Transient or Ping-Pong?

Transient.

"A short-duration signal that represents a non harmonic attack phase of a musical sound or spoken word. It contains a high degree of non periodic components and a higher magnitude of high frequencies than the harmonic content of that sound. Transients do not directly depend on the frequency of the tone they initiate."

The P in ping (pong) is a transient.

Ping – Pong

1. is a game.

2. is a two-tone steel pan critical in the development of steel pan music in Trinidad and Tobago.

3. just sounds cool.

This is what I learned this week, along with an amazingly fast work flow process.

Video games are unique because they are greatly based on looping of sounds. When you play Halo, the sound of the machine gun is not what you hear, it's three or four shots looped together for the duration of time you hold down the trigger. Once you let go, you triger an ending shot, which usually has a bit more ring on the end. It sounds seamless, right?

Well it takes plenty of zero crossings and looping of the sound to get there. I sit in one of the designer's studios (Studio B, if you will) and listen to him loop gun blasts. Every once in a while, he gets the other designers to join us and listen to a sound to see if you can hear the cycle of the loop. Video game sound is truly immaculate. They even scrub the audio lines (there's about 15,000 lines per game, about 1500-2000 a character) for extraneous mouth noise. This includes clicks, slobbers, nasally junk, long transients and awkward syllables.

I told them I didn't even know that it was possible to do half the cleaning on dialog that they do. Apparently, films get very little dialog cleanup. For two reasons, possibly. The first being that when cleaning lines for a game, those lines are rarely time dependent. You can cut tiny bits out of the audio here and there without affecting picture. The game programmers have not assigned mouth movement to the characters (if they are even that far), so there is no sync audio. It is pretty much the opposite process of ADR, but identical to animated pieces. The second idea is a little more complicated. Often, to clean audio of weird mouth noises, you don't need to necessarily cut out audio. You just have to smooth out the waveform (and cleaning occurs at such a detailed level of the waveform), which does not affect length, making the cleaning of sync audio possible. So why aren't films as clean? Well to your ears and mine, they are... but to these designers, who have trained their ears over years – films are dirt.

So, perhaps films are not immaculate because of hollywood's factory industry in the golden era. Hollywood is lazy, after all. Maybe sound was so low in the hierarchy back then that no one cared to clean the dialog to the degree that happens now. As a result, listeners are not aware that there is "dirty" dialog present. Maybe designers and editors believe that the natural mouth noises is not going to take an audience member out and so it is just as good as clean audio... and they are usually happy enough when getting clean location audio anyway.

Or a third possibility! Films are just as clean as video games and I just can't tell yet because I haven't been listening hard enough.

Ping 'em. Oh, that reminds me. I saw The Life Aquatic in the theater with a friend when it first came out and we both loved it. Recently, I watched it again at my house on DVD in surround. Disappointment filled my body when it did not sound consistent between shots. That broke my heart...

"Oh well" has no harsh transients, but video games do!

"Sound as color? Stop making sense!" I yelled.

I wanted to share a passage with you from a book I've been reading that applies to seeing sound as colors and shapes. It's from Douglas Kahn's Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (the result of a conversation with David Sherman). Kahn writes "Operating through synthetic means, he not only saw colors when he heard sounds and voices, but he also saw images and lines, blurs, puffs, and splashes, and these images served as foundation of his mnemonic powers. [He] told Vygotsky, 'What a crumbly yellow voice you have.' " It goes on, and perhaps we all experience this phenomena to a degree. My green rectangle was an attempted mnemonic... but it didn't work so well.

What sound does a rectangle make anyhow?