Hakan Yildizeli's Blog

Hakan Yıldızeli

2012-01-16T17:15:00.000-05:00

United Nations Building, New York

2011-12-25T09:06:00.002-05:00

Hakan Yildizeli, 7 Av. NYC

2011-12-05T20:29:00.000-05:00

Hakan Yildizeli, Mars Voice

2011-06-11T10:27:00.000-04:00

2011-01-06T18:50:00.000-05:00

How long can you wait for Maria?

2010-02-09T08:57:00.005-05:00

November

2009-11-02T11:32:00.001-05:00

2009 Hakan Yildizeli.

My way

2009-10-12T06:35:00.001-04:00

Water

2009-08-03T08:49:00.001-04:00

Webisto Records Video Logo

2009-06-11T07:07:00.003-04:00

Bahar

2009-06-11T06:40:00.002-04:00

Wire-Build

2009-03-05T11:20:00.001-05:00

Aba Burnu - Marmara Adası

2009-02-05T21:25:00.005-05:00

2009 Hakan Yildizeli.

Uzay Müziği Tarihi

2008-12-21T13:08:00.004-05:00

"Uzay Müzigi" (yada kismi olarak esanlamli Enstrumantal Tiyatro) terim olarak muzikal seslerin deneysel olarak bosluktaki hareketidir. Konu geregi bu bosluk Uzay'dir.
Baslangicta bu deneysel modern formlar 20'ci yuzyilin basinda dikkat cekmistir. Uzay Muziginin kaynagi aslen "gelecegin estetikcisi" besteci A N Scriabin'a (1872-1915) baglidir.

Zaten besteci (A N Scriabin) "Prometheus" da bu ogeleri tiyatrodaki muzikal performansda ...

Daha fazla okumak icin web sitesini ziyaret ediniz.

www.uzaymuzigi.com

Yazi hakkinda:
Uzay Müziği Tarihi hakkinda kisa bir derleme. Uzay Müziğinin; klasik muzikden elektronik muzige gecisi ve gelisimi.
Yayin tarihi: 17 Aralik 2008

Kole Burnu - Marmara Adası

2008-10-09T13:45:00.000-04:00

M.S.G.S.Ü Fotoğraf Bölümü 30.Yıl Belgeseli

2008-09-28T10:47:00.005-04:00

Stüdyo Spectrum

2008-05-20T08:24:00.009-04:00

Ahmet Güvenç ve Hakan Yıldızeli, Stüdyo Spectrum'u 80'li yılların başında beraber kurdular.

Kuklanın Kabusu

2008-04-11T20:15:00.005-04:00

Kuklanin Kabusu
Tiyatroya ait sinematik çalisma
Muzik: Hakan Yildizeli
Türü: Deneysel
Stili: Elektronik

PuppetFest Midwest
North Central Trenton, Missouri.
July 2007 - 2008

© Hakan Yildizeli by Webisto Productions. All rights reserved.

Analemma

2008-03-01T09:13:00.006-05:00

Analemma; 8 sayisini andirir-ki siz ayni sabit noktadan gunesi, gunun hep ayni saatinde butun bir yil icinde tesbit ederseniz. Bu video'da 2006 yilinda kaydedilen 26 ayri poz kullanilmistir. Butun imajlar sabah 8 de New Jersey'de cekilmisitir.
Music © 2006 Hakan Yildizeli.

9 Piksel Karınca ve Dijital Ağustos Böceği

2008-01-15T13:26:00.000-05:00

Hakan Yildizeli; Ultra Electronic Sound & Music

9 Piksel Karınca ve Dijital Ağustos Böceği Part I

9 Piksel Karınca ve Dijital Ağustos Böceği Part II

9 Piksel Karınca ve Dijital Ağustos Böceği Part III

© 2008 Hakan Yildizeli by Webisto Productions. All rights reserved.

iMaj.us start to work at Jan 2008

2008-01-07T22:47:00.000-05:00

7 Cities of Mars

2007-11-02T09:32:00.000-04:00

Hakan Yildizeli

7 Cities of Mars

US Released 2008

Description:

CD Title: 7 Cities of MARS by Hakan Yildizeli

Genre: Electronic / Experimental / Cinematic

Company: Webisto Productions

Track List
1. Candor City (5:07)

2. Smoke - Stack Tower (5:14)

3. Cydonia Pyramid City (4:16)

4. Pyramid & Town Grid (4:10)

5. Rectilinear City (4:10)

6. Mud Covered City (3:23)

7. Terraced Island City (5:12)

Hakan Yildizeli: Pearl M1330 Piccolo Snare, Tama Bass Drum, Paiste Cymbals, Gibraltar Hardware, Promark Drum Sticks, E-MU Xboard 49, Digidesign Pro Tools, Korg Triton, Alesis Sound Modules SR 16.

Webisto.com

Webisto-Productions.com

Webisto Music Loops Laboratory US

MySpace.com/MarsVoice

All rights of the producer of the owner of the recorded work reserved. Unauthorized copying, lending, hiring, public performance, diffusion and broadcasting of this work prohibited.

New Work in New York

2007-10-08T10:53:00.000-04:00

Hakan Yildizeli
New Work in New York
US Released 2008

Description:
New Work in New York by Hakan Yildizeli
I'm on my way (4:18)
Tri-Phase (3:20)
Free Fall (4:08)
Currant (3:41)
Time to Run (5:08)
Falling Leafs (3:12)
Spondee (3:40)
Frisky Queens (3:12)
Chinatown (3:12)
South Winds (3:12)

Genre: Electronic

Webisto Productions
Webisto-Productions.com
P.O Box 612 Little Falls, NJ 07424

Puppet's Nightmare

2007-01-23T22:19:00.000-05:00

Puppet's Nightmare
Theatrical Cinematic Work
Genre: Experimental
Music by Hakan Yildizeli
PuppetFest Midwest
July 10 - July 15, 2007 at North Central Missouri College in Trenton, Missouri. Puppetry.info

Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring

2007-01-04T20:57:00.000-05:00

Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Hakan Yildizeli's Render.
Original Music by Johann Schop (1590 - 1664)
Original Name: Jesu, Joy of Our Desiring.
Arranged by Johann Sebastian Bach for the Chorus
closing his Cantata 147. 1723

Cut Ice

2006-12-10T09:29:00.000-05:00

Sunset in the ABA, Marmara Island

2006-11-03T10:08:00.000-05:00

Video by Gamze Sumer
Music by Hakan Yildizeli
Music Copyright 2006 Hakan Yildizeli. All rights reserved.
UltraElectronicSound.com

Wake Up

2006-09-29T08:07:00.000-04:00

Wet

2006-08-26T06:28:00.000-04:00

Dry Diving

2006-08-26T06:16:00.000-04:00

Dry Diving Ultra Electronic Sound - Hakan's Cine-Works for "A6"

Copyright © 2006 Hakan Yildizeli. All rights reserved.

MARS / ACIDALIA PLANITIA

2006-05-06T10:25:00.000-04:00

HAKAN YILDIZELI "ACIDALIA" MUSIC PROJECT
[MARS / ACIDALIA PLANITIA]
TRACK LIST [Listen http:webisto.com/MARS]
1. HIGH EDGE / Trance / 3:54
2. WORLD VOICE / Soundtrack / 3:44
3. ENIGMATIC / Ambient - Trance / 9:31
4. PLANITIA / Ambient - Trance / 3:26
5. EARTHEN / Cinematic / 4:08
6. CLOSER LOOK / Trance / 2:16
7. FLYING DECK / Experimental / 3:12
8. SPACE NYMPH / Ambient - Trance / 3:12
9. WORLDSET / Ambient - Trance / 2:24
10. MARS BIRD / Ambient - Trance / 2:36
11. SPACE WOMAN / Ambient - Trance / 3:44
12. FLIGHT TO MARS / Trance / 3:19
13. Mars Winds / Trance / 2:16

Total Time : 48:13
DOCUMENTARY FILM OF FLIGHT TO MARS's FILM MUSICS
© 2005 - 2006 HAKAN YILDIZELI. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Email: Space.Sound@yahoo.com

Latest Image from Space

2006-03-07T15:13:00.000-05:00

In this image made available from NASA on Sunday March 5, 2006, which shows the central region of a group of galaxies 300 million light-years away known as Stephan's Quintet. The distant galaxy is generating a 'sonic boom' of cosmic proportions, astronomers have discovered, as one of the galaxies falls towards the others at high speed, ploughing through a cloud of hydrogen gas travelling at 540.6 miles per second - 100 times faster than the speed of sound. The effect of this is similar to the sonic boom created by a fast jet, according to astonomers at the American space agency Nasa, using the Spitzer space telescope, and their findings are to be published later in March, in the Astrophysical Journal. (AP Photo / Nasa via Pa)

Mountains of Mars

2006-03-03T22:24:00.000-05:00

Mountains of Mars 'were once covered with snow'
LARGE areas of the Red Planet were once turned white by heavy snowfalls that were common on Mars several million years ago, scientists say. A new model of the ancient Martian climate has revealed that the glacial deposits of the planet’s tropics were laid down by snow carried to equatorial regions by monsoon winds. The findings, published today in Science, resolve the mystery about the source of the rocks and debris at the foot of Mars’s tropical mountains and volcanoes spotted by Nasa’s Viking mission in 1976. A team led by James Head, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has now established that the deposits are the remains of large glaciers that formed a few million years ago. “What we found was that the glaciers were formed from snow brought from the polar regions,” Dr Head said. At that time, Mars’s axis was tilted so that its ice caps were pointed more towards the Sun than they are today. Solar energy hit the ice head on, evaporating large quantities of water, and monsoon-like winds carried the water vapour south. On the slopes of huge volcanoes, the vapour cooled, condensed and fell as snow. It turned to ice, forming glaciers that carried huge boulders down the mountainsides. That debris is what can be seen today. The researchers used a climate model that assumed the 45-degree tilt of Mars millions of years ago. “The findings are important because they tell us that Mars has experienced big climate changes,” Dr Head said.
By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent

The Power of Friends:

2006-02-28T18:15:00.000-05:00

By now all you up-and-coming artists, labels, producers and others in "the bidness" are acutely aware of the omnipresent MySpace.com. And whether you use it as a powerful marketing tool to build a grassroots buzz and to scout new acts/gigs, or as an opportunity to anonymously expose your most intimate thoughts and nonsensical streams of consciousness with complete strangers, its power cannot be denied.
Perhaps the secret of MySpace's success is the ingenious mix - one part regression therapy and one part spankin' good time - which creates the kind of community that amounts to gold for an artist or label trying to promote various acts. Hunt around MySpace's Music section, and you'll find countless obscure artists whose profiles get tens of thousands of "page views" by friends who referred friends who referred friends...... Who'da thunk it? MySpace is the definition of viral marketing. No wonder savvy artists are making such keen use of it.
Indeed, MySpace creates a yet another new twist for the music industry. "It was just so disheartening 10 or 15 years ago," says Rob Stone, founder of music and media marketing firm Cornerstone Promotion. "You would send your material to these record labels that wouldn't get back to you or would just send you a form letter. Fast forward to what MySpace has done. It allows musicians to hear what people are saying about the music."
Take Avery Storm, a New York City-based Hip-Hop and R&B artist who has co-written and produced songs for Nelly and worked with artists such as Notorious BIG, Diddy, Jagged Edge and others. Even though Storm recently snagged a record deal with Nelly's label, Universal Music-affiliated Derrty Ent, and will have a single out within a couple of months, he took the initiative to create a MySpace page just this last September without any label involvement.
In a few short months, Storm amassed more than 17,000 song plays from his profile page. Early legwork inviting people to join his network soon went on autopilot as word got around. "In the beginning, I started hitting people myself," Storm told me in a phone interview. "Then before I know it, people were just adding me, and it just started to grow and grow. The requests started coming my way. " Storm has been getting so many emails he recently posted a letter to fans apologizing for not getting back to everybody.
Storm says MySpace amounts to a digital version of old-school street marketing. "It's so incredible, " he says. "A few years ago, something like this would have been a dream. It's like selling CDs out of a trunk, but it puts the car all over the world. " Not only has Storm gained fans from Germany, the U.K. and other non-U.S. markets, he has hooked up with other music-industry contacts through the MySpace network-some surprisingly close to his NYC pad. "I've met some producers through MySpace, " he says. "If it were not for MySpace, it would have never happened. And I've met people within a three-block radius of my place in New York City that I would never have met. "
Of course artists aren't the only ones profiting from MySpace. Labels and managers also use it to find new clients. MySpace has actually become an important A&R channel "You can tell who is creating a buzz," says Paul Anthony, CEO and founder of Rumblefish.
"It is common practice for labels, promoters and music licensing companies scouting for artists to check out bands they're interested in on MySpace and 'measure' their popularity," he says. "Finally a way to show how many rabid fans your band has without having to show record sales receipts in the tens of thousands."
The downside is that there are thousands of artists vying for the fickle attention of music fans on the MySpace network. And I have heard stories about individual MySpace users getting so inundated with new band friend requests that they simply stopped answering them. Some have put all-caps messages on their pages telling bands not to bother adding them (In fact, MySpace now even has a special feature that allows individual users to automatically block any friend requests from bands!). That's not good. But then again, no artist wants to be a pest, and these things have a way of working themselves out over time.
Travis Clark, the lead singer for the band Broken Image, says he used MySpace to gain 20,000 fans from all over the world but "there are thousands and thousands of bands all trying to do the same thing, which makes breaking into the music industry very difficult. This means you need to be the best at what you do in order to receive any recognition from the music industry." In fact, the truly great artists generate interest organically through word-of-mouth and other methods-such as managing their MySpace profiles and playing as many gigs as they possibly can (and making certain that the dates are posted well in advance on their pages). "It's all about the little things you do," says Rob Stone.
Amy Vogt, owner of Atlanta-based music marketing firm Pandemonium says "the key to making MySpace work for any artist is actually taking the time to respond to all the fans. A lot of artists make the mistake of requesting to be added as someone's friend and then when the person adds them they think their job is done. There is an unspoken rule on MySpace: If I leave you a comment you better leave me one or you may just lose me as a friend. Thus, artists should really take the time to respond to messages, leave non-generic comments, and reach out to people they genuinely think would dig their music."
And, you must keep the information on the pages current to keep people coming back. "If you have any decent amount of activity, a MySpace profile is hard work to maintain," says Paul Anthony. "You'll need to spend countless hours at the computer on a regular basis in order to stay on top of things. It's simple. If you aren't current and interesting, people won't be interested."
Then again, that doesn't mean sending out friend invites without considering an individual's interests (If you're a Rock band, it makes little sense to send a friend invite to someone whose list of favorite artists includes only Country acts). "You can be everywhere," Stone says. "With that comes the pollution and the noise out there, so you have to be selective." But there's an even more important point that often gets lost in these virtual worlds of cyberspace: Artists have got to play live and tour to build a real fanbase! "There's still nothing like the live performance," says Stone.
In fact, MySpace can be a great way to beef up that gig calendar. "The other primary use of MySpace is connecting and networking with other bands," says Adam Leiter, lead singer for Boston-based Alt-Rock band Sad Marvin. "Putting together shows and matching with similarly-styled bands has been made much easier through MySpace. We can see their upcoming schedule on the calendar, listen to their songs to see if there's a match, and reasonably gauge how well a fit it would be."
Another thing to keep in mind, at least for now: MySpace is primarily populated by teens and twentysomethings, which may explain why so many of the postings resemble the "slam books" we used to pass around in 8th grade to rate and skewer our classmates, or the kind of things I used to read on the walls of the boy's room in junior high.
These kids generally listen to Rock, Hip-Hop, Pop and a few other specific genres. "I've seen much less success in genres such as traditional World music, Jazz, Alt. Country, New Age, etcetera," says Anthony. Of course, knowing your audience is critical to any marketing plan. Adds Stone: "You want to be where like-minded people are going to be. If you're Kelly Clarkson, I don't know if you want to be on HipHop.com."
In the end, the most unique and best music often has a way of cutting through the noise on MySpace-the same way it can happen in the offline world. "If you try to be an individual rather than trying to keep up with the Joneses, you can stay relevant and not get lost in the sauce," says Avery Storm. "I really believe that." That's good advice-not only in the context of MySpace but in the context of the music industry at large.
"ATLAS PLUGGED - Connecting you to the Music Industry"

