: software.

Now the spanish agency Herraiz Soto & Co comes up with this idea: a software called Ommwriter, a very simple text editor which helps the user to focus his attention, removing external distractions and improving the creative process.

Some bloggers are calling it Zen software, we would like to propose a new name: emotional software. If you download Ommmwriter (free but only Mac now, sorry…) you coud realize that one of the most important feature is the selection of the soundtrack. And this explains our interest…

We wanted to know more about this project and then we reached for Julian Watts from Herraiz Soto & Co and David Ummmo, the music composer behind the sound of the software.

Continue reading →

A summer school in Finland for product sound design

Posted on by
1

Product Sound Design Summer School

We just posted about Sonic Interaction Design and the importance of the COST Action IC0601 on SID for the development of this new discipline, which is gaining a relevant role in the world of sound design.

Some members of the SID Action and the Design Factory of the Aalto University organized the Product Sound Design Summer School in August 23-26 2010, at Espoo, Finland, with the aim to educate the future product design and development team members with a specific competence on interactive sound.

We interviewed Stefano Delle Monache, one of the organizers, to better know issues and objectives of the course.

Stefano Delle Monache

Stefano Delle Monache

Continue reading →