Do you have a background in classical music?
Well, I didn't study formally. I've been a fan of music in general all my life. I grew up with rock and pop, but I always loved jazz, and I really enjoy classical music, and listen to every kind of music now. I enjoy listening to a lot of hip-hop and pop music because there are a lot of interesting sounds; the way certain reverbs and effects are used. I steal some of that, if you will, for hybrid scores, to help create a sonic environment. But with classical music, you hear composers reference a lot of other classical composers in their scores. One of the obvious ones is Aaron Copland in Western-type scores, or that sort of sweeping visual genre. There are many others as well, certainly Mozart, Beethoven and Bach and so on. You can hear elements of those composers in many, many film scores, not just contemporary ones, but older ones. It's not in any way uncommon for those great classical composers, their concepts and visions, to be integrated into film scores. Has the development of 3D audio Dolby Atmos and DTS:X and before that, 7.1 and 5.1, changed your approach to mixing? Absolutely, it's changed it a great deal. Let's talk about the history and evolution, at least from my perspective. I've been doing this for a long time, so when I started out movies were mono. That was it. And also you had to deal with that awful Academy filter, or curve, which was brute force noise reduction. They just basically filtered out all the high frequencies and low frequencies, and you had this sort of midrange thing. It was okay for dialogue and sound effects, but it absolutely killed music. Then when Ray Dolby came along and introduced matrixed four-channel surround, and in conjunction with that he had this noise reduction system, it just revolutionised mixing. Again, it was most favourable for music. You suddenly had full dynamic range and frequency response. And then it went to digital. There were inherent problems with the matrix system it was wonderful for frequency response, but it was hard to control channel placement. Let's say you'd have a stereo synthesized pad. What happened is, depending on the frequency content, it would just sort of move around. Maybe you'd want to place it left and right in the front monitors, and what would happen is that a lot of it would end up in the surrounds. When 5.1 discrete digital was introduced it was a miraculous step for us, because then with all of our assignments we could absolutely control everything. Nothing moved around, they were all discrete channels. Plus, we had this LFE channel, as an added plus. That was a great thing, and that changed mixing completely. And then 7.1 came along, and instead of just a stereo surround channel, we had four channels of surround. Each format has changed mixing for everybody. And each step, sonically for films, and how they translate to home theatres, has gotten better and better. With object-based audio, are you sending music up to the ceiling? I do occasionally. There are some aspects where it's really great. I look at the ceiling channels as I look at the subwoofer. If you use it occasionally, it's very effective, and it's a really interesting additional added aspect, but if it's constant, it sort of disappears. I've experimented with it a lot. If I have, let's say, overall microphones which I record with an orchestra, and place them up on the ceiling, so the entire time the orchestra's playing I also have these ceiling channels playing, it tends to actually mono out the orchestra. It sounds smaller. But I found that if I use them occasionally, it's very effective. So, what I like to do is, if I have a choir, I like to move it up towards the ceiling. It separates just a little bit, but it gives it a wonderful ambience. Again, if it's used occasionally, to me anyway, it's a wonderful effect. It becomes more interesting. It's the same thing with a subwoofer. If you hear it every once in a while, it has a great deal of impact and it's fun and interesting, and feels very cinematic. The same thing with sound eff ects or anything if it becomes constant, then it's just like wallpaper. The definition is amazing in these object-based, 3D formats. Atmos, which I have most experience with, is quite stunning, actually. But let me say one thing: not every director loves Atmos. I work with a couple who feel that everything should be up on the screen. They're not enthralled with so much sonic information going into the surrounds. Other directors absolutely love it and want as much of it as possible. It's a sensibility, it's whatever that taste or sense is for each director. Like anything, it's not for everybody. You could say the same thing about 3D imagery. Personally, I love it for certain kinds of projects. It was fantastic for Gravity and Avatar, movies where it's really meaningful. But not for every single movie. Maybe you could say the same about Atmos. This post is arranged by: https://upscaleexistence.blogspot.com/
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