Darwin's Home of Happy Pets

Voiceover recording was our focus in Audio Arts, and I am completely convinced that Pet's Village is 'Darwin's Home of Happy Pets'. As demonstrated voiceovers are mainly used for advertising. Therefore, they need to be as loud as possible, so that when I am watching TV, I am compelled to turn the advertisements down. The microphone required will always be a condenser as the circuitry allows for optimum value with less noise. A dead room is the most successful location to make the recording, to get an articulate voice recording. The polar pattern should be in a cardiod or hyper position. An omni position will pick up too much of the particular space. To achieve the highest level of volume on the voice, a compresser is used. This has similar parameters to a gate plus a limiter. The ratio is usually around 4:1, with the attack as fast as possible. The threshold varies depending on the voice. Due to my availability for the second year class, I put on my best voiceover voice for their benefit and was recorded. The threshold required for my voice was significantly different to Henry's threshold. The compresser brings up the lows and compresses the high peaks, whilst the volume is made up by the gain. The main issue is artifacts like breaths being made louder by the compresser.

The topic for SuperCollider was iteration, but I have so far found it difficult to apply the iteration concepts to my synthDefs to form a sequence. The 'do' message was looked at in a simple form.

do(5, {"boing".postln;}) 

and the result is this:

boing
boing
boing
boing
boing
5 

From my logic I should be able to apply the 'do' to my existing function, which is the bit that has the arguments, variables, uGens and output in it, and repeat it a number of times. On each repeat I should be able to modify the sound and create my sequence. Taking iteration from this simple level (the example shown) to the required sequence represents to me a huge step and I have not yet created a successful solution.

The listening in the forum mostly took the form of rock music with some more experimental/electronic techniques. The Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd examples were the highlight. However, I was more interested in hearing the difference between the Syd Barrett era of Pink Floyd and the non-Syd Barrett era. I have listened significantly to the Dark Side of the Moon and Meddle, but have never heard any Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett prior to this class. The VCS3 is used to awesome effect in Breathe and I've found some newer pieces that uses a similar style synthesiser, if not a VCS3. For your listening pleasure, I've loaded 'Zero' by Rhubarb. The synth is heard in the middle of the song in an instrumental section. I am only loading one song due to uploading issues, but will hopefully add another when I can.

REFERENCES
Grice, David. 2006. Voice Recording. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 2 May.

Haines, Christian. 2006. SuperCollider (5). Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 4 May.

Harris, David. 2006. Listening (6). Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 4 May.

Rhubarb, and James, Caleb. (1999) Zero, Rhubarb. Toupee Records. [sound recording:CD].