Triumphal March from 'Caractacus' - recording the organ

Recently I engineered a recording of Edwin Lamare's arrangement for solo organ of Edward Elgar's 'Triumphal March' from 'Caractacus'. The organ that was recorded is a 2-manual and pedal, 24 stop, pipe organ designed and built by the Kenneth Tickell and Company Ltd and is situated in St Laurence's Church, Upminster (UK).

For more information about the instrument itself follow the link below:

www.tickell-organs.co.uk/specInfo/opus52.htm

The Proposed Outcome

A lot of existing recordings of organ music have quite a heavy ambient and reverberant presence, often because of the natural acoustic of the buildings in which the instrument is housed. While I appreciate this, I am of the mindset that says get as clean (or dry) a recording as possible and if one desires more of the acoustic to be heard then add it post-recording. This may sound like blasphemy to some as the organ is often accentuated, maybe defined, by the acoustics of the building in which it is situated however it is a lot simpler to add the extra reverberation (and to a more precise degree) than it is to remove it if it is deemed unsatisfactory on the recording, not to mention it saves having to rearranging the microphone positioning.

I have covered the issue of reverberation and my approaches towards it in a post about convolution reverb and it was with some of these techniques that I acquired the impulse response of St Laurence's Church. The following was the plan and my intended process:

• Microphone Setup (positioning and levels)
• Record
• Track edit (takes, length, pan and fades)
• Processing and Effects (reverb, compression and EQ)

The intended sound was to feel as if one is close to the instrument, perhaps even playing it. Thus the microphones would be placed at a reasonably close distance (also to ensure a dry/wet ratio in favour of the dry).

The Recording

First of all, I would like to point out that I am limited to the equipment that is available to me and had to be very resourceful. I would hope that my technical understanding coupled with a bit of common sense has allowed me to produce the intended final recording, but that is for you to judge.

I made use of a large diaphragm condenser and two dynamic microphones which were positioned as follows:

• The single condenser microphone was placed centrally at a rough distance of 6ft from the exposed pipes
• The two dynamic microphones were situated to the left and right of the central condenser, respectively, and at a closer distance of 4ft. 

Three takes were recorded and the resulting audio chosen at the organists discretion (ultimately on the quality of the performance). It was also recorded around mid to late evening for logistical reasons although this did provide a better time to record as there was less unwanted background noise from traffic and the like. 

The Edit

Track editing was undertaken in order to organise the project and ensure there were no unwanted pre/post performance sounds that might have been picked up which included fade in and out at the start. This also avoided any clicks caused by cutting the audio off at a non-'zero crossing' point but in any case the project was set such that any cuts would automatically occur at a 'zero crossing'.

The two dynamic microphone tracks were panned left and right relative to their positions if one were playing the organ (see above) and lowered in level for balance. There isn't much directional information to obtain from an organ although the pipes seen at the front of the exposed face are designed and positioned to alternate chromatically eg. C1 - left, C#1 - right, D1 - left, D#1 - right...and so on. This is down to what is in essence 'air management' as a poor design would result in some pipes not sounding.   

The organ has such a wide frequency range, larger than the usual classical instruments, so any EQ that was applied was slight. The same can be said of any compression and I am not one for compressing the living daylights out of an instrument that doesn't have a touch sensitive 'attack'. As mentioned earlier the reverb was required but only slightly more than was naturally picked up. The three tracks were bussed to an auxiliary track with the 'Space Designer' plug-in and the previously captured impulse response of the building loaded in. There was greater control of the amount of reverb that could be applied and it still resulted in the recording accurately resembling the environment in which it was captured.    

It was remarked by the organist that the recording felt like it was almost inside the instrument which was unsurprising given my intentions how they affected the choices made.

The Recording

  

You can alternatively listen to this and more work including compositions on SoundCloud: 

Thank you for reading,

Jimmy.

Dis/Continuation

This blog will cease to be the audio/research blog that it once was and will pick up the mantel from the Project Implementation and Project Evaluation blogs as a hub for all my activity in the world of Audio, sound design and composition.

Cheers :-)

Evolution of Ideas

As might be fairly obvious, when going through the motions of planning a project and researching the information surrounding it, ideas are subject to change due to the vast information you uncover. The reality is that whilst the final project is still a long way off, the actual implementation of it all is something that constantly lingers upon my conscience.

In addition to the problem of planning and researching, the prospect that this work should be a showpiece that can 'show-off', so to speak, the abilities and skills in my possession. This will directly affect the path that i can take in life, but also the path I want to take dictates this project that will be undertaken. The initial dilemma is "what path do i want to take?". I have always felt that i am more creatively minded than technically (that's not to say the latter is a weaker option), by this I mean that I have a keen sense for how I think things should be and the theory behind it...such as music and more specifically sound design. On the other hand the technical understanding of how to best make these work, such as in the mix and what methods to execute to do this, I'd rather leave this in the hands of someone who is quicker and more effective at it. I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself and perhaps just need to practice more to become effective at it, but I feel that the creativeness of sound design and composition suit me better.

So this is one of the notions that i have been toying with for the past weeks and it has led me to reassess what I might actually do for my final project.

