Suffolk Developers - How Does One Person and a Computer Replace an Orchestra? - Martin Russ
Our thanks go out to Martin Russ for his incredible talk. You can watch the video below, enjoy!
The Talk:
The music that you hear in movies, tv programmes and online videos is not made the way you might think. With a few exceptions, the vast majority of it is produced by a composer working alone, in a small home studio, using a computer, some very sophisticated software, and a music keyboard. And not an orchestra, grand piano, conductor or tape recorder in sight! Actually, many big orchestras now spend a lot of time recording the raw material for the libraries of sounds that those music composers use every day, and the sound that you hear has been processed and adjusted for many hours to get as close as possible to perfection. So when the composer plays a note on the keyboard, it is the result of hundreds of hours of detailed effort by hundreds of musicians and editors and technicians.
So if orchestras aren’t being recorded playing along live to a movie, then how is all the music we hear actually created? In this talk, I will show you how I produced the soundtrack music for a short section of the third season of ‘Westworld’ (shown on Sky 1 in the UK), using the same type of software as all of those other composers. ’Show’ is the important word here. No slides, only a couple of videos, and lots of live control of software. The starting point is a video that has the speech and sound effects on it, but no music. I will show you how cue points are located in the video, how sounds are created, edited and assigned to those cues, and how the fine detail is then adjusted so that they work in the context of the whole piece of media. The main component of the music is created using music software that I wrote, which shows that big hardware-based modular sound synthesisers aren’t essential either.
✔ See how a video is analysed to locate cues - known as ’spotting' (and then how these are often ignored)
✔ See how sounds are made in little bits of software inside a virtual ’multi-track tape recorder’
✔ See how sample libraries make a one-person orchestra possible (even if you do not have an infinite budget)
✔ See how composition and conducting are done, digitally, live (and slightly slower than that…)
About Martin Russ:
I'm one of those unusual individuals who works best at the intersection of technology, creative, and commerce - coming up with innovation, strategy, insights, persuasion, and new combinations/solutions. As a result, I’ve nurtured my ideas via research and development into technologies, patents, and development programmes - and then downstreamed them as products or created partnerships or start-up companies. My current start-up creates software solutions for music producers and composers, as well as developing leading edge ‘Virtual Foley’ sound enhancement technology.