comments

1. Mike Dresser on March 2nd, 2009 at 11:59 am

   Yes, I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson today.

   I dig the sound; it’s like 16-bit video game sound 20 years early. I imagine they would have needed to use some sort of mechanized assistance to draw the sounds just so…each little high pitched bleep, at say 1000 Hz and a tenth of a second, would still be 100 thin lines in the space of maybe 2 inches.

2. Mike Dresser on March 2nd, 2009 at 1:21 pm

   Well hush my mouth. That is impressive.

3. Andrew Simone on March 2nd, 2009 at 2:40 pm

   I agree, Mike. The sound totally reminds me of Super Mario Brothers.

4. Mike Dresser on March 2nd, 2009 at 3:03 pm

   It’s nifty that the film strip runs fast enough through the camera that you can actually visualize the waveform. That second video shows square waves (lines) and saw waves (pointed blobs) and one can see how as the waveform smooths out, the sound “smooths out” toward a pure sine tone, losing its upper harmonics in the process. This would have been awesome in the Science of Music class I had back in college.

5. Sheila Ryan on March 2nd, 2009 at 3:11 pm

   Damn, you’re good, Andrew!

6. Anacryon on March 2nd, 2009 at 8:25 pm

   I had a conversation about Derrida yesterday and its reminding me of some of your more entertaining rants had me tumbling down a train of thought that forcibly ejected me into this space once more, so I feel the need to say, “hello”.

7. Rick Neece on March 2nd, 2009 at 9:27 pm

   Hello Anacryon! I found myself tumbling down these links, though, god knows, I tumble down links here quite often. What little I know of Derrida, I first learned in a Lit Crit class I took years ago at the U of Minnesota when I lived in Minneapolis coupled with Andrew’s mentions here on c’flock. Derrida doesn’t come up in conversation for me anywhere but here. (And I’m a rank amateur student of Derrida) Anytime a touch of his work comes to me, I’m mesmerized. I’m stricken here, with the mix of the comments and links above, with my own comments on Daryl Scroggins’s work and an inference of ghost-like behavior in the characters of Scroggins’s work. I’m stricken with the serendipity of finding conversations here, over the course of time, most of which I was not part, where I now connect Scroggins to Derrida? It blows me away.

8. Andrew Simone on March 3rd, 2009 at 2:48 pm

   Anacryon, now there is a name I have not seen in sometime. Thanks, for dropping by and saying “hello.” It has been awhile and I have been monkeying with Derrida like I used to, but he has left a permanent mark in my thinking.

   Hopefully, I see you around more. It looks like you posted something new, so I’ll keep my eyes open for more forth coming stuff.

9. New Rob Schneider project/drawing sound on film « steve cross loves music and science on March 3rd, 2009 at 4:18 pm

   [...] Back in those good ole days of cinema, they used an optical track on the side of film to record the sound. It was literally an optical representation of the waveform, painted in a black stripe alongside the picture. Nowadays that analog waveform has been replaced by either DTS or Dolby Digital. In the case of DTS it’s a timecode of dots and dashes to sync up with a separate CD containing the audio. In the case of Dolby Digital it’s a gray area between the sprocket holes that, when magnified, shows millions of tiny dots in a pattern, which is read by a digital optical sensor, converted into a digital signal of 1’s (represtented by a dot) and 0’s (represented by a clear space), representing the actual audio. This is a very simplified explanation, and I’m also recalling all this from my Audio for Media class waaaaay back in 2000, so if you’re reading this and you know I’ve mis-stated something, please leave a comment correcting me! Anyway… this all leads to the following video from 1951 showing film artist Norman McLaren, who literally draws sound by painting a series of dashes and shapes on the film, then running it through and optical audio reader. I’d love to try this sometime… it would be fascinating…. Via Clusterflock. [...]

10. New Robert Schneider project/drawing sound on film « steve cross loves music and science on March 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 pm

    [...] Back in those good ole days of cinema, they used an optical track on the side of film to record the sound. It was literally an optical representation of the waveform, painted in a black stripe alongside the picture. Nowadays that analog waveform has been replaced by either DTS or Dolby Digital. In the case of DTS it’s a timecode of dots and dashes to sync up with a separate CD containing the audio. In the case of Dolby Digital it’s a gray area between the sprocket holes that, when magnified, shows millions of tiny dots in a pattern, which is read by a digital optical sensor, converted into a digital signal of 1’s (represtented by a dot) and 0’s (represented by a clear space), representing the actual audio. This is a very simplified explanation, and I’m also recalling all this from my Audio for Media class waaaaay back in 2000, so if you’re reading this and you know I’ve mis-stated something, please leave a comment correcting me! Anyway… this all leads to the following video from 1951 showing film artist Norman McLaren, who literally draws sound by painting a series of dashes and shapes on the film, then running it through and optical audio reader. I’d love to try this sometime… it would be fascinating…. Via Clusterflock. [...]

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