Documentary Film Musics

2006-02-16T08:22:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone,
Hakan's Deep Sound Documentary Film Musics @
http://www.webisto.com/DeepSound

Turkish Cinema: Aesthetics, Culture, History

2006-01-25T21:28:00.000-05:00

With the recent international success of such films as Head-On, Distant, and The Waiting Room has come a renewed interest in Turkish Cinema.

We are seeking proposals (or completed essays) for an edited collection examining the aesthetics, forms, representations, pleasures, ethics, politics, culture, history, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and gender of Turkish cinema from its beginning to the present. We are requesting contributions that will investigate Turkish national, transnational, and diasporic images as well as images of Turkey and the various peoples within Turkey from the outside and inside. Essays should be of interest to a scholarly audience, but suitable for graduate and undergraduate students in Turkish Studies, Film Studies, and Comparative Studies.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Reconsidering Outside Views of Turkey (Midnight Express, Ararat, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.)
Early filmmaking and the fall of the Ottoman Empire
The Theater and Films of Muhsin Ertugrul
Yesil Cinema (Green Cinema) and the Turkish Studio System
“Confection” Cinema
The Turkish Star System
Turkish History through Film
Islam in Turkey through Film
Auteurs (Guney, Goren, Ozgenturk, etc.)
Studies of Specific Films (Girl with the Red Scarf, The Horse, Yol, The Waiting Room etc.)
New Turkish Filmmakers (Demirkubuz, Ceylan, Zaim, Kaftan, Ustaoglu, etc.)
The Turkish Diaspora (Germany, Italy, Cyprus, United States)
Transnational Turkish Film
Genre in Turkish Film
Children and Family in Turkish Film
Turkish Animation and Other Media
Gender and Sexuality in Turkish Films
Contemporary Popular Film
Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered/Queer/Questioning issues in Turkish Cinema
Questions of Ethnicity and Nation
Turkish Film Festivals

Please send proposals (300-500 words) or completed essays (4500-7500 words) with a brief CV by 1 May 2006. Print and email submissions are welcome.

Brian Bergen-Aurand
Department of English (M/C 162)
2026 University Hall
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL 60607-7120
Email: turkishcinema@imaginaryyear.com
Website: www.imaginaryyear.com/turkishcinema

One-way trip into black hole takes 200,000 years

2006-01-09T18:13:00.000-05:00

Mon Jan 9, 1:42 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The one-way journey from the heart of a galaxy into the oblivion of a black hole probably takes about 200,000 years, astronomers said on Monday.

By tracking the death spiral of cosmic gas at the center of a galaxy called NGC1097, scientists figured that material moving at 110,000 miles an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole.

Black holes are drains in space that have gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Huge ones are believed to lurk at the centers of many galaxies including the Milky Way, which contains the sun.

"It would take 200,000 years for gas to travel the last leg of its one-way journey," Kambiz Fathi of Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

No one has ever seen a black hole, but astronomers study the way matter and energy behave around them.

An international team led by Fathi studied the black hole at the middle of NGC1097, a behemoth with 100 million times the mass of the sun.

The team managed to observe behavior 10 times closer to the black hole than ever before, Fathi said, seeing clouds of material within 10 light-years of the galactic core, where the black hole is believed to reside.

Previous research has detected gas clouds from 100 to 1,000 light-years from the galaxy's heart.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. The galaxy is about 47 million light-years away from Earth, relatively close in cosmic terms.

The Philosophy of Film

2006-01-08T19:54:00.000-05:00

The Philosophy of Film: Towards an Understanding of Film as Art A film conference, 8th-9th June, 2006. To be held at the philosophy department of the University of Liverpool.

‘Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet?
The search for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? All over the world there are, indeed, entertainment firms and organisations which exploit cinema and television and spectacles of many other kinds. Our starting point, however, should not be there…..’ Andrei Tarkovsky Many films give us information, explanation, they
please the spectator with their action, music, dialogue, scenery (and what pleases the most is commonly derived from other arts). They might be fast, slow, violent, clever, crass, driven by commerce or ideas, but rarely with an understanding of nature, of life. They distract us, discourage us from taking the medium seriously,
of thinking seriously about film as a distinctive art form. The aim of this conference is to clarify film’s role, to think about and better appreciate film as art. Areas that might be of interest include:

· The role of the director
· Film as philosophy
· Film as an evocative art
· Religious feeling and film
· Film and imagination
· Film and Eastern tradition
· The film and its audience: contemplation versus explanation

While this conference has a philosophical focus, it is open to all those who are interested in film, aesthetics and art, whatever their position on the matter. We are looking for papers that display originality, sensitivity and imagination.

Abstracts for presentations (of no more than thirty minutes) should be submitted by email to John Adams at jadam@liv.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions: 15th March
Conference organisers:
John Adams (jadam@liv.ac.uk) and Payal Doctor (p.doctor@liv.ac.uk)
------------------------------
Design and Cinema Conference
------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

Yahoo! Groups Links
< *> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/designcinema/
------------------------------
Hakan Yildizeli

One Martian Year

2006-01-02T10:31:00.000-05:00

Spirit, the untiring robotic “wonder child” sent by NASA to explore the eerily earthlike fourth planet from the sun, has completed one martian year–that’s almost two Earth years–on Mars. Designed to last only 90 martian days (sols), the six-wheeled marvel the size of a golf cart has pursued a steady course of solar-driven geologic fieldwork, bringing back some 70,000 images and a new understanding of Mars as a potential habitat.
During Spirit’s martian year, the seasons have changed from summer to winter and back again. In its orbit around the Sun, Mars has returned to where it was when the rover first landed. Having survived seven times its expected lifetime and traveling over 3 miles (about 5,000 meters), Spirit is still going strong.
Hill Climbing with Spirit
“When we first took a look around after landing,” noted Cornell geologist and principal investigator Steve Squyres, “the ‘Columbia Hills’ seemed impossibly far away. Given its longer life, though, Spirit reached them and became the first explorer to climb a mountain on another planet. ‘Husband Hill’ is about as tall as the Statue of Liberty, but for a little rover, that was a heck of a climb.”
To achieve that feat, Spirit’s handlers painstakingly plotted a path up the slopes to keep the rover alive during the colder months of the martian year. A few months into the mission, winter was fast approaching and the Sun was ever lower above the northern horizon.
“We followed a circuitous path uphill, using the higher, uneven terrain to tilt the solar panels toward the Sun, keep the communications antenna facing Earth, and avoid rocks along the way,” said rover driver Chris Leger at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
While keeping warm in the winter, Spirit’s uphill battle also centered on what NASA sent both rovers to find: signs of past water on Mars. If water persisted for long periods of time in martian history, the red planet might have once had a life-supporting environment. At first, Spirit’s studies showed plenty of volcanic rocks, but few signs of minerals formed by water.
“Only by climbing did Spirit find what we were seeking,” said Ray Arvidson, deputy principal investigator from Washington University in St. Louis. “With Spirit’s engineering stamina, we finally found rocks in the ‘Columbia Hills’ that either formed in, or were altered by, water. Perhaps best of all, the hills hold the highest sulfur content ever found on Mars: sulfate salts, deposited by water.”
Besides finding these prized signs of past water on Mars, Spirit has discovered at least five distinct classes of rocks. Among these are molten rocks blasted upward and outward during meteorite impacts, materials formed during violent volcanic explosions, and lava flows. Beyond these large features, Spirit has taken a close look at grain-sized rock particles as well. “At a small scale, the geology of ‘Husband Hill’ looks like it’s been put in a blender,” said Squyres.

“All of this variety churned up in the rock record shows how volatile Mars was in the past,” Arvidson says. “Rocks in one layer say volcanoes were exploding, in another that lava was flowing, in another that water was seeping. And then imagine that some massive geologic force uplifted the whole of ‘Columbia Hills,’ exposing all of these layers to millions of years of wind erosion, gravity-driven landslides, and meteorite impacts.”
Seeing this rich geologic record on the north side of the Columbia Hills, Arvidson says, heightens the science team’s anticipation of what more they will learn about the history of the hills during Spirit’s trek down the other side.
Raising Spirit’s Energy
For Spirit’s continued journey, engineers are delighted with the unlikely role the martian wind has played in increasing the rover’s staying power. A peak threat of wind is the planet-encircling dust storms that can arise in martian spring through early summer, blocking out sunlight needed for power. “Luckily,” said project scientist Joy Crisp, “we haven’t yet seen a global dust storm since the rovers landed on Mars, but we have seen a lot of dust devils.”
Dust devils occur when the wind whirls over the surface, stirring dust up like a miniature tornado and traveling up to 13 feet per second (4 meters per second). It turns out the dust devils are primarily a lunchtime affair, mostly occurring between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. at each rover site. For both rovers, these noontime winds have been very favorable.
While dozens of dust devils have passed before Spirit’s cameras, some have made contact, sweeping dust from the rover’s solar panels. The solar panels are then able to take in more sunlight and convert it into electricity, keeping Spirit “alive” for even longer.
Keeping Spirit Alive
While no one can predict how long Spirit will last, the rover’s stamina throughout the long martian year encourages hope. The science team is busy even now plotting new destinations to strive toward. If the “Columbia Hills” were once a distant dream, new far-off horizons beckon just as much. Getting there will stretch the rover’s capabilities as much as the imagination. Team member Jim Rice calls one such distant target, a rough and rugged terrain to the south, “the Promised Land.”

One thing is sure. No matter what the future holds, Spirit is already there.

Creating Sound

2006-01-01T20:17:00.000-05:00

CREATING SOUND FOR DEMME
by Elisabeth Weis
Ron Bochar discusses the creation of sound effects in scenes from Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia.
Here’s how Jonathan described Jodie Foster’s first trip down to visit Lecter in the dungeon: “This is the bowels of the building. Let me hear howling and let me hear bowels.’ So that’s what you got. I can’ t begin to list the material that went into all that. But there were animal screams and noises built into the ambience itself downstairs there. From a little movie I had made years ago called Little Monsters I took this lunatic kind of screaming that I had recorded; I took track, processed it, slowed it down, and played it in reverse. That became one of the ambiences in the room, too. It’s the room tone, but the room tone has been made from some guy screaming in pain. Whenever you’re down there with Lecter there’s this element–it’s a low tone that rises and then comes down again. It’s very organic as opposed to something you can create electronically. I don’t like taking sounds that start electronically; I like sounds that start organically. It’ s a lot more fun.”
On Tom Hanks’s first visit to Denzel Washington’s office in Philadelphia:
“When Tom Hanks tries to talk Denzel into taking the case and Denzel shakes his hand, I introduced a bus with really ugly brakes. During that whole interview the bus [which you never see–EW] just won’t leave that intersection. It constantly hangs in there, filling in the little gaps between the conversation with ugly squeals that finally cease when Denzel begins to not want to take the case. To me that contributed something emotionally coming from outside . . . It’s not as up front as in early versions, but it is still in there in the final print. Those things aren’t meant to be in your face, but even at a lower level you’re getting it across.”

