Step outside and have a listen to our world. In today’s fast-paced society, I personally feel this is not done enough, even recreational. What can be even more scary, thrilling, disturbing, and exciting all at the same time is to listen to our world in a place of near-silence. I say ‘near-silence’, because true silence (to us) does not exist. Sound propagation, as we know it, is due to compression and rarefaction of air molecules. I say ‘as we know it’ because many different molecules conduct sound, such as water, although air molecules are what we as human beings are designed to hear with our ears and thus generally accept as the norm, or base standard, by which all comparisons are made. If there is no air, we cannot hear, even if we found a way to stay alive from being completely oxygen-deprived – true silence is a paradox. I cannot recall the source of this quote, but it has been said that near-silence, or ”silence’ as we fallibly know it, is “the sound of everything, at rest”. It is very true, there is a noisefloor, or presence, which can be heard in near-silence if you listen carefully.
Photo by Andrew Papagiannis.
With the increasing technological and globalized developments in our world, naturally-occurring near-silence is becoming an endangered species by the day. A prime example is aircraft, because their flight pattern criss-cross over remote areas of wilderness and untamed land, and they are incessantly loud. A saying I’ve always liked is that “aircraft always fly low enough that they ruin the recording, yet high enough that they cannot be recorded”. The mere fact that I had to cut a sound recording multiple times due to LAX air traffic while 100 miles away in the Carrizo Plane (made famous by the San Andreas Fault) should be indicative enough of the problem at hand. I feel very fortunate and privileged to have had the opportunity to experience almost near-silence, and this was at the Twentynine Palms / Joshua Tree area of Southern California’s Mojave Desert. I say this because unlike the Carrizo Plane, there were virtually no crickets, birds, or insects chattering. And this brings me to the point about listening to the world around you. Nature can make quite a racket. Heck, the Mojave makes noise too, albeit slightly sparse. It all comes down to our conscious awareness – are we willing to experience the world round us? It requires a lot of patience, sometimes many minutes or hours, since our ears are ill-adjusted for and used to the normal 70-80 dBSPL urban environment we live in – as much as 95dBSPL if you spend a lot of time around streets such as Los Angeles (in context, CAL-OSHA regulations state that 85dBSPL is an allowable listening level for 8 hours per day maximum). Our homes, when running merely central air, rate at about 40-50 dBSPL. Quiet rooms with no air rate at about 30-40 dBSPL. Near-silence is, well, near 0dBSPL (the threshold of human hearing). The world around us is very alive with air, wind, birds, insects, water, traffic, car horns, voices, footsteps, and so much more. The world around us serves as a context for our lives. It give our experiences shape, volume, form, and depth on a variety of levels - ethnically, socially, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, visually, and sonically. In film, the world around us is an integral backdrop which we call Backgrounds. This entry is devoted to theory behind what backgrounds are, while Part II will cover the more technical and editorial process.
Below is a sample of this hideous, technological marvel-of-a-monstrosity polluting an ambience recording out in the Carrizo Plane. This is a raw, non-mastered recording and it begins with a wonderful blackbird call amongst crickets, and then it all goes to hell in a matter of seconds by a sound which inhabits all frequency ranges and has a very long doppler pitch shift, thus it cannot be simply ‘carved out’ with most known means of cleaning of sound recordings:
Below are three samples of wind/air presence recorded in the Mojave around Joshua Tree, ranging from mid morning (about 10 AM) through dusk (7 PM) at easily 20 miles apart from each other. They have been recorded facing directly into the vast open country, and amplified by about 20-30 dBFS to feature the true sounds of the desert more prominently, and further reinforce that even in a place as remote as Joshua Tree, there is such thing as life in the perceived ‘silence’ when you stop and listen:
Backgrounds, sometimes known as Ambiences, Atmospheres (thanks to Tim Prebble for noting this one!) or known by post-production shorthand is BGz (BGs), are the sonically-painted backdrop, or world, in which the film’s story is set it and by which it is expressed. If there is any ‘red-headed stepchild’ of post production sound, it is these, which can arguably be tied with Foley. As Dom Cobb said in Inception when speaking of limbo’s un-constructed dream space, “we built the world for ourselves” – or at least something to that exact effect, I may be slightly paraphrasing. As sound effects editors we are charged with developing the world that the story inhabits, and in some cases, we are also responsible for destroying those worlds (see: every Armageddon-related film). In some cases with sci-fi and fantasy-based films, we are responsible for creating believable rich worlds which never existed or never could exist. Backgrounds is a very large responsibility and it takes many years to develop a refined sense and tact for creating them effectively. It requires an obscene amount of analytical listening to our world and it’s many locales, a passion for storytelling, and a thorough knowledge of your sound library and go-to source material. In my personal opinion, what can truly set apart great background sound effects editors from good ones is their library, and more specifically, their ability and desire to capture their own custom source material rather than always using the already over-used, canned recordings from the major commercial libraries. These libraries have some great material, but there is a proper place and a