Sound Log

The Mix
Diary of a Sound Mind
Introduction
Page 1
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Conclusion

The experience is designed to last about three minutes, which afforded us the luxury of sculpting the entire soundbed in advance. The catch was, that all of the sections in the experience would be changing lengths throughout the remainder of the development cycle. This in mind, I designed an architecture for the integration of the elements which afforded the necessary flexibility in implementation to account for changes in the lengths of each section.

The figure below illustrates how the elements fit together, allowing for timings of each section to change while the overall integrity of the soundbed is maintained.

So if the length of Section A shrinks, rather than cropping the 1st musical element, this design will allow the event timeline to contract in a musically friendly way. Conversely, if the length of Section A lengthens, there is room in the transition effect track to cover that possibility too, without fading completely. If the length of time to complete Section A increases substantially, the 1st musical element can fade to black, or loop if necessary.

Given that the musical elements had percussion figures in them, they needed to fade in and out on downbeats in order to sound right. If one starts on the heels of another, the transition sounds sloppy. By making the transitions non-rhythmic, I was able to buy the necessary time to move from one section to another in a way which advanced the pace of the soundtrack, rather than tripping it up.

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