On subjective ambience in the trial scene of Philadelphia:

“When Tom Hanks begins to get sick at the trial, Jonathan said that scene was begging for something. The convention is to add reverb to Mary [Steenburgen]’s voice, but Jonathan said that would be hokey. We discussed certain colors [with tonal associations for Demme–EW] and what it’s like on a seashore when you hear people talk while putting conch shells to your ears. We didn’t want the sound to be a focal point but to evolve as Tom got sicker. So from the time when Tom starts to hallucinate and the camera does a slow Dutch tilt, we dropped the previous room tone and shifted the ambient sound. There’s a low, subliminal thumping, almost like a heartbeat, but it wasn’t. The room tone had included shuffles and dim movements. When Tom starts to get ill we created an air tone from a note being sung. We added reverb and so thinned out the tone, making it sparse and whistly like wind, so that it’s not a note anymore. There’s also a conch-type sound I created on the Synclavier from some underwater sea sounds and a few other things. And Mary’s voice was at least three different Marys talking at once–each once processed a little bit differently. You only heard this on Tom’s POV and it was never the dominant effect. We also played with the space at that point; up to that time we had restricted sound pretty much to the left, right, and center speakers. But once the hallucination began we played more with the surround speakers, while keeping the dialog more in the center. That whole scene allowed all of us at the board to experiment, to see how far we could take it. We had some pretty wild versions, but ended up using a subtler version.”

Views of Mars

2005-12-29T12:27:00.000-05:00

The Interior of Mars
The current understanding of the interior of Mars suggests that it can be modeled with a thin crust, similar to Earth’s, a mantle and a core. Using four parameters, the Martian core size and mass can be determined. However, only three out of the four are known and include the total mass, size of Mars, and the moment of inertia. Mass and size was determined accurately from early missions. The moment of inertia was determined from Viking lander and Pathfinder Doppler data, by measuring the precession rate of Mars. The fourth parameter, needed to complete the interior model, will be obtained from future spacecraft missions. With the three known parameters, the model is significantly constrained. If the Martian core is dense (composed of iron) similar to Earth’s or SNC meteorites thought to originate from Mars, then the minimum core radius would be about 1300 kilometers. If the core is made out of less-dense material such as a mixture of sulfur and iron, the maximum radius would probably be less than 2000 kilometers. (Copyright 1998 by Calvin J. Hamilton)
Topography Map of Mars
This image is a newly released topographic map of Mars. The full range of topography on Mars is about 19 miles (30 kilometers), one and a half times the range of elevations found on Earth, The most curious aspect of the map is the striking difference between the planet’s low, smooth Northern Hemisphere and the heavily cratered Southern Hemisphere,” which sits, on average, about three miles (five kilometers) higher than the north. (Courtesy GSFC/NASA)
Schiaparelli Hemisphere
This image is a mosaic of the Schiaparelli hemisphere of Mars. The center of this image is near the impact crater Schiaparelli, 450 kilometers (280 miles) in diameter. The dark streaks with bright margins emanating from craters in the Oxie Palus region, upper left of image, are caused by erosion and/or deposition by the wind. Bright white areas to the south, including the Hellas impact basin at extreme lower right, are covered by carbon dioxide frost. (Courtesy USGS)
Valles Marineris
This image is a mosaic of the Valles Marineris [VAL-less mar-uh-NAIR-iss] hemisphere of Mars. It is a view similar to that which one would see from a spacecraft. The center of the scene shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, more than 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) long and up to 8 kilometers (5 miles) deep, extending from Noctis Labyrinthus, the arcuate system of graben to the west, to the chaotic terrain to the east. Many huge ancient river channels begin from the chaotic terrain and north-central canyons and run north. Many of the channels flowed into a basin called Acidalia Planitia, which is the dark area in the extreme north of this picture. The three Tharsis volcanoes (dark red spots), each about 25 kilometers (16 miles) high, are visible to the west. Very ancient terrain covered by many impact craters lies to the south of Valles Marineris. (Courtesy USGS)
Central Candor Chasm - Oblique View
This image shows part of Candor Chasm in Valles Marineris. It is centered at Latitude -5.0, Longitude 70.0. The view is from the north looking into the chasm. Candor Chasm’s geomorphology is complex, shaped by tectonics, mass wasting, wind, and perhaps by water and volcanism. (Courtesy USGS)
Ophir Chasma
Ophir Chasma is a large west-northwest-trending trough about 100 km wide. The Chasma is bordered by 4 km high walled cliffs, most likely faults, that show spur-and-gully morphology and smooth sections. The walls have been dissected by landslides forming reentrants; one area (upper left) on the north wall shows a young landslide about 100 km wide. The volume of the landslide debris is more than 1000 times greater than that from the May 18, 1980 debris avalanche from Mount St. Helens. The longitudinal grooves seen in the foreground are thought to be due to differential shear and lateral spreading at high velocities. The landslide passes between mounds of interior layered deposits on the floor of the chasma. (Courtesy USGS)
Landslide in Valles Marineris
Although Valles Marineris originated as a tectonic structure, it has been modified by other processes. This image shows a close-up view of a landslide on the south wall of Valles Marineris. This landslide partially removed the rim of the crater that is on the plateau adjacent to Valles Marineris. Note the texture of the landslide deposit where it flowed across the floor of Valles Marineris. Several distinct layers can be seen in the walls of the trough. These layers may be regions of distinct chemical composition or mechanical properties in the Martian crust. (Copyright Calvin J. Hamilton; Caption: LPI)
HST 3 Views of Mars at Opposition
These Hubble Space Telescope views provide the most detailed complete global coverage of the Red Planet ever seen from Earth. The pictures were taken on February 25, 1995, when Mars was at a distance of 103 million kilometers (65 million miles). To the surprise of researchers, Mars is cloudier than seen in previous years. This means the planet is cooler and drier, because water vapor in the atmosphere freezes out to form ice-crystal clouds. The three images show the Tharsis, Valles Marineris and Syrtis Major regions. (Credit: Philip James, University of Toledo; Steven Lee, University of Colorado; and NASA)
Springtime on Mars: Hubble’s Best View of the Red Planet
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope view of Mars is the clearest picture ever taken from Earth, surpassed only by close-up shots sent back by visiting space probes. The picture was taken on February 25, 1995, when Mars was at a distance of approximately 103 million kilometers (65 million miles) from Earth.
Because it is spring in Mars’ northern hemisphere, much of the carbon dioxide frost around the permanent water-ice cap has sublimated, and the cap has receded to its core of solid water-ice several hundred miles across. The abundance of wispy white clouds indicates that the atmosphere is cooler than seen by visiting space probes in the 1970s. Morning clouds appear along the planet’s western (left) limb. These form overnight when Martian temperatures plunge and water in the atmosphere freezes out to form ice-crystal clouds. Towering 25 kilometers (16 miles) above the surrounding plains, volcano Ascraeus Mons pokes above the cloud deck near the western or limb. Valles Marineris is in the lower left. (Credit: Philip James, University of Toledo; Steven Lee, University of Colorado; and NASA)
Outflow Source of Channel Ravi Vallis
This image of the head of Ravi Vallis shows a 300-kilometer (186-mile) long portion of a channel. Like many other channels that empty into the northern plains of Mars, Ravi Vallis orginates in a region of collapsed and disrupted (”chaotic”) terrain within the planet’s older, cratered highlands. Structures in these channels indicate that they were carved by liquid water moving at high flow rates. The abrupt beginning of the channel, with no apparent tributaries, suggests that the water was released under great pressure from beneath a confining layer of frozen ground. As this water was released and flowed away, the overlying surface collapsed, producing the disruption and subsidence shown here. Three such regions of chaotic collapsed material are seen in this image, connected by a channel whose floor was scoured by the flowing water. The flow in this channel was from west to east (left to right). This channel ultimately links up with a system of channels that flowed northward into Chryse Basin. (Copyright Calvin J. Hamilton; Caption: LPI)
Streamlined Islands
The water that carved the channels to the north and east of the Valles Marineris canyon system had tremendous erosive power. One consequence of this erosion was the formation of streamlined islands where the water encountered obstacles along its path. This image shows two streamlined islands that formed as the water was diverted by two 8-10 kilometer (5-6 mile) diameter craters lying near the mouth of Ares Vallis in Chryse Planitia. The water flowed from south to north (bottom to top of the image). The height of the scarp surrounding the upper island is about 400 meters (1,300 feet), while the scarp surrounding the southern island is about 600 meters (2,000 feet) high. (Copyright Calvin J. Hamilton; Caption: LPI)
Valley Network
Unlike the features shown in the above two images, many systems on Mars do not show evidence of catastrophic flooding. Instead, they show a resemblance to drainage systems on Earth, where water acts at slow rates over long periods of time. As on Earth, the channels shown here merge together to form larger channels.

However, these valley networks are less developed than typical terrestrial drainage systems, with the Martian examples lacking small-scale streams feeding into the larger valleys. Because of the absence of small-scale streams in the Martian valley networks, it is thought that the valleys were carved primarily by ground water flow rather than by runoff of rain. Although liquid water is currently unstable on the surface of Mars, theoretical studies indicate that flowing groundwater might be able to form valley networks if the water flowed beneath a protective cover of ice. Alternatively, because the valley networks are confined to relatively old regions of Mars, their presence may indicate that Mars once possessed a warmer and wetter climate in its early history. (Copyright Calvin J. Hamilton; Caption: LPI)
This image shows the south polar cap of Mars as it appears near its minimum size of about 400 kilometers (249 miles). It consists mainly of frozen carbon dioxide. This carbon dioxide cap never melts completely. The ice appears reddish due to dust that has been incorporated into the cap. (Courtesy NASA)
North Polar Cap
This image is an oblique view of the north polar cap of Mars. Unlike the south polar cap, the north polar cap probably consists of water-ice. (Copyright Calvin J. Hamilton)
Polar Laminated Terrain
One of the discoveries of the Mariner 9 spacecraft was that the south polar cap of Mars was made of thin layers or laminations of ice and sediment. Four years later, on October 10, 1976, the Viking 2 spacecraft took this picture of the Martian north polar cap. The visible layering occurred as a result of wind born dust settling upon the polar cap. As the caps experience climatic variations, they expand and contract. The layers of dust sediment tend to grow thicker near the poles where ice deposits remain for longer periods of time. The thickness of the deposits indicates they were formed during cyclical climatic variation rather than annual changes. As ice withdraws from a region, wind exposes the layers sculpting valleys and scarps. The formation of layered deposits is an active process today. (Copyright 1998 by Calvin J. Hamilton)
Dunefield
This image shows several dune types which are found in the north circumpolar dunefield. This thumnail image shows a section of transverse dunes. The full image has a field of traverse dunes on the left and barchan dunes on the right with a transition zone inbetween. Transverse dunes are oriented perpendicular to the prevailing wind direction. They are long and linear, and frequently join their neighbor in a low-angle “Y” junction. Barchan dunes are crescent-shaped mounds with downwind-pointing horns. These dunes are comparable in size to the largest dunes found on the Earth. (Copyright Calvin J. Hamilton)
Local Dust Storm
Local dust storms are relatively common on Mars. They tend to occur in areas of high topographic and/or high thermal gradients (usually near the polar caps), where surface winds would be strongest. This storm is several hundreds of kilometers in extent and is located near the edge of the south polar cap. Some local storms grow larger, others die out. (Copyright Calvin J. Hamilton; caption by LPI)
White Rock
This image shows a lesser known, but unusual feature on Mars. It is commonly called “White Rock”. The white feature is eroded crater fill, but exactly how it was formed has not been satisfactorily explained. White Rock was not formed by polar processes because it lies near to the equator at latitude -8 degrees and longitude 355 degrees. It has been modified through aeolian erosion showing transverse and longitudinal erosional features. (Copyright 1998 by Calvin J. Hamilton)
Martian Atmosphere
This oblique image taken by the Viking orbiter spacecraft shows a thin band of the Martian atmosphere. This image looks northeast across the Argyre basin. The Argyre basin is about 600 kilometers across with a rugged rim of about 500 kilometers in width. (Copyright 1997 by Calvin J. Hamilton)

The Art and Technique of Postproduction Sound

2005-12-26T10:21:00.000-05:00

Sync tanks
The Art and Technique of Postproduction Sound
by Elisabeth Weis
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The credits for John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) include Wyatt Earp as technical consultant[1] but only one person responsible for all of postproduction sound (the composer). The credits for Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp (1994) list the names of thirty-nine people who worked on postproduction sound. The difference is not simply a matter of expanding egos or credits.
“An older film like Casablanca has an empty soundtrack compared with what we do today. Tracks are fuller and more of a selling point,” says Michael Kirchberger (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Sleepless in Seattle). “Of course a good track without good characters and storyline won’t be heard by anyone.”[2]

With soundtracks much more dense than in the past, the present generation of moviemakers has seen an exponential growth in the number of people who work on the sound after the film has been shot. What do all those people add both technically and esthetically? “When I started out, there was one sound editor and an assistant,” says picture editor Evan Lottman (The Exorcist, Sophie’s Choice, Presumed Innocent). ” As editor for a big studio picture in the early Seventies I usually cut the ADR [dialog replaced in postproduction–EW] and the music as well.” Today an editor on a major feature would either hire a supervising sound editor who gathers a team of sound specialists, or go to a company like C5, Inc., Sound One, or Skywalker that can supply the staff and/or state-of-the-art facilities.

Sound is traditionally divided into three elements: dialog, music, and effects (any auditory information that isn’t speech or music). Although much of the dialog can be recorded during principal photography, it needs fine tuning later. And almost all other sound is added during postproduction.

How does sound get on pictures? The following is a rough sketch of the procedure for a major Hollywood feature production. But it is not a blueprint; exact procedures vary tremendously with the budget and shooting schedule of the film. Blockbuster action films, for instance, often devote much more time and money to sound effects than is described below. The process certainly does not describe how the average film is made abroad; few other cultures have such a fetish for perfect lip-synching as ours–so even dialog is recorded after the shoot in many countries.

This article can only begin to suggest how digital technologies are affecting post-production sound. For one thing, there is wide variation in types of systems; for another, digital sound techniques are evolving faster than alien creatures in a science fiction movie.

