Making beats can be a complex subject, which is why there are artists and producers who specialize in beat and groove production. Here I will outline the main general ways that beats are produced in contemporary electronic music production. Sequencing … Read More

The idea of a mix ‘glue’ is usually applied to the use of dynamics processors, as with the various ‘glue compressor’ plugins. Gluing in the common usage aims to get the multitude of sonic elements in a mix to cohere … Read More

Back to Part 1. Sound & Music Cont’d Audiovisual aesthetics, especially in relation to music, can of course be traced back for millennia, so I have drawn some historical lines to constrain the inquiry. Since the idea of the ‘audiovisual’ is … Read More

Photo by Mike from Pexels Sound design can be said to consist of two aspects: the making of sounds and making decisions with those sounds. Making sounds involves a gamut of techniques that includes the processes of recording (finding and capturing a sound), signal processing (altering sounds) … Read More

Technological Origins and Aesthetic Trajectories The 1950s-60s At the start of this article, I want to quickly convince you that the general history of electronic music has a lot of relevance for sound design. Actually maybe you have already been … Read More

This article touches on something that is very easy to do at home, and yet I’ve managed to procrastinate for maybe half a year before finally getting around to blogging about it! While my own music does not usually adhere … Read More

Music videos, opening credit sequences, experimental films, depictions of hallucinations and dreams, compressing time and action, and videos that will kill you if you watch them are amongst the main types of moving image making that employ montage techniques. Montages have their … Read More

An important concept in sound design is to put sounds into movement, i.e. expressing meaningful and effective — interesting, emotionally compelling, even experientially correct or physically accurate— change in the sound over time. The movement of sound amongst sounds, and sounds … Read More

Jonas Mekas’ typology of experimental film is still enormously useful as a high level conceptual scheme for defining a vast territory of aesthetic practices in moving image media: – Documentary– Cinepoem– Cineplastics– Narrative To this list of categories we might add Performance and Animation, except … Read More