time to use them sparingly and appropriately. Some of my favorite traffic tracks are those which I custom recorded all up and down the Central Valley out in the farm lands. Car bys themselves don’t read all that well, especially for backgrounds – they sound washy and blurry. So, I in all cases chose to instead park my gear at a 45 degree angle to 3-way and 4-way intersections and record. By doing this, it created a nice stereo spread where I captured close by cars and trucks turning corners and rev’ing to drive away, both on the nearby corner and distant corner. These are all fantastic actions which cause an engine to have to work, thus creating a tasty sound as opposed to a car coasting by. And since we were out in farm country a lot of the vehicles ranging from sedans to semi trucks were in shoddy condition and by many accounts diesel. I have recorded 10-20 minute long takes of these consisting of over an hour of source material in total.
Below is a sample of one of the 20 minute recordings in one of my favorite spots around Tulare, north of Bakersfield, pretty much in the godforsaken middle-of-nowhere (no offense to residents) but nice and quiet for ambiences:
When I have to cut backgrounds, these are one of many of my favorite go to’s because they are not white-noisy, have an incredible variety, have a sound that nobody’s heard before, and they sell incredibly well when played at the most quiet of sound levels. The same goes for birds, where I have a couple go-to forest morning bird tracks I have recorded which are my preferred go-to’s because they sound ‘fresh’ and have long enough durations to not require an obscene amount of ‘looping’ edits.
Below is a sample of the bird track. Yes, it has some noticeable Noise Reduction because it was not the most ideal recording location, however this was employed with the understanding of the masking effect sound has, so I let it slide. When this track is dropped by 20dBFS or so to an appropriate BGz level, and winds and air are played against it amongst other possible layers such as traffic, the background noise has no effect on the final composite sound:
Backgrounds are also important for their emotive and psychological content. One prime example is one our favorites, the rich bottom end, or LFE (low frequency effects). This broadly refers to content which inhabits the fundamental frequency range of 20-250 Hz. By Dolby Digital standards, the range is 20-120 Hz, and by DTS-CA standards it is 20-180 Hz – the standards are in reference to the crossover for dedicated LFE hard sound effects on a 5.1 printmaster. That doesn’t mean that LFE content is not present in the BGz themselves at times however. Low frequency makes us uncomfortable. It is the sound of earthquakes, of avalanches, of fire, and well, anything we human’s perceives as threatening. The lower in frequency you drop, the more non-directional the sound source becomes. Once you reach the LFE range, it is quite indistinguishable, and that’s what scares our primitive minds. This is exactly why Interrogation scenes on films push the low end and usually consists solely of deep rumbling drones. A police interrogation can be a scary experiences (I have never been in one personally though), and with sound the BGz push this emotive threat by acutely working with rumbles (see: every CSI: Las Vegas interrogation scene). Want to push it further psychologically? Merely de-tune your tones so that they are dissonant, such as the “Devils Chord”, or tri-tone. On a side note, the tri-tone is the first three notes of Danny Elfman’s The Simpsons theme. As I briefly mentioned in my review of Crazy, Stupid, Love, so much as a difference in the density of rain and the surfaces it hits can change a scene from being very calm and, soothing, and romantic, to being one of squalor, pain, and loneliness (see: The Matrix when Neo meets Trinity under the bridge on a rainy night and then tries to get out of the car, looking down the lonely alley). Density can change the visual perception of a scene and trick our minds. Having personally cut backgrounds for a variety of college frat party scenes in films, these are highly dense and complex backgrounds which are cut precisely this way to give the visual and story more impact – because nobody wants to be a part of a lame party. It’s almost always big and bold because we want to be the life of the party, and make the audience feel that they are the life of the party too. There are of course situations when play to density differently as well, especially with crowd reactions to create a reactive rise-and-fall to the crowd energy when, say, somebody fires a weapon unexpectedly in a public setting, or a comedian tells a joke that leaves the entire room in stitches. What is funny to note is that for loud crowd scenes such as parties or clubs, the production track is dead quiet and the actors are yelling their lines. It sounds incredibly awkward as-is, until you layer in your backgrounds. Then, the yelling feels just right for the scene and reads through the dense crowd layers. This is where I find a big downfall with inexperienced actors and/or films (usually of the short film nature) where the actors are inappropriately talking as if they’re in a cafe. Yes, it may be okay when shooting because you don’t have all the club crowds or all the rainstorm going on sonically, but when you add these layers of backgrounds in post, the cafe-conversion is drowned out and lost completely. This then means that the backgrounds have to be toned down and pushed back so the dialogue can read, in which case the story suffers, and in the end everybody loses. Backgrounds is about layering and building, sculpting and defining. Background sound effects editors add their sounds, including the types expressed, with carefully cut, placed, and executed choices with a specific intention and supporting the story. It’s an astronomical responsibility and undertaking, yet provides such a wonderful reward when the scene plays back with a natural, appropriate feel and doesn’t stand out to say “hey, look at me!”.