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PRODUCTION
Even the sound recorded live during principal photography is not wedded physically to the image and has to be precisely relinked during postproduction. It is usually recorded on 1/4″ magnetic tape (though there are alternatives) and marked so that it can be ultimately rejoined with the picture in perfect synchronization.

On the set the location recordist (listed as production mixer) tries to record dialog as cleanly and crisply as possible, with little background noise (a high signal-to-noise ratio). A boom operator, usually suspending the microphone above and in front of the person speaking, tries to get it as close as possible without letting the microphone or its shadow enter the frame.

An alternative to a mike suspended from an overhead boom is a hidden lavalier mike on the actor’s chest, which is either connected to the tape recorder via cables or wired to a small radio transmitter also hidden on the actor. But dialog recorded from below the mouth must be adjusted later to match the better sound quality of the boom mike. And radio mikes can pick up stray sounds like gypsy cabs.

While on the set, the sound recordist may also ask for a moment of silence to pick up some “room tone” (the sound of the location when no one is talking), which must be combined with any dialog that is added during postproduction (with reconstructed room reverberation) so that it matches what is shot on the set. (We don’t usually notice the sound of the breeze or a motor hum, but their absence in a Hollywood product would be quite conspicuous.) The set recordist may also capture sounds distinctive to a particular location to give the postproduction crew some sense of local color.

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POSTPRODUCTION
Theoretically, the first stage of sound editing is “spotting,” where the editor(s) and possibly the director go through each second of the film with the supervising sound editor in order to generate a list of every sound that needs to be added, augmented, or replaced. This practice has fallen prey to demands for early previews, which have wreaked havoc on postproduction schedules.

Dialog
Dialog editing is mostly a matter of cleaning up production sound. The work can be as detailed as reusing a final consonant of one word to complete another where it had been obscured or removing an actor’ s denture clicks.

Some of the dialog heard in the completed film was not recorded on location. Shooting silent (MOS) is much easier than having to achieve perfect quiet from the crew, the crowd watching the film, or airplanes and birds passing overhead. Even with the compliance of onlookers, nature, and ubiquitous car alarms, however, miked dialog may be unusable because it picked up extraneous noises such as a squeaky camera dolly or clothing rustle.

Despite these difficulties, directors almost always prefer production dialog, which is an integral part of the actors’ performances, to looping (rerecording speech in post-production). Although there is a trend in looping sessions toward using booms and the original microphones to mimic the situation on the set, it is nearly impossible to duplicate all the conditions of the shoot. Orson Welles found that out after shooting the festive horseless carriage ride in The Magnificent Ambersons. Because the scene was photographed in an ice plant with tremendous reverberation (which wouldn’t be heard outdoors), the dialog of all six characters had to be looped. When Welles heard the original looping, he rejected it because the voices were much too static; they didn’ t sound as though they were spoken by people in an automobile. The sound-man’s low-tech solution was to redo all the lines with the performers and himself seated on a twelve-inch plank suspended between sawhorses. For a week, says James G. Stewart, “As we watched the picture I simulated the movement of the car by bouncing the performer and myself up and down on the plank.”

It is tough, however, for actors to match later the emotional level they achieved on the set. Ron Bochar, who supervised the sound on Philadelphia, describes the powerful scene where Tom Hanks is responding to an opera recording as a case in point. Ideally the aria and the dialog would be on separately manipulable tracks so that the dialog could be kept intelligible. But Hanks wanted both the freedom to move around and the ability to hear and react to the singing of Maria Callas. As a result, both his dialog and her aria are recorded on the same track and the dialog is less than ideal. But everyone involved agreed that the live performance was preferable to looping the scene. “That’ s one of those things about ‘mistakes’ that get put in because you are forced to or they just happen,” says Bochar. “They turn out to be things that you could never re-create. You’d ruin the scene by making it cleaner.”

Today, one of the first jobs of dialog editors is to split spoken lines (usually from different camera–hence microphone–angles) onto separate tracks. Doing so, says Kirchberger, “makes them as independently controllable as possible, so that we can later ‘massage’ them in such a way that they fit together seamlessly.” This is not to say that filmmakers can’t do creative things with dialog.

Robert Altman, most notably, developed with rerecording mixer Richard Portman atechnique for creating his unique multilayered dialog style. During the shoot Altman, who allows a lot of improvisation, mikes each of his simultaneous speakers on separate tracks (sixteen for Pret-a-Porter). Later the rerecording mixer can raise and lower the relative volume of each track to create a weaving effect among the various actors’ lines.

Dialog can also be edited to affect characterization. Suppose the director wants to make an arch-villain more domineering. A mixer could raise the volume of his voice and adjust the tonal qualities to make him sound larger than life. It’s the aural equivalent of someone invading our space by standing too close to us. The picture editor could enhance the villain’s sense of menace by regularly cutting to his voice before we see him. Because he seems to lurk just beyond the edges of the frame, the viewer will feel uneasy about his potential reappearance whenever he is not present.

ADR
Dialog that cannot be salvaged from production tracks must be rerecorded in a process called looping or ADR (which is variously said to stand for “automated” or “automatic” dialog replacement). Looping originally involved recording an actor who spoke lines in sync to “loops” of the image which were played over and over along with matching lengths of recording tape. ADR, though faster, is still painstaking work. An actor watches the image repeatedly while listening to the original production track on headphones as a guide. The actor then reperforms each line to match the wording and lip movements. Actors vary in their ability to achieve sync and to recapture the emotional tone of their performance. Some prefer it. Marion Brando, for instance, likes to loop because he doesn’t like to freeze a performance until he knows its final context. People have said that one reason he mumbles is to make the production sound unusable so that he can make adjustments in looping.

ADR is usually considered a necessary evil but Bochar has found there are moments when looping can be used not just for technical reasons but to add new character or interpretation to a shot. “Just by altering a few key words or phrases an actor can change the emotional bent on a scene.”

Sound Effects
Dialog editors are usually considered problem solvers rather than creative contributors, but there’s considerable room for artistic input in choosing and editing sound effects. For one thing, sound effects tracks are normally built from scratch. We would not want to hear everything that really could be heard in a given space, Even if it were possible to record only the appropriate noise on the set while the film is being shot, it wouldn’t sound right psychologically. Sound is very subjective and dependent upon the visual context and the mood set up in the image. The soundtrack of real life is too dense for film. In the real world, our minds select certain noises and filter out others. For instance, we mentally foreground the person speaking to us even if the background is louder. On film, the sound effects editors and rerecording mixers have to focus for us.

Focusing on selected sounds can create tension, atmosphere, and emotion. It can also impart personality to film characters. Walter Murch (the doyen of sound designers) once described the character sounds (in a film he directed) as “coronas” which can magnify each character’ s screen space. A figure who is associated with a particular sound (often suggested by his or her clothing), has “a real presence that is pervasive even when the scene is about something else or the character is off-screen.”

Indeed, sound is a major means to lend solidity and depth to the two- dimensional screen image. Furthermore, new digital release formats allow filmmakers to literally “place” sounds at various locations throughout the theater. Thus sound can expand space, add depth, and locate us within the scene.

A crucial difference between visual and aural manipulation of the audience is that even sophisticated audiences rarely notice the soundtrack. Therefore it can speak to us emotionally and almost subconsciously put us in touch with a screen character. In a film like Hitchcock’ s The Birds, for example, any time we see a bird we know we are being titillated. But by merely adding a single “caw” to the soundtrack on occasion, Hitch was able to increase the tension without our being aware of his manipulation.

To understand the manipulability of effects it is useful to know how effects tracks are created. A regular source of effects is a stock library, where sounds are stored on CD. The rest have to be recorded or combined from several sources. Foleying is the “looping” of sound effects by a specialized department in a studio designed for watching the picture and creating the sounds at the same time. The process is named after its developer, legendary sound man Jack Foley of Universal. Because virtually all footsteps are replaced, a foley stage usually includes several pits with different sounding surfaces on which the foley artist will walk in time to the one or more characters he or she is watching. Clothing rustle (another sound we never notice until it’s missing) and the movement of props such as dishes are likely to be recorded here as well. Even kisses are foleyed. A steamy sex scene was probably created by a foley artist making dispassionate love to his or her own wrist. The foleycrew will include the artist or “walker,” who makes the sound, and a technician or two to record and mix it.

Foleying needn’t be a slavish duplication of the original object. The sound crew can characterize actors by the quality of the sounds they attribute to them–say, what type of shoes they wear. To attribute some subtle sleaziness’ to Nicolas Cage’s lawyer in It Could Happen to You, Michael Kirchberger’s foley crew sonically added a squeaky shoe and rattling pocket change as Red Buttons walks around the courtroom. It’s the opposite shoe of the one that squeaked in Jerry Lewis movies, says Kirchberger.

Usually the more exotic–less literal–sounds are created by the effects staff. According to Murch, “That’s part of the art of sound effects. You try to abstract the essential quality of a sound and figure out the best way to record that, which may not be to use the thing itself but something else.” Thus, some sounds have nothing to do with the original source–the real thing would be unconvincing. Mimi Arsham, who worked on Ben-Hur, reports that the sound of a whip cracking was actually a hefty steak being slapped on a thigh.

Most sounds need processing (fiddling with). The most common strategy is to start with a sound made by a source that is the same as or similar to what was photographed and then to distort it. One simple method is to slow it down or speed it up. Two other common processing tricks are to choose just part of the frequency spectrum or to run a sound backwards. As far back as 1933 the original sound man at RKO created King Kong’s voice by playing backwards the roar of a lion he recorded at the San Diego Zoo. Today digital editing techniques have vastly expanded the possibilities: a sound editor feeds a sample of a sound into a computer, which can then manipulate it and provide a whole range of sounds from the original. One powerful tool is the Synclavier, which combines a computer sampler and a keyboard that can play a sound (or sounds) assigned to any of seventy-three keys with the stroke of a finger.

New sounds can also be created by mixing disparate sources. In order to accentuate the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword, the final close-up of the typewriter keys pounding out the Watergate expose in All the President’s Men combines gunfire with the sound of clacking typewriter keys.

Many of today’s sound effects are “stacked”; they are layers of combined sounds from different sources that often begin organically but are processed digitally. Kirchberger reports that he created the roar of the Komodo Dragon in The Freshman by starting with tapes of vultures recorded for Ishtar. The sound was processed, added to other sounds including a pig, and then vocalized through digital sampling. “I knew we had something that was vaguely reptilian. What made it ‘talk’ was altering the pitch as we played back the stacked sample. That gave it the vocalization we needed, as opposed to its being just a screech or a caw.”

Much of the freedom in sound design comes when making horror or science fiction films, where stylization is the norm. Most sonic sources are hard to identify unless we see them–and films of the fantastic have sources we have never heard in real life. So there is great latitude in deciding how something should sound.

However technically sophisticated the equipment that processes sound, the original source can be quite mundane. Gary Rydstrom, the lead sound designer at Skywalker, likes to challenge listeners to a game of “name that sound,” that is, to guess the sources of his sounds- -exotic noises he created from prosaic origins. One favorite tool, he says, is air compressed in a can. The source of the “sliming” noise in Ghostbusters, for example, is Dust-Off sprayed into Silly Putty. He is also proud of the sound of the mercury-like character (T-1000) passing through steel bars in Terminator II. Seeking a sound that was part liquid, part solid, Rydstrom came up with the sound of dog food being extruded from a can.

The majority of the sound crew are not brought onto a picture until it is “locked,” that is, the image is finalized. On films where sound is considered a major creative element, directors may hire a sound designer like Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, The Godfather) or Skip Lievsay (who creates sound for the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese, and David Lynch). “Sound designer” is an elusive term which can refer to a person brought on to create just one kind of effect (for example, Bochar was hired late in the postproduction of Wolf just to create the effects that accompanied Nicholson turning into a beast). In some cases, however, sound designers are thought of as artists who are brought on staff during the planning stages of a film, along with the set and costume designers, and who do their own mixing. In these instances, the sound designer works with the director to shape an overall, consistent soundtrack that exploits the expressive possibilities of the sound medium, is organically related to the narrative and thematic needs of the film, and has an integrity not possible if sound is divided among an entire bureaucracy. A case in point would be Jurassic Park, where Gary Rydstrom first designed the sounds of the dinosaurs and then models were built to match those roars.

On the average A-picture the first postproduction sound person brought onto the film is the supervising sound editor, who not only directs and coordinates the creative contributions of the postproduction sound staff but also must handle all the related administrative duties like scheduling mixes.

Although the supervising sound editors are usually not consulted during shooting, in the best of all possible worlds they are in touch with the location sound recordist during and after the shoot so that their work can be coordinated. Bochar feels strongly that his work should start early on: “To me the whole adage is that postproduction begins the first day of production.”

Like most filmmakers, sound personnel work under extreme time constraints. One way for them to get a headstart is to work on a picture one reel at a time. Thus, if a director and editor are satisfied with reels two and three, they can send them on to the sound editors while they are still solving picture problems on other reels.

Scratch Mixes/Temp Tracks
Today the tendency is to bring the supervising editor on earlier and earlier. The main reason is the changing demands for sound in early screenings. According to Kirchberger, this practice has engendered the greatest changes in the logistics of postproduction sound in the last two decades.

As Lottman describes it, “On most A-pictures a sound editor will come on some time before the picture gets locked. You can’t put them on too soon; that’s too expensive. But you put them on, say, before the first screening. Now there’s this big trend towards scratch mixes at screenings. Most directors don’t want to screen a picture for anybody unless it has a complete and full soundtrack–a temp track with temporary sounds, temporary music and dialog to give the audience a preview of what the final, polished soundtrack will belike. They’ll try to iron out a dialog scene where the sound shifts dramatically from cut to cut. They didn’t use to do this at all. Now they do it on any mid- to high budget film. You try to keep it simple: you have just one sound editor and an assistant, perhaps.”

