Surround Sound

[ateolf]

Mary Beth and I went to the Symphony in the afternoon. The program was just one longer piece called The Drop That Contained the Sea by Christopher Tin. It's a newer piece (only about eleven years old) and it has a big huge choir (don't think we'd seen a heavily choral piece at MSO before). It was good. Some parts I liked better than others (at times it could feel a little like Hollywood-ized World Music, but mostly I enjoyed it). At one point (for the Ancient Greek text...each section was a different language (and style of music) of the world with a poem from that language as the text) a small subset of the choir (seven or nine singers) left the stage and then appeared a little while later behind us in the middle of the auditorium and that gave it an effective surround sound. Then at a point during that section they walked up to the side of the stage while singing and then left the stage and disappeared into the wings, still singing so you got the backstage echo. There was also a bunch of percussion instruments from around the world. Fun stuff. Later at night I worked more on editing the audio for the movie. I painstakingly made my way through and eventually finished the third track (the one with the dialog (and other stuff) on it). That one was probably the most tedious and painstaking (I thought it might be less so than the first two but no). I finished a little bit past my bedtime but I figured I'd see what the next track was like, at least. The fourth track is the one that appears to be just for the subwoofers. It just has some bassy rumbles, and fewer big sounds in general than any of the other tracks. It also has some low and very quiet echoes of the music but there's no often other sound effects happening at the same time. That one did turn out as I'd hoped and it was way easy and I just went ahead and breezed through it because it went so fast. Did not take long at all to edit that one. So I stayed up a little bit later and knocked the whole thing out. Made me feel better about only having just reached halfway through and almost immediately changing that to two-thirds of the way through! (In terms of results, not necessarily time spent!)