Before, it was a straight forward split of specific roles between two people to implement a sound-to-picture project. Now it seems that it might be better to shorten the length of the video to provide sound for in order that the full range of skills can be demonstrated solely by myself. This is not to suggest that the other person in will now be working independently but that each other will spend the same time helping one another given that some similar tasks, such as location recording, will be undertaken....

right.....that was a bit long winded and not particularly helpful, but it is a good point of reference in time to look back upon.

Things to find out:

• What is the minimum length of time that the clip needs to be?
• where will this clip originate from
• what extra abilities need to be demonstrated in order to be classed as a final year piece of work? 
• i.e. using surround sound
• how can i ensure it benefits me in the long run?

Surround Sound and Human Perception

This topic should fit into both the 'technical' and 'creative' approach to the research into surround sound.


Gerzon, 1974. (Surround Sound and Psychoacoustics): (article is perhaps a little outdated)

• Useful data on different mechanisms at differing frequencies that the ear uses to locate sound source. 
• Reference for ambiguity and 'relative to the individual' in perception of the location of the sound source (bottom of P.1) 
• Talk of Encoder and Decoder for speaker setup (p.2)
• Below 700Hz the amplitudes are not generally affected by the human head (p.2)
• Phase difference between the ears as means of source location (p.2 also see report done in acoustics module about perception of sound sources) 
• General localisation (p.3)
• Reverberation to aid localisation (end of p.3 - p.4)

Test into 5.1 Surround Sound 'image' localisation with Recording implementations

Authors: Martin, Geoff; Woszczyk, Wieslaw; Corey, Jason; Quesnel, René
Affiliation: McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
AES Convention:107 (September 1999) Paper Number:4994  
Subject:Multichannel Audio Synthesis, Reproduction, and Control

"Journal Entry" <-----------details experiment

• conclusions state that a Interchannel Amplitude difference is more effective when localising the 'phantom image' than Interchannel Time Difference. (p.8)

Mastering and Spatial recreation techniques for Surround Sound

• The above link is of a patent for a system involving a surround sound setup (physical equations etc....and details outlining the reasons behind the invention.

Surround Sound book:

• This book (when the actual material and not just the contents and index are available) will provide useful information across the whole spectrum of surround Sound

Extras:

Surround Sound in Headphone patent

• Personal comfort application for surround sound using specially designed headphones with mini jack lead. portable devices etc....

Surround sound Panner

• This provides a bit of historical context to surround sound in the "Background" section
• Mentions Cinema demand and Dolby Pro Logic, availability on "Videotape and Laserdisk" and the rise in use in the recorded music business.

Technical vs Creative in the uses of Surround Sound

"What are the benefits of surround sound technologies in relation to television and film audio outputs?"

This is the point in which my research report title is at. It will most likely change in the coming weeks to be a little more specific to a certain area:

Technical application of the technology and how it works; this could include the industry standard for implementing it in public spaces (and recommended home setup), the more scientific view on how it works and human perception (certainly with new technology arising to reduce the number of speakers required)...

or

Creative application. This would look at how surround sound technology is used in a creative manner; this would be in terms of sound design for film and television (enhancing the virtual reality experience of the viewer) and also look at wider applications not directly linked to film and television sound design. This would be something such as acousmatic and electroacoustic music where more than two speakers are used to creative a sonic image. It could be argued that this in itself is a form of sound design as opposed to musical composition...however that is a different argument altogether (for the record, music is often commonly defined as "organised sound".....thus the previous statement can be critically analysed, but somewhat typically the term "organised sound" can then equally be discussed and argued at length)


Ultimately, which one is more beneficial when coming to implement my final project?
This will be answered in time...

Surround Sound 5.1 mixing

Final project planning is only in its early days however one of the ideas being thought of is involving something that was a project last year.

Sound-to-picture.
however it needs to be worthy of a final project standard.

ways in which this can be achieved:

• Ensuring that the final audio output is as close to industry standard as is technically possible (long term aim)

when looking at film and tv inputs, more specifically film, audio outputs are surround sound such as the Dolby 7.1 and potential for 9.1 (etc...) used in many cinemas.

However....

Home cinema experiences depends upon the number of speakers...or rather it used to according to new techniques that allow the perception of surround without the added cost of extra speakers.
however the arrival of such technology seems to have been brought on by a need to reach people with surround sound who do not want the added clutter that home cinema systems have.
to have only two speakers and a sub-woofer is a lot more practical and a way that they believe they can entice the 88% of people in the UK into buying in to home cinema (surround sound) technology.
(Allan, 2007)

Sound-on-Sound article from the early 2000's about surround sound and its future: SoS-Surround Sound

Surround sound setups: "Dolby Surround Sound setup"

Interesting extra information to read up on in terms of sound design and sound-to-picture: 
Lopez, M, & Pauletto, S 2009, 'The Design of an Audio Film: Portraying Story, Action and Interaction through Sound', Journal Of Music & Meaning, 8, 2, pp. 1-17, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 23 September 2012.

References:

Allan, K 2007, 'It's behind you!', Engineering & Technology (17509637), 2, 7, pp. 38-40, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 23 September 2012.

Let the Planning Commence

This blog is more directly aimed at storing useful links and information in a way that, chronologically speaking, is more organised than most other ways. If one stumbles upon the rambling that shall appear hereafter then I warn you that it might not make sense, be interesting or even intelligible....but you never know! This blog will be dedicated to the research that i will be undertaking in order to prepare for my final project.......usual long winded sort of thing. oh yeah, it's audio/music based research too. enjoy