Because of demands for scratch mixes the sound editors are under greater time constraints than ever. By the first scratch mix, the editors must have cleaned up noticeable sound-image problems and supplied the major effects. Yet this is also the best time to introduce their most inventive ideas, while directors and producers are still open to experimentation.

One result of scratch mixes is that they become weeding-out processes. During this stage sound editors, given the time, have a certain amount of latitude to present creative options to the director. One downside, says Kirchberger, is that if the director likes parts of the scratch mix, those sounds may never be refined even though they were just presented as a sketch.

Music
Like the foley crew, the music personnel are a discrete department. The composer may be brought in as early as the first cut to discuss with the director and editor the general character of the music and its placement in the film.

The person who spends the longest time on the scoring is the supervising music editor. It is the job of the music editor to spot every cue, that is, to make a precise list of timings–to the split second– for each appearance and “hit” (point of musical emphasis) of the music. In addition, the editor will log all the concomitant action and dialog during each cue. The composer then has about six weeks to come up with a score. The supervising music editor will set up recording sessions, which for, say, thirty minutes of music, take four to five days. Each set of instruments has its own microphone and track so that scoring mixers can balance them.

Apart from esthetic issues, film music composers must deal with particular technical requirements. For the sake of clarity, a film composer must orchestrate with instruments that do not overlap much with the frequency of the human voice or any dominant sound effects to be heard at the same time. In theory, composers keep in mind any anticipated noises for a sequence so that the music and effects aren’t working at cross purposes. In practice, music editors often serve as master tacticians caught between the work of the sound editors and the composer who says: “Dump those goddamn sound effects!”

The scoring is also affected by the need for scratch mixes, for which the music editor has had to select temporary music. This may be a counter-productive trend. The editor will probably use music that was composed for an earlier film. As the producers and directors get used to their temporary track they often want something similar, so the composer is inadvertently rewarded for not straying far from what has already proved successful.

One of the more positive changes in scoring practices has been made possible through computer programs and synthesizers for musicians. Instead of presenting their ideas to the director at a piano, composers can now present them in a form “orchestrated” with simulations of different instruments.

Rerecording (The Mix)
The climactic moment of postproduction sound is called the “mix” in New York and the “dub” in L.A. On the screen the credit goes to a rerecording mixer, but that term is rarely heard in daily parlance, says Lottman; “If we said we were going to a rerecording mix, they’ d laugh.”

At the mix all the tracks–singly called elements–are adjusted in volume and tonal quality relative to each other and the image. (At some mixes the music editor and effects editors may be sitting at the “pots” controlling their subsets of tracks.) During the mix the director and/or picture editor will decide with the mixer which sounds should be emphasized. A composer can find that a particularly inspired fugue has been dropped in one scene in favor of sound effects or dialog. However much effort the composer and effects editors may have put into their creations, their efforts are sub-sentient to the ultimate dramatic impact of the overall sound plus picture. Asked what makes a good mixer, Bochar says, “The best mixers, like Richard Portman, Lee Dichter, and Tom Fleischman have the ability to leave their egos at the door. No one has to lay claim on the track. Mixing becomes an experience, as opposed to a job and drudgery. When those moments hit, it just Soars.”

The top mixers are orchestrators who create a sonic texture. You can’ t have wall-to-wall noise, says Rydstrom; like music, the sound effects have pitch, rhythm, and pace which must be varied to create interest and may be manipulated to raise and lower dramatic tensions.

The mixer also has to equalize, blend, and balance the tracks for the seamless, invisible style that characterizes Hollywood style cutting. Thus, at a minimum, the mixer must match sounds created by dozens of technicians in different times and places. The engine roar of a 1954 Chevy may include sound obtained from a stock library, recorded on the set, and augmented with new recordings during postproduction. It may have been “sweetened” with synthesized sound. But it has to sound like one car.

Mixers have a number of tools. Equalizers and filters, for example, can boost or decrease the intensity of low, middle, or high frequencies in order to make dialog or sound effects match those that came from microphones and sources with different characteristics. Filters are also used to eliminate unwanted steady frequencies, such as the buzz of an air conditioner. In dealing with image size, the mixer adjusts perspective (determined mainly by the ratio of direct to indirect or reflected sound), which can be manipulated through the addition of artificial reverberation.

Great rerecording mixers are artists as much as technicians. The mixers’ console is their palette: they have an infinite number of choices for blending. Their tools can be used in expressive ways. For example, an annoying voice can be adjusted to sound more screechy, or the roar of an approaching truck can be made more ominous. At the mix some of the many sound effects are heightened and others are lowered or eliminated. Sounds can be emotionally effective even when they are reduced to near inaudibility. (See, for example, the sidebars on Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia.) And the most eloquent ” sound” of all may be silence. In our age of dense soundtracks, the sudden absence of noise can have a stunning impact.

A mix on an average A-picture combines at least forty to sixty tracks, and perhaps hundreds. Therefore for manageability of dense soundtracks there may be any number of premixes, wherein groups of tracks are combined and equalized in relation to each other. For example, twenty- four tracks of foleys may be boiled down to one or two six-track elements. A typical final mix might begin with seven six-tracks: two six-tracks each for effects and foley, and one each for backgrounds, dialog, and ADR. Dialog is usually mixed first. In Murch’s words, “Dialog becomes the backbone of the sound and everything else is fit into place around that.”

Given that a mix costs from $400 to $800 or more an hour, sound editors do as much in advance as possible so that the mixer can worry about the bigger balance rather than hundreds of small adjustments. With track separation, the remixed tracks need not be permanently wed to one another. If at the final mix of a car crash, the director chooses to emphasize one sound of shattering glass, that specific element can still be manipulated if necessary. Often the director or editor is given a choice among several types of sound for a given effect.

Technology has inevitably affected the esthetics of the mix. A few decades ago, merely pausing to make a correction would create an audible click, so an entire reel had to be mixed in one pass or started over. Then, with the advent of “rock ‘n’ roll” systems, mixers were able to move back and forth inch by inch. Once consoles became computerized to “remember” all the mixer’s adjustments, says Murch, he was able to think in larger units. “You take a sweep through the reel, knowing that there are certain things you’re doing that are not perfect. You get the sense of the flow of a ten minute or longer section of film, rather than doing it bit by bit. So you go through in ten minute segments until you’ve got the basic groundwork for what you want, knowing that there are things wrong in there that you can fix later. It’s like a live performance: sometimes there’s something that happens spontaneously that way, that you can never get when you’re trying to do it inch by inch. Thus automated mixing allows you to work in large sections but it also encourages you to be very finicky about small things and it doesn’t penalize you for that.”

The end product of the final mix is not just one printmaster from which domestic exhibition prints are struck; effects, dialog, and music are kept discrete to allow for release in different formats ranging from monaural optical 16mm tracks, to multi-channel digital systems, to foreign versions minus the dialog.

Directors and Sound
The soundtrack is perhaps the most collaborative component of filmmaking. It is created by all the personnel mentioned above plus their assistants. Nevertheless, the editor and ultimately the director do call the shots. How do sound personnel communicate with directors?

There have always been a few directors particularly attuned to the expressive potential of sound; these include Robert Wise, Orson Welles, Robert Altman, and Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock, for one, usually prepared a detailed list of sounds and was actively involved in choosing them. (For the sound of the knife entering the body in Psycho’s shower scene, Hitchcock did a blind sound test among different types of melon, finally settling on a casaba.) These sound-sensitive directors often incorporate sound as part of the basic conception of their films. For example, Hitch experimented with expressionistic sound (Blackmail), interior monologues (Murder), subliminal sound (Secret Agent), and electronic sound (in The Birds, which orchestrates computer-generated noises and has no underscoring).

Other directors do not think creatively about sound but choose personnel who do. These directors may have unerring instincts for the best sound when presented with several specific options. Most directors, however, do not use the expressive potential of the soundtrack and leave sonic decisions up to their staff.

In general, the younger generation of filmmakers are more savvy than their elders. For one thing, they were part of the revolution in music technologies. For another, they were probably exposed to sound courses in film school. According to Murch the very raison d’etre for Coppola’ s team in creating Zoetrope was to have their own sound facility. And a few of today’s directors consider sound an equal partner with image. (But even these directors still may have to figure out how to convey their sonic ideas–Jonathan Demme has been to known to ask his sound editors for “something blue.”)

The best way to appreciate the expressive possibilities in an American soundtrack is to study in great detail virtually any movie by the sound-sensitive directors, such as Altman, the Coen brothers (try Barton Fink) or David Lynch, among independents. To find the most interesting soundtracks in other Hollywood productions, check the sound credits. The most respected sound designers and supervisors may be called technicians, but their artistry can be heard in all the films they touch.

Footnotes:

1 Ford had met Earp in the Twenties.

2 The sources of the information and citations in this article are interviews conducted by the author in 1994 (Michael Kirchberger, Ron Bochar, Evan Lottman), 1986 (Walter Murch), and 1975 (Dede Allen, Mimi Arsham, James G. Stewart). The comments by Gary Rydstrom were made at a lecture at the Walter Reade Theatre in February 1992.

Recommended Books and Periodicals on the Art and Technique of Film Sound:

AItman, Rick, ed., Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992.

Chion, Michel, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. by Claudia Gorbman. NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Moviesound Newsletter: The State of Film Soundtracks in Theaters and at Home, P.O. Box 7304, Suite 269, No. Hollywood, CA 91603.

LoBrutto, Vincent, Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994.

Weis, Elisabeth and John Belton, eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Forlenza, Jeff and Terri Stone, eds., Sound for Picture: An Inside Look at Audio Production for Film and Television. Emeryville, CA: MixBooks, 1993.

Schneider, Arthur, Electronic Post-Production Terms and Concepts. Boston, MA: Focal Press, 1990. —————————————————————————————

Weis, Elisabeth, Sync tanks.., Vol. 21, Cineaste, 01-01-1995

Great Lesson Hollywood Acedemy

2005-12-24T20:29:00.000-05:00

The sound of sound
A Brief History of the Reproduction of Sound in Movie Theaters
by Rick Altman
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What should sound sound like?
When you stand in the stereo showroom, or when you move your speakers around the family room, how do you know when the sound sounds right? When THX creator Tomlinson Holman designs crossover circuitry or specifies speaker type and placement, how does he know when he has it right? Discussing the home THX system, Holman stresses the importance of making films sound in the home just as they do on the dubbing stage or in the theater.[1] But that only begs the question–How do the people who design theater acoustics know when the sound sounds right? In fact, how do any of us decide whether a sound reproducing system represents the original sounds properly?
Clearly, it’s not simply a question of fidelity to the original sound source. How many of us have actually heard Toscanini at La Scala or the final mix of Star Wars on the dubbing stage? Yet even though we’ ve never heard the original, we have very clear ideas of how the copy should sound. In fact, depending on our hearing experience, we harbor quite divergent ideas about how Toscanini–and everything else–should sound. When Aesop’s Country Mouse paid a visit to his city-dwelling cousin, he found the urban soundscape not to his liking at all. Indeed, if the City Mouse were to drop in on his country cousin, he would probably conclude that there is something ‘unnatural’ about a nocturnal soundtrack featuring no more than the sound of crickets. For we learn to hear by hearing, and in doing so we form quite specific notions about how sound should sound.

To an extent as yet unrecognized, cinema sound depends heavily on the very same process. Though it is typically studied as an independent phenomenon, the history of film sound cannot be properly understood unless it is correlated with the major sound practices of each era. By listening to available sound, each generation learns just what constitutes acceptable sound. But since the sound available to each generation changes with transformations of taste and technology, it stands to reason that the standards by which cinema sound is judged must vary from decade to decade.

These changes are reflected throughout the history of cinema through such developments as increased frequency and dynamicrange, modifications in the role accorded to music, shifts in the relationship between sound scale and image scale, and innovations like stereo or surround sound. Changing notions of how sound should sound are thus readable through the history of variouscinema sound practices. In particular, a fascinating record of varying spectator expectations regarding sound is encapsulated in decisions as simple as the placement of speakers in the theater.

Unless they happen to be sitting next to a misbehaved surround speaker or watching a stereo film with a dead channel, most people pay little attention to the location of speakers. Indeed, theater designers have systematically followed Hollywood’s tendency to dissimulate technology inside the theater (even though it is often touted on the marquee outside), so much so that most spectators have literally never even seen a cinema speaker (other than the surrounds). Yet the location of speakers is remarkably indicative of contemporary presuppositions about sound. Indeed, the history of cinema sound may conveniently be divided into five periods, each featuring a different speaker configuration designed to match cinema sound to current standards of how sound should sound.

During the latter half of the 1900s, the cinema industry entered into a profound crisis. With the rise of the nickelodeon, the number of theaters exhibiting films had grown so rapidly that producers were unable to meet demand. Forced to show the same film as the competitor down the block, theater owners looked to sound practices to differentiate their products.

Where previous films had been only intermittently accompanied by a vaudeville orchestra, a lone untrained pianist, or not at all, exhibitors now sought to raise the tone of their establishments through sound. Eschewing popular music and ragtime, theaters instead increasingly featured light classical accompaniment performed by competent musicians.

Before continuous musical accompaniment became the rule, however, enterprising exhibitors labored mightily to make films sound like live theater. From 1908 to the early Teens, the human voice commonly accompanied film projections. During the late Aughts, films were often supplemented by carefully rehearsed actors speaking lines in sync with the image. Indeed, there were enough “talking picture” troupes (calling themselves Humanovo, Actologue, Ta-Mo-Pic, and the like) to support a New York academy dedicated to training behind-the-screen actors. For theaters unable to afford the full troupe, a live narrator was often used to secure the narrative coherence of films longer on spectacle than clarity.

