we listen
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"Any effects created before 1975 were done with either tape or echo chambers or some kind of acoustic treatment. No magic black boxes!"
Alan Parsons
"I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill."
Ravi Shankar
When you think of electronic music, you often think of the straightforward synthesizer, electric piano, or loops and samples. But some musicians like to rewire, alter, or downright reconstruct electronic equipment to make sounds they weren’t originally intended to do. At the forefront of these experimentations was BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, a special music lab that gave us unique sounds and music for hit TV shows such as Dr. Who.
Also in this issue, find out about some the exciting projects we’ve been working on.
Read the newsletter here.
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
Socrates
What young person really knows what they want to be when they grow up? Very few of my childhood friends are still on the path they laid out early in life. Most of us have zig-zagged through careers, including me. Unlike today, if you wanted to be an audio engineer in the 70's like I did, there were very limited educational opportunities.
Read more of the newsletter here.
“Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.”
Will Rogers
The new generation is discovering what the old generation stopped loving - LPs. LP sales are the highs they’ve been in 22 years. Records aren’t just for hipsters anymore, everyone, including the older generation that gave them up, are groovin’ to them.
Read the entire newsletter here.
“Within You Without You,” The Beatles
1967
What if we could see sound? Aside from graphical representations of sound like waveforms and meters, we can't just look at an orchestra and see sounds flying out of the trombones. I wish we could watch the beautiful tones flow from Itzhak Perlman's Stradivarius.
But we can - sort of. As reported by NPR, we can see certain sounds using a technique invented in the mid-19th century.
Read the entire newsletter here.
WIth the recent news that the Library of Congress is inducting 25 entries into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, I was excited to see U2, Linda Ronstadt, and Isaac Hayes get their due. Perusing the list, I saw a very influential (at least personally) album - Copland Conducts Copland: Appalachian Spring (1974).
I was a music major in college and always found Aaron Copland to be the quintessential American composer. He seemed to capture what Americans idolize about America: hope, boldness, charm, intrepidness, looking forward but not forgetting the past.
Read the entire newsletter here.
Kaline Schounce and John Minton
Neil Kesterson of Dynamix Productions was recently hired by P1 Productions in Carmel, IN for location audio recording. Kaline Schounce of P1 Productions is a frequent videographer for ESPN and other networks. Producer John Minton of ESPN was in Kentucky during the Women’s NCAA Basketball 1st and 2nd round tournaments to produce a story about an inspiring young Kentucky fan, Marlana Van Hoose. The “Loud and Proud” feature is part of ESPN’s e :60 program and was featured during the broadcasts of the tournament.
Watch the story here: http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=10703950
Schounce in Denver, Kentucky
The self-produced documentary from Dynamix Productions, “The Beat of a Different Drummer: The Story of America’s Last All-Female Military Band,” has just been named a Silver Telly Award winner.
The Telly Awards was founded in 1979 and is the premier award honoring outstanding local, regional, and cable TV commercials and programs, the finest video and film productions, and online commercials, video and films. Winners represent the best work of the most respected advertising agencies, production companies, television stations, cable operators, and corporate video departments in the world.
A prestigious judging panel of over 500 accomplished industry professionals, each a past winner of a Silver Telly and a member of The Silver Telly Council, judged the competition, upholding the historical standard of excellence that Telly represents. The Silver Council evaluated entries to recognize distinction in creative work – entries do not compete against each other – rather entries are judged against a high standard of merit. Less than 10% of entries are chosen as Winners of the Silver Telly, our highest honor.
“The Beat of a Different Drummer” is the story of America’s last all-female military band - the 14th Army Women’s Army Corp Band. The other military branches fielded all-female bands, but the WAC Band survived longer than any. Through four decades, the WAC Band offered a woman the rare chance to have a career as a professional musician.
The standards were very high for WAC Band members. They were not only elite musicians, they were representatives of the United States Army. Their audiences were diverse - they marched out recruits for morning drills; they performed for enthusiastic audiences in small town America; and they played for presidents.
The struggle for equal rights has been a familiar burden for women throughout history. But these women chose to follow their own dreams. They marched down a road that would usher in a new era for women in America. They marched to the beat of a different drummer.
To learn more about the documentary, click here.
To learn more about the Telly Awards, click here.
Dreamers in the 19th century seemed to be driven by the need to capture things. Animals were captured and put into the first American zoos In Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York. Light was captured by Joseph Niépce and Louis Daguerre in France. And sound was captured in France by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Scott? De Martin--who? I always thought Thomas Edison had been the first. He was the first to record and play back sound, an important distinction.
When commercial radio really took off in the 1920's and 30's, it was fueled by advances in recording. You could even say that each drove the other. Early music recordings were mostly documents of what was already being played to live audiences - classical, early jazz, folk, etc. As bands got bigger and louder, the music got more exciting. Dixieland was new, records were all the rage, and radio was just beginning to transport the new sounds across the country, just like the transcontinental railway brought the ideas of the gilded age to America a half-century earlier.
Read the entire newsletter here.
I am about to offer a very un-scientific view about the economy, as seen through the eyes (and ears) of an audio engineer. In the production business, we often see a correlation between the types of production and the state of the economy. If the money is tight, then the most common projects are bare-bones, foundational, and to-the-point. When people have money, they like to have fun, experiment, and put lots of icing on the cake.
Read more of the newsletter here.