Included in this project:

• Production Analysis

• Digital Audio Song & Reflection

• Resources

Production Analysis

I have no idea how to know which synthesizer was used or what effect the drums had on them, so I'm going to be funny and pick the song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega. There was one sound, her voice, plain and pure, not much reverb. The producers were Steve Addabbo and Lenny Kaye. The end.

Except it's not the end. Tom's Diner was released in 1987 on Vega's album "Solitude Standing." Three years later, a pair of British electronic music producers (Nick Batt and Neal Slateford, known as DNA), cut and pasted Vega's vocals to fit into a beat that various sources say is from Soul II Soul's "Keep On Movin'." The DNA track starts with Vega's vocal, then it sounds like some synth strings come in, followed by the Soul II Soul beat, and later some synth brass punctuation.

Fun fact: The original Tom's Diner is known as the first mp3. The song was used by digital audio scientist Karlheinz Brandenburg to test the compression algorithm because it would be the least forgiving due to its single, natural vocal sound.

Digital Audio Song Reflection

For this project, I started with the Production Analysis section, above, and got Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega stuck in my head as a result of my tomfoolery (pun accidental but welcome). I somehow decided to try singing it in 3/4 time and realized that it sounded a bit spooky. My private students have been doing some songwriting this month and some of them have written spooky Halloween songs, so I decided this would be my spooky Halloween song. I decided to place Suzanne Vega's melody in the bassline and was going to use bass guitar as my non-primary instrument to record live, but I couldn't get it under my fingers, so I ended up using ukulele as my non-primary instrument instead and did the bass with my MIDI keyboard. Both the ukulele and the bass play the melody.

Then I thought it might be fun to have a MIDI string section doing a pizzicato melody along with the bass and ukulele so I threw that in in a couple of places as well. While scrolling through SoundTrap's hundreds of effects, I stumbled across "Horror SFX" and got really excited. In that MIDI program I found a clanging bell (count the clangs if you dare), crows, and a spooky wind sound. There were some other great spooky sound effects available that I decided not to use in this project because it would just be too much.

Next I added a MIDI track called "Ooh Female Alto" but I call it the "Ghost Chorus." Then I went looking for a beat, and had a hard time finding anything in 3/4 time. I searched "Waltz" and only two beats came up out of the hundreds of other beats. So I decided to try something that was just hi-hat, to give some driving tension to the song without it being too obvious that the beat was not in the same time signature as the song. I randomly listened to a handful of "tops" in the beat loop library and came across this one called "Cream - Creamy Beat (Tops)." The name doesn't sound too scary but in the context of all the other spooky things I think it gets the job done. It also contains some random metallic tapping sounds that call to mind ghostly ideas such as a ghost chef banging away in the diner's kitchen.

Finally, I played with the pan and the volume and added some automation so pan and volume could vary within a single track. I especially enjoyed automating the pan on the crows, so it sounds like crows are all around you, and you never know where they're going to come from. I'm pretty happy with this final mix. It made my partner jump, so I consider that a success.

Resources

The first resource video I watched was How Sound Works in Rooms, which demonstrates using Nerf guns how sound waves bounce off flat surfaces and then interferes with the overall quality of the sound. It then demonstrates how sound absorbers and sound diffusers can work together to absorb and scatter the reflected sound waves to make the room sound more natural.

Next I watched the video What is Up With Noises? This was a hugely informative, interesting and mind-blowing video. When it got to the part about overtones and how the C major triad sounds good to our ear because it consists of the simple ratio overtones and we naturally hear those notes together anyway, my brain exploded. And the video wasn't even halfway done yet. By the end it was waxing philosophical about the music in a screeching train coming to a stop. It's pretty amazing how math and physics and the physiology of our ears and the magic science in our brains work together to make us be able to hear sounds. That's amazing enough as it is, but then somehow we humans developed singing and drums and flutes and banjos and pianos and put them together in all different ways to make infinite kinds of musical sounds. Wow.

Lastly I watched the video How Digital Audio Works, which was also pretty mind-blowing after the previous video. Now you're taking those amazing sound waves and putting them into a microphone which converts them to electrical signals and the computer uses 0s and 1s to encode them. It was very interesting to see how and why clipping occurs and learn about the levels used to get the best digital audio.