The real attention-getters, however, were the dozens of experiments with sound-on-disc synchronization. The first of these systems to achieve a modicum of success was Cameraphone, an avowed attempt to can vaudeville performances–image and sound –for inexpensive distribution to the hinterlands. With one hundred locations by the end of 1908, and continued expansion in 1909, Cameraphone was soon joined by a bevy of imitators: Vivaphone, Electrograph, Phoneidograph, Picturephone, Phonoscope, Gaumont’s Chronophone, the British Cine-phone, and many others, culminating in 1913 with Edison’s ill-fated Kinetophone. Every one of these systems, it should be noted, aims not at providing synchronized musical accompaniment, but at reproducing the human voice (in keeping with the current generic term for the phonograph: “talking machine” ). It is thus hardly surprising that, after many experiments locating the loud speaker near the projector (the simplest solution) or to the side of the screen (the traditional arrangement for combined slide and phonograph presentations), virtually every early synchronized sound system settled on a speaker location behind the screen (fig. 1), where the resultant sound could most easily be assimilated to the body of the characters observed on the screen.

Primarily the province of undercapitalized, independent enterprises, sound-on-disc fell prey by the early Teens to a systematic producer campaign to feature continuous musical accompaniment and narrative sound effects in preference to the human voice. By the mid-Twenties, light classical orchestral or organ accompaniment had become so pervasive as to relegate speech entirely to the written form of inter-titles.

It is thus not so much the technology that changes with the Vitaphone system that precipitated Hollywood’s conversion to sound in the late Twenties. After all, even though it benefits from Bell Laboratories’ advances in electric recording and amplification, Vitaphone is still nothing more than an improved version of the dozens of sound-on-disc systems popular around 1910. Important changes had come not in technology alone, but also in audience expectations regarding sound. No longer was speech the film accompaniment of choice. Instead, discs were called upon to provide the expected musical support for films that continued to carry speech on intertitles.

When the Vitaphone system was first exploited commercially in 1926, we thus find an entirely new speaker configuration, again reflecting current assumptions about what kind of sound merits reproducing. While one speaker is maintained behind the screen–in order to reproduce infrequent speeches, like Will Hays’s introduction to the initial Vitaphone shorts program–the other is located in the orchestra pit, pointing upwards, simulating the sound of the orchestra it has displaced (fig. 2). Pity the poor projectionist, frantically switching back and forth from one speaker to the other, according to the type of sound reproduced.

From the films produced for the Vita-phone system during its first year of operation, it is clear that Warners thought of synchronized sound as serving alternately one of two purposes: either to replicate music or to serve as a public address system (hardly surprising, since the Bell Labs research leading to Vitaphone had included the development of a new public address system and a new phonograph, the Orthophonic Victrola). The first Vitaphone shorts systematically stress musical uses, while the first year’s features range from Don Juan’s ninety- nine percent musical accompaniment (August 1926) to tentative experiments with what we might call “megaphone speech” in The First Auto (June 1927). While the latter film uses intertitles for all normal conversation, the Vitaphone system is pressed into service each time a character shouts or calls out to another character, thus taking advantage of the public address-like amplification provided by the behind-the-screen speaker quite properly identified as loud.

Designed primarily for sounds made to be amplified, sounds that their makers seek to project to a larger public, the Vitaphone system nevertheless proved unable to determine its own fate, for technologies depend as much on their use as vice versa. Starting with The Jazz Singer in October 1927, audiences were increasingly exposed to a new kind of sound–not the theatrical kind meant to be projected to a larger public, but a new more intimate sound that is presented as private, and thus can only be overheard. When Jolson sings to the crowd in Coffee Dan’ s, like generations of vaudeville and theatrical performers before him he is purposely projecting his voice to a large audience; but when he sings and talks privately to his mother, an entirely new kind of relationship is established between the performer and the amplification system. At Coffee Dan’s, performer and technology are aligned, the amplifying potential of the one overtly serving the other’s amplificatory purpose; in the privacy of the family living room, however, the amplifying technology operates in spite of and against Jolson’s quiet demeanor, thus changing us spectators from the destined audience of a self- conscious performer to a group of auditory voyeurs intent on hearing sounds that are not meant for us.

The new function of the antiquated sound-on-disc technology spawned by this important change in filmmaking style is reflected as of 1929 by a revised loudspeaker configuration. No longer present to replace the orchestra, the sound now abandons the pit to settle fully behind the screen. Whereas 1926 sound practice recognized the pit orchestra as the source of all music (typically thought of as accompaniment), the many musical films of the 1927-29 period increasingly locate the source of music on the screen. As revealed in a 1929 Western Electric ad (fig. 3), this new standard is recognized in theaters by henceforth placing both speakers behind the screen, so that all sound can once again be identified with the activity presented on that screen.

Note that there is nothing particularly logical about this change. Why should the voice of Fox’s Movietone News announcer come from behind the screen? It would make more sense to identify him with the projection of the film by locating his speaker near the projector, or to recognize his off-screen status by placing his speaker next to the screen. Locating his voice behind the screen creates a spurious identification between the announcer and the images he presents. And of course it is precisely this identification that the new arrangement seeks to establish. Increasingly, during Hollywood’s heyday, the screen displaces all other aspects of the film experience, to the point where generations of film theorists have assumed that the whole of the cinema may be reduced to the screen alone, thus missing the point that the speakers of Hollywood’s classical period are dissimulated behind the screen on purpose, in order to hide the real source of the sound by attributing it to the image.

Ironically, the turn away from the classical tendency to dissimulate sound sources occurs as a side effect of a movement designed to increase identification between sound and image. Not content with a generalized correspondence between screen image and behind-the-screen sound, technicians caught up in the high-fidelity movement sought to enhance the spatial correspondences between cinema sound and image. Following up on the 1933 Bell Labs experiments with broadcast stereo, in 1940 Western Electric demonstrated a four-track stereo system (left-center-right- control) aimed instead at the recording industry. Before stereo records began to flood American markets in the late Fifties, however, stereo had been adopted by the cinema industry under the most confused of circumstances. First introduced in Cinerama’s early Fifties travelogue extravaganzas, cinema stereo was given the double task of meeting the needs both of fidelity (accurate spatialization) and of spectacle (rapid, energetic movement). Only the familiar ping-pong sound of early stereo records and films could simultaneously capture these two standards, yet the panning of dialog across a wide screen and back ran directly counter to the expectations of both cinema spectators (who had been trained to expect single-source sound by classical Hollywood films and speaker placement) and home high-fidelity listeners (who had been trained to regard monaural reproduction as the norm).

When Fox tried to impose magnetic stereo on all CinemaScope users, four-track for 35mm (left-center-right-surround) and six-track for 70mm (adding half-left and half-right channels), they thus found themselves bucking both economic and representational objections. While the fully panned dialog championed in the mid-Fifties by Fox and Todd-AO offered gains in a certain sort of fidelity, it failed to match current (monaural) notions of high fidelity. The surround speakers created the inverse problem. Used only intermittently, usually to reinforce spectacular visual effects, surround sound worked directly against the ideal of spatial fidelity applied to the three direction-al front speakers. So contradictory did this system appear that most studios simply refused to follow Fox’s lead. As John Belton reports, M-G-M, Warners, Columbia, and Universal refused to ping-pong dialog, reproducing it instead in mono, while most studios shied away from the surrounds, with Columbia never using the fourth channel at all.[2]

The parallel development of stereo sound for music and cinema over the past forty years offers a fascinating view of the way in which technological systems may be retrofitted to existing standards. To make a longstory short, the difficulty of matching Fifties cinema stereo to current monaural standards led to virtual abandonment of stereo as a narrative tool during the Sixties and early Seventies, with only music regularly receiving stereo treatment (in keeping with stereo’s conquest of the home music market during this period). Surround channels were so seldom used that surround speakers fell into disrepair, offering more static than anything else.

However, the late Seventies application of the new Dolby optical stereo variable area matrixing with improved noise reduction to Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and other fantasy blockbusters initiated a new era in speaker usage (fig. 4). At first, a new generation of sound specialists labored mightily to employ the surround speakers to enhance spatial fidelity. Having failed to learn a lesson from the mistakes of Fifties stereo technicians, the sound designers of the post-Star Wars era regularly placed spatially faithful narrative information in the surround channel. Recalling the 3-D craze in the mid-Fifties, for a few years every menace, every attack, every emotional scene seemed to begin or end behind the spectators. Finally, it seemed, the surround channel had become an integral part of the film’s fundamental narrative fiber.

But not for long. Listening to theatrical reproduction of the sound he had designed for Star Wars and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, Ben Burtt discovered that due to poor equipment and managerial disinter- est the narrative sound events he had carefully placed on the surround channel were simply not being properly played in the theaters.[3] Starting in 1983 with the third film in the series, The Return of the Jedi, Burtt initiated a new strategy, soon emulated by other sound designers. All narrative information would henceforth emanate from the front speakers, with the surrounds used for spectacular (but nonessential) enhancements. Thus freed from any responsibility to present narrative events or even spatial fidelity, the surrounds began a new career (especially in fantasy or horror films) as purveyors of spectacular effects. Not since the antics of the vaudeville-trained drummer accompanying silent comedy had cinema accorded such a place of independence and honor to sound effects.

While the surrounds were being liberated from the demands of spatial fidelity or narrative relevance, a similar transformation was taking place with the front speakers. Since channels two and four of all six-channel 70mm prints (feeding the half-left and half-right speakers) had long since been simply extrapolated from a four-track master, they offered no new information. Beginning with Star Wars, a new function was assigned to these speakers: to provide a boost for available low frequency sound. Corresponding with Hollywood’s renewed attempt to attract the youth market through concentration on sci-fi, adventure, horror, and musical superproductions, the creation of two “baby boom” channels realigned cinema sound with a new and unexpected model, the rock concert with its characteristic overamplification and earth- shaking bass.

Whereas Thirties film practice fostered unconscious visual and psychological spectator identification with characters who appear as a perfect amalgam of image and sound, the Eighties ushered in a new kind of visceral identification, dependent on the sound system’s overt ability, through bone-rattling bass and unexpected surround effects, to cause spectators to vibrate– quite literally–with the entire narrative space. It is thus no longer the eyes, the ears, and the brain that alone initiate identification and maintain contact with a sonic source; instead, it is the whole body that establishes a relationship, marching to the beat of a different woofer. Where sound was once hidden behind the image in order to allow more complete identification with that image, now the sound source is flaunted, fostering a separate sonic identification contesting the limited, rational draw of the image and its visible characters.

By the time the “baby boom” speakers and the surrounds had been liberated from narrative responsibilities, the center channel had already become specialized in dialog reproduction. So deep-rooted is Hollywood’s dedication to dialog intelligibility (we mustn’t forget that the conversion to sound was initiated by the ultimate purveyors of dialog: the telephone company and its subsidiaries), that nothing but perfectly understandable dialog could possibly satisfy spectator expectations. Given Hollywood’ s establishment during the Thirties of a clear preference for clarity of dialog over careful matching of sound and image scales, it is hardly surprising that stereo imaging would eventually be reserved primarily for music, with dialog being routed uniquely through the center speaker.

What we see taking place over the past forty years is thus a systematic dismantling of the unified classical Hollywood system whereby all sounds would be fused into a single, unified soundtrack and funneled through a single cluster of speakers behind the screen. Creating the fiction that all sound derives from and serves the image (the familiar myth that has led to such a high level of disregard for cinema sound in general), this classical flamework has been done away with by broad dissemination, over the past decade, of a new system of discrete parts. Whereas the soundtracks of the Thirties and Forties were marked by their ability to share a single invisible loudspeaker (or a cluster of speakers all reproducing the same sound at the same time), the new approach offers four virtually independent sound outlets, each separately engineered and visibly located to serve a specific need and to correspond to a different set of sound standards.

The new configuration and its purposes are most obvious in the many proprietary home audio/video systems (including the home version of THX) that use Dolby Pro Logic encoding to emulate the cinema theater situation. Receivers featuring Yamaha’s Digital Sound Field Processing, for example, offer six speaker outputs (digitally processed from the four tracks on Dolby-encoded laserdiscs): left-center-right-left surround-right surround-subwoofer (fig. 5). In 1929, these six channels would have made no sense whatever, but when considered in terms of the multiple and varying requirements enforced by our soundscape and our listening experience, they openly reveal their source and function.

The left and right speakers offer standard stereo. Over the last quarter- century, stereo has become increasingly specialized in the reproduction of music (records, tapes, CDs, FM multiplexes, most uses of TV stereo), while narrative uses of the very same media (particularly radio and television) have remained in the monaural mode. The left and right channels of homevideo systems are thus primarily dedicated to the reproduction of music. In fact, all Pro Logic receivers offer the option of returning the system to a traditional home stereo mode, routing music from nonvideo sources solely through the left and right channels, while dosing down all other channels.

The center speaker offers a separate monaural channel, to which all dialog is shunted. Listening to the center channel is like listening to a telephone during a music concert, simultaneously satisfying our expectations for music reproduction (large room with high levels of long, slow reverberation and a wide frequency range) along with the standards that we have learned to apply to dialog transmission (spacelessness and no reverb, with a relatively narrow frequency range).

By virtue of its physical separation from the screen and because it carries no sound events of crucial narrative importance, the surround channel (or two channels in the case of THX, Yamaha, and certain other processors) is released from the standards we apply to the front channels (directional fidelity for the stereo left/right combination; equal intelligibility throughout the theater for the center). Seeking “effects that are out of this world” (as a recent Adcom ad suggests), contemporary films commonly create domains in which any sound effect, however farfetched, will be deemed acceptable. Not just the fantasy worlds of outer space and Transylvania, but also the apparently realistic realms of heavy military machinery and undersea exploration create atmospheres in which synthesized or digitally massaged sounds coming through the surround speakers can add to our pleasure, in spite of–or rather because of-our inability to judge whether the sounds we are hearing have any correspondence to reality.

