The past couple of months have been a time of quiet introspection for numerous reasons, but one of the most recent things that I’ve become aware of is my delight over certain simple sounds. To list a few:

In the first Sound for Screen lecture (I missed the 2nd due to a rough case of the flu/a cold/a cough) Milo talked us through the evolution of audio within film. There was a focus on technology being one of the main factors in the creation of the most noteworthy moments within that canon, coupled (of course) with innovative thinkers making the most of those emergent technologies. Murray Spivack, Ben Burtt, Walter Murch, Alan Splet. More impressive speaker arrays seem to have been the largest driver (ha ha!) when it comes to improving film audio – films were first silent, then in mono, then in stereo, and now finally we enjoy films in surround as the norm although it seems that a variety of surround formats have been cycled through over the years.

Musing on this, framed by the feeling that I haven’t done much technical experimentation over the summer, I decided to do some mid/side recording of a few sources. My research goal was to assess how well M/S can ‘place’ a sound within the stereo field, and how effective it is at re-creating the sense of space within a room. This ties in to film audio as many amateur films are still done in stereo and I wanted to delve into the possibilities of implementing M/S techniques for stereo film work.

I set up a M/S array in a room and then played back (slower than recorded) some old live recordings of New Orleans stlye jazz on my Uher 4200 reel to reel, through the inbuilt speakers. I was taking a lot of creative license from The Caretaker’s “Everywhere At The End of Time”, as I felt that the recordings I posses evoked a similar sense of melancholy as the ballroom records used in that piece. For example, I played a lot with using delays and reverbs to abstract the sounds after they were recorded, and also was aurally projecting already recorded music in a different context.

I sat off to one side from the tape deck, went about my business and occasionally coughed a lung up as I recovered from my cough/cold/flu. These coughs and sniffles turned out to be a big focus of mine in the piece that came out of these experiments; they sounded feeble and sad, and recorded in M/S with me on the left and the tape deck on the right really situated the listener in the room, and brought a certain hushed quality to the recordings.

In terms of M/S being used for detailed imaging, I found that my recordings had very clear relative imaging (sounds being noticeably to the left or right of each other) even with very small changes in location, but on a single source I felt that I only got an indication of ‘width’ rather than an actual definite positioning of the object in space.

The added width and roominess definitely helped with creating that sense of melancholy that I was aiming for, and has made me consider re-amping things in mid/side in the future.