ACM Interview: Tomlinson Holman

[photo via audioengineeringsociety]

Winner of the 2001 Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement, Mr. Tomlinson Holman is Professor of Film Sound at the USC School of Cinema-Television and a Principal Investigator in the Integrated Media Systems Center at the university.
Tom was chief electrical engineer at Advent Corporation, founded Apt Corporation, maker of the Apt/Holman preamplifier, and was at Lucasfilm for 15 years where he developed the THX Sound System and its companions the Theater Alignment Program, Home THX, and the THX Digital Mastering program.
He is founding editor of Surround Professional magazine, and author of the books Sound for Film and Television and 5.1 Surround Sound Up and Running. He is an honorary member of the Cinema Audio Society and the Motion Picture Sound Editors. He is a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, the British Kinematograph Sound and Television Society, and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. He is a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the IEEE. He has lifetime or career achievement awards from the CAS and the Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association. Tom holds 7 U.S. and corresponding foreign patents totaling 23, and they have been licensed to over 45 companies.

Supplemental videos (.mov):

Does THX stand for Tom Holman Experiments?

Can you tell us the history of THX and how you came up with the idea?

How do you see the future of digital television and digital cinema?

How do you see the future of multichannel music?

What do you think about "Wave field Synthesis" and other researches in audio technology?

What is the next generation 10.2 channel sound system that you're working on?

[via Association for Computing Machinery]
[visit tmhlabs.com]

The winners of the Giga-Hertz Award

The Giga-Hertz Award (given by the ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO des SWR Freiburg) addresses composers working in the areas of electronic and acousmatic music. A Grand Prize and four Special Prizes are awarded once a year by an international jury.
The Grand Prize honors the artistic and life’s work of renowned composers of electronic and acousmatic music.
This year the Grand Price of € 15.000 goes to the british composer Trevor Wishart. The four Special Prices, each worth € 8.000 go to Natasha Barrett (born in Britain), Dai Fujikura (born in Japan), the Portuguese João Pedro Paiva de Oliveira and to Åke Parmerud from Sweden.

Members of the jury 2008 are Ludger Brümmer, Detlef Heusinger, François Bayle, pioneer of electroacoustic and acousmatic music who developed the famous Acousmonium, Jonathan Harvey, Armin Köhler and Peter Weibel.
They said: "Particularly with his developments in the area of the software synthesis, he made complex sound processing understandable and applicable. Trevor Wishart designed in 1986, together with other composers, the Composers Desktop Project for Atari and Unix computers. Is to be emphasized also his work in the musical education and the formulation of its aesthetic and technical approaches in educationally oriented writings such as 'Audible design' and 'On Sonic Art'. [...] His music is enormously effective and has influenced generations of composers. "

The award ceremony will be held at the ZKM | Karlsruhe on November 29th, 2008 (starting at 7.00pm), in line with two Award-Winner-Concerts on November 28th and November 29th (8.30pm).

[via giga-hertz.de]

Ben Burtt interview - Upcoming Pixar

[photo via sfgate.com]

Sound Designer Ben Burtt moved from LucasFilm to Pixar a few years ago and headed up Sound Design on WALL•E. Have a read of this Q&A below with Burtt, thanks to Upcoming Pixar.

Some excerpts worth mentioning:

BB: I have always felt that the best way to get a robot voice is to have a human element and an electronic element and blend the two. So I worked out a circuit where I started with my voice and broke that down in the computer and then re-synthesized it. And the voice of EVE was done in a similar way. We used a woman at Pixar, who was named Elissa Knight. We started using her as a scratch track and once again, just like with me, once I ran it through the laborious computer process, we got results that we liked, and we felt we should keep it.

BB: I’ve always found, when you’re trying to create illusions with sound, especially in a science fiction or fantasy movie, that pulling sounds from the world around us is a great way to cement that illusion because you can go out and record an elevator in George Lucas’s house or something, and it will have that motor sound. It will be an elevator and you might associate it with that, but if you use it in a movie people will believe it’s a force field, or maybe it’s the sound of a spaceship door opening.
[...] It’s forging those connections between familiar sound and illusionary sound that I think is the basis of the success for a lot of the sounds that sound designers have put in these movies.

BB: I’ve been on this film for three years, so the work was being embedded right from the beginning, sometimes we would do some sounds and then do an animation test to try those sounds out. Those kinds of opportunities are great. So of course I’m very proud of that, what film gives you a chance to do sound effects as well as key voices in the film. Maybe the only other big assignment would be to do a movie with no music and see where you could go...

[some fun facts about WALL•E’s sound design - promotional PDF]

[read more via pixarplanet.com]