Note how different this logic is from the standards applied to the limited number of effects fed through the left and right frontspeakers, which are judged by altogether different notions of spatial fidelity.

Derived from the baby boom speakers in 70mm theaters, the subwoofer reproduces all low frequency sounds. In addition to extending the bass response of speakers with insufficient bass extension, the subwoofer’ s floor-shaking capacity offers the possibility of representing cinema as a more participatory event. Yamaha’s ad says that “Cinema DSP blurs the line between watching a movie and actually being in one.” It might well have said that subwoofers blur the line between listening to film music and actually being present at a rock concert, thus radically modifying the identificatory relationship between the audience and the film.

Just as all modern music speakers involve a combination of woofers, midrange, and tweeters, each serving a specific purpose and range governed by a network of crossovers, so current theatrical and home configurations involve a series of quite different speakers, each dedicated to a different purpose, connected by Dolby Pro Logic and the twin needs of narrative and spectacle. While the logic is the same as it was in 1909, with the success of the technology depending in large part on its ability to conform to contemporary notions of what kind of sound deserves reproduction, and how that sound should sound, today’s results are far removed from those of the beginning or even the middle of the century. Instead of alternately satisfying divergent sound needs through differing sound systems and speaker configurations, we have entered into an era where careful manipulation of technology and representation alike have made it increasingly possible to satisfy a large number of contradictory needs simultaneously.

As sound technology becomes increasingly microminiaturized–moving first from theater to home and now to multimedia computer workstation- -it is tempting to speculate about future developments. Will CD-ROM- equipped computers need center speakers if they are to be used for talking books or voice-illustrated encyclopedias? Will they have built- in subwoofers next year, so as to provide the bass response needed for certain styles of music? Will they feature FM connections to surround speakers, so that video games will feel truly wrap-around? We live in exciting times, which only become more fascinating when we apply to them the logic systematically applied to past developments in sound: in order to succeed, each new sound technology must satisfy the needs created by the other sound practices to which potential consumers are accustomed.

Hakan's MarsVoice.com

2005-12-22T11:06:00.000-05:00

MY NEW WEBSITE MARSVOICE.COM
Hakan Yildizeli's Space Sound Film Musics
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It resides with Earth (our planet) in the region of the solar system where liquid water can exist on the surface, and therefore the chance that life is (or once was) present on Mars remains a distinct possibility.
Mars is the Roman god of war (Ares is the Greek version), and the planet was probably given this name because of its red color. Mars is frequently referred to as the Red Planet.

Young Film Composers Competition

2005-12-22T10:57:00.000-05:00

Grand Prize includes $10,000 Plus Opportunity to Score a Feature-Length Film for Premiere on Turner Classic Movies

Oscar®-winning composer Hans Zimmer whose scores for Batman Begins and Madagascar can currently be heard in theatres, led a blue ribbon panel of judges in selecting Marcus Sjowall as the Grand Prize Winner of Turner Classic Movies’ 6th annual Young Film Composers Competition. He was selected from over 500 aspiring film composers who submitted entries for the competition this year.

Sjowall beat out four other finalists, winning the judges over with his score for a 90-second clip from SOULS FOR SALE (1923) the film for which he will now compose a complete score that will be recorded with a live orchestra in a Hollywood soundstage this fall for air on TCM early next year. His winning score will be available at http://www.turnerclassicmovies.com/2005/yfcc/index.

Sjowall, a Los Angeles resident, is a graduate of the Berklee College of Music. His credits include a placement in Malcolm in the Middle (2005), music preparation for the 2005 Presidential inauguration and Stargate Atlantis (2004).

Runners-up included Daniel James Chan of Denton, Texas, Glenn Morrissette of Durham, North Carolina, Darrell Raby of Rancho Palos Verdes, California and Jason Graves of Raleigh, North.

TCM presents the annual competition, along with sponsors including Film Music Magazine, Todd-AO and The Guitar Center. When it began six years ago, it was inspired by a desire to bring unseen films to life and by TCM’s long-standing commitment to film preservation. TCM has more than 100 silent films that have not been seen since their theatrical debut, as they were originally performed with live musical accompaniment and have no recorded score. Each past winner, picked from hundreds, has gone on to score a film with a live orchestra, the past two years at Todd-AO, with a premiere screening of the film on TCM.

Turner Classic Movies, currently seen in more than 70 million homes, is a 24-hour cable network from Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., a Time Warner company. TCM presents the greatest motion pictures of all time from the largest film library in the world, the combined Time Warner and Turner film libraries, from the ‘20s through the ‘80s, commercial-free and without interruption. For more information, please visit the TCM Web site at www.turnerclassicmovies.com.

The Influence and Implications

2005-12-21T11:37:00.000-05:00

Cinema Studies Historical Turn:
The Influence and Implications of Early Cinema
Graduate Conference on Cinema
Conference Date: Saturday April 1, 2006, University of Chicago
Keynote Address: Jennifer Bean, University of Washington
Deadline for Abstracts: December 15, 2005

Cinema Studies’ Historical Turn:
The Influence and Implicationsof Early Cinema will be the third
Graduate Cinema Conference
at the University of Chicago, a one-day event that will bring
together new work being done by graduate students on cinema
history and historiography. Since the late 1970s, the scholarly
study of early cinema history has revolutionized the field of
cinema studies and led to the critical reassessment of many
long-held assumptions about film history.
Today, the way scholars approach the beginnings of cinema
history largelydetermines how they view the broader
implications of film history, theory, and practice.
Nevertheless, as a recent issue of Cinema Journal (Winter 2005)
haspointed out, historical research only figures as
approximately twenty percent of the work being done in the field.
If those numbers are indicative of theinterests of a newer
generation of film scholars, the so-called “historical turn”
in cinema studies has only made a partial revolution.
In order for it to come full circle, those working on
issues of historiography must continue to confront the important
questions of why and, more importantly, how we ought to study
film history, particularly in light of previous work done on
early cinema.

A central goal of the conference is to provide a forum for
graduate students who are exploring questions about early
cinema’s status in film history, theory,and practice and,
more broadly, the historiographic issues that such
questionsraise for cinema studies as a whole.
Early cinema continues to offer scholars a framework
both for conducting historical research and for engaging with
fundamental concerns about the nature of the medium-concerns
relevant both at cinema’s inception and in its historical
transformations.
Early cinema was, for example, the first global cinema: it was
produced and distributed around the world, and the influence
and implications of its circulation still raise relevant
questions for today’s media histories and practices.
Additionally, early cinema has itself become inspiration for
more recent films such as Guy Maddin’s Archangel and Bill
Morrison’s Decasia.
While such historically-inflected productions have roots in the
experimental work of a prior generation of filmmakers
(e.g. Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs),
they also emerge from and are indebted to cinema studies’
historical turn. The ways in which they reflect upon the
historicity of film raise significant questions for cinema
studies, particularly now in the 21st century when the future
of the medium is an open and pressing issue.
We welcome papers from graduate students that explore
historiographic questions specifically in relation to the
study of early cinema.
In particular, we are interested in proposals pertaining to
the following areas:

* early cinema’s historiographical impact on the development
of the discipline of cinema and media studies

* how the methodologies developed for the study of early cinema
might be applied to different historical contexts and to other
critical and theoretical questions (e.g. approaches to genre,
gender, class, or race; intermedial genealogies; intersections
with modernity; aesthetic histories)

* conceptual frameworks for exploring the international
character of early cinema in relation to later global media cultures

* perspectives on what early cinema history might teach us
about the present and future possibilities of the medium,
particularly as it pertains to more recent cinematic practices
(e.g. Guy Maddin and Bill Morrison; digital, experimental, and
post-classical filmmaking, etc.)

The keynote speaker for the conference will be Jennifer Bean,
Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies, Comparative Literature,
and Women’s Studies at the University of Washington. She is
editor, with Diane Negra, of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema
(Duke University Press, 2002) and is currently completing a
book titled Bodies in Shock: Gender, Genre, and the Cinema of
Modernity,
1912-1924.

Mars

2005-12-20T21:13:00.000-05:00

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It resides with Earth (our planet) in the region of the solar system where liquid water can exist on the surface, and therefore the chance that life is (or once was) present on Mars remains a distinct possibility.
Mars is the Roman god of war (Ares is the Greek version), and the planet was probably given this name because of its red color. Mars is frequently referred to as the Red Planet.

Atmosphere
The atmosphere of Mars is quite different from that of Earth. It is composed primarily of carbon dioxide with very small amounts of other gases, such as nitrogen and oxygen. Martian air contains only about 1/1,000 as much water as our air, but even this small amount can condense out, forming clouds that ride high in the atmosphere or swirl around the slopes of towering volcanoes. Local patches of early morning fog can form in valleys. At the Viking Lander 2 site, a thin layer of water frost covered the ground each winter.

There is evidence that in the past a denser martian atmosphere may have warmed the planet enough to allow water to flow on the surface. Physical features closely resembling shorelines, gorges, riverbeds and islands suggest that great rivers once marked the planet. But Mars is a cold planet now; the average recorded temperature on Mars is -63° C (-81° F) with a maximum temperature of 20° C (68° F) and a minimum of -140° C (-220° F).

The first spacecraft to visit Mars was Mariner 4 in 1965. Several others followed including the two Viking landers in 1976. Ending a long 20 year hiatus, Mars Pathfinder landed successfully on Mars on 1997 July 4.

Mars’ orbit is significantly elliptical. One result of this is a temperature variation of about 30 C at the subsolar point between aphelion and perihelion. This has a major influence on Mars’ climate. While the average temperature on Mars is about 218 K (-55 C, -67 F), Martian surface temperatures range widely from as little as 140 K (-133 C, -207 F) at the winter pole to almost 300 K (27 C, 80 F) on the dayside during summer.

Though Mars is much smaller than Earth, its surface area is about the same as the land surface area of Earth.

Notable Features
Except for Earth, Mars has the most highly varied and interesting terrain of any of the terrestrial planets, some of it quite spectacular: - Olympus Mons: the largest mountain in the Solar System rising 24 km (78,000 ft.) above the surrounding plain. Its base is more than 500 km in diameter and is rimmed by a cliff 6 km (20,000 ft) high. - Tharsis: a huge bulge on the Martian surface that is about 4000 km across and 10 km high. - Valles Marineris: a system of canyons 4000 km long and from 2 to 7 km deep; - Hellas Planitia: an impact crater in the southern hemisphere over 6 km deep and 2000 km in diameter. Much of the Martian surface is very old and cratered, but there are also much younger rift valleys, ridges, hills and plains.

The southern hemisphere of Mars is predominantly ancient cratered highlands somewhat similar to the Moon. In contrast, most of the northern hemisphere consists of plains which are much younger, lower in elevation and have a much more complex history. An abrupt elevation change of several kilometers seems to occur at the boundary. The reasons for this global dichotomy and abrupt boundary are unknown (some speculate that they are due to a very large impact shortly after Mars’ accretion). Recently, some scientists have begun to question whether the abrupt elevation is real in the first place. Mars Global Surveyor should resolve the issue.

The interior of Mars is known only by inference from data about the surface and the bulk statistics of the planet. The most likely scenario is a dense core about 1700 km in radius, a molten rocky mantle somewhat denser than the Earth’s and a thin crust. Mars’ relatively low density compared to the other terrestrial planets indicates that its core probably contains a relatively large fraction of sulfur in addition to iron (iron and iron sulfide).

Like Mercury and the Moon, Mars appears to lack active plate tectonics; there is no evidence of horizontal motion of the surface such as the folded mountains so common on Earth. With no lateral plate motion, hot-spots under the crust stay in a fixed position relative to the surface. This, along with the lower surface gravity, may account for the Tharis bulge and its enormous volcanoes. There is no evidence of current volcanic activity, however. And though Mars may have been more volcanicly active in the past, it appears to never have had any plate tectonics.

There is very clear evidence of erosion in many places on Mars including large floods and small river systems. At some time in the past there was clearly water on the surface There may have been large lakes or even oceans. But it seems that this occurred only briefly and very long ago; the age of the erosion channels is estimated at about nearly 4 billion years. (Valles Marineris was NOT created by running water. It was formed by the stretching and cracking of the crust associated with the creation of the Tharsis bulge.)

Early in its history, Mars was much more like Earth. As with Earth almost all of its carbon dioxide was used up to form carbonate rocks. But lacking the Earth’s plate tectonics, Mars is unable to recycle any of this carbon dioxide back into its atmosphere and so cannot sustain a significant greenhouse effect. The surface of Mars is therefore much colder than the Earth would be at that distance from the Sun.

The average pressure on the surface of Mars is only about 7 millibars (less than 1% of Earth’s), but it varies greatly with altitude from almost 9 millibars in the deepest basins to about 1 millibar at the top of Olympus Mons. But it is thick enough to support very strong winds and vast dust storms that on occasion engulf the entire planet for months. Mars’ thin atmosphere produces a greenhouse effect but it is only enough to raise the surface temperature by 5 degrees (K); much less than what we see on Venus and Earth.

Mars has permanent ice caps at both poles composed mostly of solid carbon dioxide (”dry ice”). The ice caps exhibit a layered structure with alternating layers of ice with varying concentrations of dark dust. In the northern summer the carbon dioxide completely sublimes, leaving a residual layer of water ice. It’s not known if a similar layer of water ice exists below the southern cap since its carbon dioxide layer never completely disappears. The mechanism responsible for the layering is unknown but may be due to climatic changes related to long-term changes in the inclination of Mars’ equator to the plane of its orbit. There may also be water ice hidden below the surface at lower latitudes. The seasonal changes in the extent of the polar caps changes the global atmospheric pressure by about 25% (as measured at the Viking lander sites).

Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed that the conditions during the Viking missions may not have been typical. Mars’ atmosphere now seems to be both colder and dryer than measured by the Viking landers.

