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MillimeterScoring with a computer
Jul 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Gary Eskow
Even without a composer, fitting an audio track onto a video clip shouldn't be a square peg/round hole negotiation.
Got an unlimited budget? If you're producing a major Hollywood film, documentary, or corporate video and the money's available, get yourself a composer. He or she can take your input on the role that music and sound effects should play and deliver a seamless set of tracks tailored to your needs.
When a composer isn't in the budget, the reliable alternative is library music, which has become increasingly practical as LPs and ¼in. tapes have yielded to CDs and now online delivery of compressed files. However, as effective as traditional music libraries can be, they have a serious limitation. Generally, a theme is worked into :15, :30, and :60 chunks of music. What happens if your cue doesn't fit into one of these neatly timed segments? An editor has to make the cue fit by cutting judiciously.
Until now, no program has tapped into the brainpower of the computer to facilitate logical transitions between musical cues. Enter Smart-Sound Sonicfire Pro from Sonic Desktop. The brainchild of composer and Sonic Desktop president Kevin Klingler, Sonicfire Pro grew out of Klingler's own experience as an underscore composer for movies of the week, cable movies, and primetime commercials for NBC and ABC.
“I still make a point of telling our clients that hiring a composer is their best bet, when it's possible to do so,” Klingler says. But his product, developed with expert code writers Chris and Geoff Hufford, empowers those who are creating library music tracks.
The idea? To use the computer to help a producer or editor customize library contents in the most musical way possible.
In a nutshell, the user imports a video clip into Sonicfire Pro's timeline to determine the length of a musical cue. The user then tells the program where to end the cue (to three-frame accuracy) and what piece of music should take over, and Sonicfire will decide the most logical way to end the first selection. “We take a full-length track and have competent professional musicians break it into component phrases,” says Klingler, explaining how the program designs the musical transition.
Sonic Desktop continually adds to its library, which features a range of styles, including techno, pop, and classical. In addition to its own proprietary material, the company also licenses music from other top libraries.
“All of the music gets embedded with digital information that tells us where the most logical places are to break a cue,” says Klingler. “The technology can decide which of the component phrases work together to make the length that the user requires. The algorithms make these choices.” So far, the user can't layer sound effects on top of a track within a piece, but Klingler says that function will be built into a future version of the software.
Many SmartSound clients are in the business of creating corporate image pieces. One of them, Jim Cheal, is a partner in iDVnet.com, a company that specializes in digital streaming projects.
“I found Sonicfire when I was beta testing Adobe Premiere 6.0,” says Cheal. “I was taken aback by how easy it was to use. I'm not a professional musician, but I do have an appreciation for it. I recently created a presentation for an insurance industry client, and the subject matter was rather dull, to tell the truth. Sonicfire Pro helped a lot. It's very easy to put your video clips on a timeline and create music that matches them exactly. All you need to do is pick out a sound track, open up a video clip, and decide where the in and out points should be. The music itself is fantastic. I ended up buying the entire library.”
Cheal's partner, Bill Turner, is owner of Turner Toons Productions, and an author whose work includes Flash 5 Cartoons and Games: FX & Design, published by Coriolis. Turner has taken Sonicfire Pro files and exported them into Peak, a sophisticated editing software application that allows him to add effects to the music tracks.
“I'll take the Sonicfire file and export it as an .AIFF file. Then I open up the file in Peak and play with its sound. You can create some very interesting sounds, even if — like me — you're not a musician,” he says.
Turner says he's had some interesting results playing with the location parameters of Sonicfire Pro. “They really put a new twist on royalty-free music. You can set things up to create some terrific sounds. For example, you and I might both have the same Beethoven CD, and set out to create a 29-second, 15-frame track. But the music we create could be very different, depending on how we set up our blocks,” he says. In other words, if Turner divides 30 seconds into two chunks and someone else divides it into four, the net results will be very different. “This is great, especially for a non-musician. The software will do its damnedest to make a piece of music fit logically into 15 seconds, 12 frames, for instance. The way it edits on its own is outstanding,” he says.
As mentioned earlier, at this time Sonicfire Pro does not offer the ability to layer sound effects on top of a track. Why? Because it's a single-track stereo audio program, not a multi-track application. The workaround is to score a video clip to the point where you'd like to hear an effect (Smart-Sound's library includes four CDs worth of sound effects) and drop one in. You could then tell the program to continue with the same piece of music, or switch to a different piece, if the mood of the clip changes at that point.
Stanton Perry is another Sonicfire Pro user. His company, Rendertek, specializes in 3D graphics and animation packages, mostly for architectural projects. His clients include McDonald's, Taco Bell, and the Irvine Company. Perry discoved SmartSound at a DV Expo several years ago and has used Sonicfire Pro for many of his projects.
“Clients drive how detailed we get with the program,” he says. “We load animation into Sonicfire Pro and load in a track. We show the client our fly-through (where a virtual camera flies through a building or construction site) with a background track. Our needs are generally pretty simple. Outside we use softer music to show off the landscaping, and generally more hard-hitting tracks inside. Within 20 or 30 minutes we can put together a custom track.”
Like Turner, Perry sometimes loads a SonicFire Pro sound effect into Peak for processing. “We might be doing a science fiction project,” Perry says. “You can't execute a pitch shift in Sonicfire Pro. Let's say we're trying to create the warbling sound of fusion energy. We'll take a pneumatic sound from the library, load it into Peak, and pitch-shift it down. Then we'll load it back into Sonicfire Pro.”
As Kevin Klingler admits, there is no substitute for the human touch. But let's face it: Computers have been fed algorithms that detail many of the stylistic nuances that fill the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and they've turned out convincing facsimiles of their work. Using a computer to intelligently determine phrase structures to the sub-second level is an idea whose time has come.
Gary Eskow is a New Jersey-based composer and journalist. “Dream Girl,” a track he wrote and co-produced with Baron Raymonde, horn player with Rod Stewart's band, is being played each night before the rock legend takes the stage. He writes frequently on audio-related subjects and can be reached at scribeny@aol.com.
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