The Viking landers performed experiments to determine the existence of life on Mars. The results were negative. Optimists point out that only two tiny samples were measured and not from the most favorable locations. More experiments will be done by future missions to Mars.

A small number of meteorites (the SNC meteorites) are believed to have originated on Mars.

On 1996 Aug 6, David McKay et al announced the first identification of organic compounds in a Martian meteorite. The authors further suggest that these compounds, in conjunction with a number of other mineralogical features observed in the rock, may be evidence of ancient Martian microorganisms. Exciting as this is, it is important to note while this evidence is strong it by no means establishes the fact of extraterrestrial life. There have also bee several contradictory studies published since the McKay paper. Remember, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Much work remains to be done before we can be confident of this most extraordinary claim.

Large, but not global, weak magnetic fields exist in various regions of Mars. This unexpected finding was made by Mars Global Surveyor just days after it entered Mars orbit. They are probably remnants of an earlier global field that has since disappeared. This may have important implications for the structure of Mars’s interior and for the past history of its atmosphere and hence for the possibility of ancient life.

When it is in the nighttime sky, Mars is easily visible with the naked eye. Its apparent brightness varies greatly according to its relative position to the Earth. Mike Harvey’s planet finder charts show the current position of Mars (and the other planets) in the sky. More detailed and customized charts can be created with a planetarium program such as Starry Night.

New Company Launches With Aim of Colonizing Mars

2005-12-19T21:03:00.000-05:00

A new center that aims to be a cross between a museum and an amusement park may soon allow people to explore a Martian settlement without ever having to leave Earth.
The Martian research and outreach center will be operated by Four Frontiers, a new Florida-based space commerce company whose main objective is the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars.
“We see ourselves as the pioneers of the new space frontier,” said Four Frontiers’ CEO Mark Homnick. “We follow in the path made by the early explorers such as NASA and the ESA. We settle in the new land, we turn it into a home and add value.”
Four Frontiers is headed by many of the same people who helped establish the Mars Foundation, the non-profit organization who earlier this year presented detailed plans for a Martian settlement the group called the “Homestead Project.”
But whereas the Homestead Project was narrowly focused on designing a settlement capable of sustaining a small group of initial Martian settlers, Four Frontiers will have a broader perspective, its member said.
“We want to establish the Mars settlement envisioned by the Mars Foundation because we view it as the essential element that will help open up the rest of the solar system,” said Joseph Palaia, the company’s Vice President of Operations. “But there is a wealth of opportunity beyond that that we are looking at.”
The company is named after the emerging inner-solar system economy that its members believe will soon develop, one that will be driven by the convergence of four frontiers: Earth, the Moon, Mars—including its two moons, Phobos and Deimos—and Asteroids.
“The beginnings of the solar system economy are happening as we speak,” Homnick told Space.com. “This is not something that’s fifty or one hundred years away, this is something that’s going to be happening in the next couple decades.”
Homnick said Four Frontiers’ focus will be primarily on the technology and design of the Martian settlement. The business of getting to Mars will be left to other companies which Four Frontiers will then partner up with.
The company’s 5-year goals include the construction of a 25,000-square-foot replica of a Martian settlement here on Earth. Unlike similar projects aiming to simulate Martian conditions, Four Frontier’s center will be located near a metropolitan areas and will be open to the public.
The center will serve as a source of revenue for the developing company as well as educate and inspire the public and garner support for the project.
“Folks wont’ just be on the outside, they’ll be able to literally walk through a Martian settlement,” Homnick said. “They’ll be able to see it, touch it and understand that its feasible with our current technology.”
The company is currently scouting out locations for the center in Florida, Colorado and New Mexico and plans to make a final decision by the end of the year. The center is scheduled to open in mid-2007.
Four Frontiers will also have a research and development section that will focus on the production of core technologies necessary for Martian colonization, but which could also have uses in the other frontiers like the Moon and asteroids.
In addition to research and outreach, the company also plans to act as a consultant to manufacturers and government agencies who want to participate in the new inter-solar system economy.
The group believes a Martian settlement could be established as soon as 2025 if the cost of private launch vehicles continues to drop as predicted.
Homnick said Four Frontiers is currently looking to recruit a few enthusiastic individuals to join the company.
“If you’ve got freedom in your heart, courage to face the unkown, and discipline to deliver, contact us, and perhaps we can realize our dreams together,” he said.
For more information about the company, visit their website at http://www.4frontiers.com.

NO NAME's Reviews

2005-12-12T12:01:00.001-05:00

This review for my track it’s call “Cinematic Bells”
10/10: A Very Powerful Cinema!!! Superb Orchestration

The introduction into piece settles one into the cinematic feel. The progression of the dramatic ethereal quality to the strings builds with the spacious metallic chimes and cymbals elements, combined with percussion counterpoint well and add the fuel of this fantastic Cinema Works. This would fit very well into a documentary or drama/adventure. I highly recommend this to any producer as it adds powerful effects to only what the camera and audience can only see and sense themselves. Hakan Yildizeli is truly a excellent Cinematic Composer!. NO NAME Titusville, FL

=============================

This review for my track it’s call “Drift in Dream”
10/10: Fantastic!!!! Drift and Dream of Reality!!!! 10 10 9.7.2005 @ 12:52am
Your right very tranquil moving happy! i don’t find anything sorrowful in this piece. The chromatic sounds harmonies well crafted. This would make a fanstastic SOUNDSCAPE!!!. You can move it and see how it does their, i have done that with mine. This is one of the best soundcapes i have heard. Its not too overdone nice pad sounds unique sounds!!! I will meditate this day with this one, its seems very relaxing to me!!!!. An expansive, spacious piece. Some may find it repetious but that is what meditation is all about focasing on a certain thing not a bunch of things, the mind can get to overworked!. The younger folks have heavy metal its a bunch of overworked notes scales and progressions they like that cause they have abit younger brains!!. I am 50 and like to let my brain chill some!! and then let it out to Play!!!! Very nice my friend HAKAN - Respect
==============================
NO NAME “Cognitive” ACIDplanet’s famous artist.Please visit his Website “Click Here”

Post Production Sound

2005-12-12T11:59:00.000-05:00

“World’s Most Advanced Post Production Sound Facility” to Open Winter 2005
Burbank,CA (September 2, 2005)–Warner Bros. Studios Post Production Sound Department has announced that, this winter, it will open “the world’s most technologically advanced Post Production facility” at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, featuring a uniquely designed, client-focused work environment.
Three years in development, planning and construction, the 52,000-square-foot Mission-style post production building will include two feature re-recording stages, an ADR stage with a spacious talent green room, 12 sound editorial/design suites and 12 DVD audio mastering suites, all featuring Pro Tools HD.
“This remarkable new building will offer an ultra-modern atmosphere staffed by the most sought-after talent in the industry,” said Kim Waugh, vice president, post production services, Warner Bros. Studio Facilities. “The future-of-the-art facility is designed to foster excellence in creativity with an emphasis on superior creature comforts and exceptional client services.”
The two large feature re-recording stages will be equipped with the latest AMS Neve DFC Gemini consoles. It is the first major motion picture re-recording facility to offer fully automated digital mixing desks that can support up to 1,000 channel paths, capable of 24 bit/96 kHz operation. In addition, six soundproof editorial rooms on each stage are fully networked to allow editors seamless support within the mixing environment.
In keeping with Warner Bros. Studio Facilities’ commitment to providing a relaxed and intimate atmosphere for its clients, each re-recording stage will include a luxurious bathroom and shower, a comfortable filmmaker’s lounge complete with a fully equipped kitchen and an extensive catering menu available upon request and an outdoor patio with a quaint Spanish-style fountain and fireplace. Clients will also have access to the new Warner Bros. Post Production personal concierge service, the first of its kind in the industry.
Warner Bros. Post Production Services
wbpostproduction.com

Space Diving

2005-12-07T07:46:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone, here is a my Space Sound Track "Space Diving".

Film Makers can use my Space Sound Tracks; "Space Diving"
any Documentary Film about Space for Educational Films
More Tracks about Space and Sound by Hakan Yildizeli
Please visit spatialmusic.com
Thanks for listening.

Mars, enjoy ! view from the top

2005-12-06T20:56:00.000-05:00

NASA’s Mars rover Spirit is experiencing the robotic high life — literally — now that it has reached to top of Husband Hill after a slow, year-long climb.Perched some 270 feet — about the height of the Statue of Liberty — above the plains of its Gusev Crater landing site, Spirit has returned images of stunning new vistas that include a potential winter refuge as the Martian seasons progress, mission scientists said Thursday during a press conference at NASA’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.“That’s no Mt. Everest, but it’s a heck of a climb for our little rover,” Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rover’s science mission at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told reporters. “When we first touched down at Gusev Crater on Jan. 4, 2004, the Columbia Hills looked impossibly far away.
Spirit spent 591 days roving across the 1.5 miles (three kilometers) between its landing point and the summit of Husband Hill, one of a network of rises in the Columbia Hills chain.The rover reached the base of the Columbia Hills, a chain named after the lost STS-107 astronauts — in June 2004. The layered rocks, which Spirit later found were changed by water in the planets ancient past, and tricky terrain were a welcome change for researchers, who until then found almost nothing but the same, basalt rocks — the most basic type of rock — day after day of exploring Gusev Crater.“The rocks in the Columbia Hills are nothing like the basalt on the plains,” said Ray Arvidson, deputy principal scientist for the rover science mission at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, during the press conference. “Water was involved in practically every one that we’ve seen so far.”Squyres said Spirit engineers and researchers will spend the next week to 10 days discussing when to leave the summit, though the rover will likely not stay atop Husband Hill for many months.Researchers have already picked out a long-distance target dubbed Home Plate in basin to the south of Spirit’s current location. A north-facing slope on the side of another hill, known as McCool Hill, may offer a prime spot to weather the Martian winter since the rover’s solar arrays would be angled toward the Sun to collect the most sunlight.“The deciding factor will be how good the geology is,” Squyres said of the time it will take to descend Husband Hill. “I think going downhill has the potential to go a bit faster, it’s easier to go downhill with these vehicles than going up.”Spirit and Opportunity are currently funded through December 2006, with scientific targets set in six-month sections, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program chief Doug McCuistion said.While the rovers show some signs of age — the rock grinding bits of Spirit’s rock abrasion tool are so worn, they’re only useful for brushing targets clean — they are still generating ample supplies of power, rover handlers said.“As long as these vehicles remain healthy and continue on their science return we’ll continue,” McCuistion said. “An asset on the [Martian] surface like this is invaluable…and we certainly don’t want to cut them off.More from Space.com

SOUND DESIGN ANIMALS

2005-12-06T11:54:00.000-05:00

Animals are never ever silent - dogs whine/bark/yip, cats meow or purr, cows moo, even in cases where most animals wouldn’t be making a sound.Rats, mice, squirels and other vermin always make the tiny little squeeky noises constantly while they are on screen.Dolphins always make that same “dolphin chatter” sound when spinning, jumping, etc.Snakes are always rattlingRed-tailed hawk screeching - [Listen to and read about Red-tailed hawks!] Whenever we see a hawk or a bald eagle, the sound is always that same red-tailed hawk screeching sound that’s been around since the 50’s!Always just before/or after some dramatic part of an adventure flick, you will here the screeching of a red-tailed hawk.Whenever a cliff or mountain is shown, especially if it’s high, the Red-tailed hawk will screech.The Red-Tailed Hawk scree signifies outdoors and a big, lonely placeOwls sound like Great Horned Owl. (a bird, that for the most part seems invisible) [Listen to and read about Great Horned Owls!]In a horror film when there is a full moon there is either an owl or a wolf howling in the distance. [Listen to Wolves!]The Loon is mostly found in lakes in North America. In the movies it seems to be just about anywhere in the world.[Listen to LoonsKookaburras (a type of large Australian kingfisher) are inhabitants of African/South American jungles, not Australian open forest. (laughing bird sound, see most Tarzan films). [read about and listen to Laughing Kookaburra!]Crickets in winter and peepers in the fallDogs always know who’s bad, and bark at them.Insects always sound wetIt’s the same Cat scream over & over.Sound effects editor Peter Steinbach once tried to record his own cat scream by stepping on it’s tail. His advice: - You only have one take. Step hard! (and dont wear shorts)

SOUND DESIGN ENVIRONMENT

2005-12-06T11:51:00.000-05:00

Castle ThunderUntil around the late ’80s, whenever you heard a thunderclap in a movie, it was probably “Castle Thunder”.Listen to and read about “Castle Thunder”Storms start instantaneously: there’s a crack of thunder and lightning, then heavy rain starts falling.Thunder is always in sync with the lightning, and the explosion sounds are always in sync with the stuff blowing up, no matter how far away. Same for fireworksWhisteling types of wind are always usedNon-stop bubbles underwaterDoors always squeekEnviromental sound to a shoot with the window open, are always next to a schoolyard or a construction site.When in San Francisco, no matter where you are, you always hear a cable car and or a fog horn.The Universal Telephone RingEndlessly used on television (especially in TV shows produced at Universal Studios during the ’70s and ’80s) and in many films as well - is the sound of a telephone ringing.Read about and listen to “The Universal Telephone Ring”Exterior Ambiences: No matter where you are outside, if it’s not in the city, you hear a lonely cricket chirpingTrains: we always hear the same old classic distant trainhorn over and over again.in U.S. films playing in big cities there’s always a police horn in the background - in films from other countries… never!!!!When a light bulb gets broken, there’s always a kind of electric soundWhenever there is a fight or commotion going on in the upstairs of a house, the person downstairs won’t hear a thing because the noise of gunshots, chairs falling over, screams etc will be totally masked by the following sounds; the phone ringing, the washing machine beginning its spin cycle, the dog barking, a drink is being whizzed up in the liquidiser or the maid beginning the vacuum cleaning. .

Hakan Yildizeli

2005-09-29T11:07:00.000-04:00