Backgrounds can play to stereotypes with sound such as sirens, angry dog barks, and shouts to sell uncomfortableness. Contrarily, it can employ meadow larks, doves, gentle wind, and light crickets to sell warmth and pleasantness. The possibilities are quite endless, and that’s what makes BGz so fun – they truly are a creative expression and interpretation of world around us that we hear and experience day in and day out. Backgrounds can even include sensationalizing reality through hyper-real motives. Maybe we have a high-tech computer center and must create cool and interesting telemetry, tape machines, and computer activity sounds to bring expressive color to what would in reality be a very boring-sounding place (see: The NORAD command center in Wargames versus the real NORAD command center). These stereotypes can be very advantageous in the storytelling process, because it taps into our psyche’s instant-recognition associations. We instinctively know through reinforcement that sirens are bad to hear because we associate them with crime, and that beeps mean something is higher-tech compared to something that makes clunky clicks like an old computer from decades past (even though a siren doesn’t always mean a crime is being committed, or that high-tech computer’s don’t really make crazy-cool beep sounds). But in split-second story-driven situations, careful and strategic use of these stereotypes can greatly propel the story’s effectiveness.
Now, how can I listen to these BGz and learn about them if I don’t have access to the project files? Simply pick up your nearest DVD or BluRay, and watch it in a foreign language version. Why do this? Well, when a film is printmastered for theatrical release, the re-recording mixers spend a day or two on the dub stage laying-off what is called the filled M&E (Music & Effects) Printmaster. All major feature film releases, and episodic primetime television releases, require these printmasters. What essentially happens is that for this printmaster, the film is stripped of it’s english production dialogue track (and any backfill presence associated), and filled with any sounds which would now be ‘missing’ such as cloth pats or grabs – usually pertinent free-and-clear effects were already split out and protected by the dialogue editor so that they live with the effects stem. In this case, those sounds are not dropped. Also, some sound effects may need to be filled such as removing any English-language sounds from background walla and crowds. It’s a very strenuous QC process, and you will get bounced for missing so much as a cloth grab or shoulder pat. A colleague shared once that a film he worked on bounced QC in Germany because they perceived a small snippet of English language in the background walla – regardless of whether that actually was discernible when investigated, it had to be re-filled. Where this gets you in the end is a printmaster devoid of virtually all production sound, consisting nearly 100% edited sound created during post production. This of course receives an overdub by foreign actors. What this means is that when you watch the foreign language sound mix of a film, if you can consciously ignore the overdub voices, EVERYTHING ELSE you will hear, sound-wise, has been build from the ground-up in post production, either cut from a sound library or custom-recorded for the show – many times it’s a hybrid of both. But this is the finest example where you can hear the backgrounds for what they really are and how the add to a scenes. And, it will show you truly how thin the production track truly is. It is a common misconception that when a scene is shot and heard on a film, all the background sounds were captured during the shoot. It could not be further from the truth, and this is by and large why BGz are treated as ‘low man on the totem pole’ outside of the post production sound process.
Photo by Andrew Papagiannis.
Backgrounds don’t make the world go around. Backgrounds are the world. Backgrounds are incredibly important, and offer creative expression beyond our wildest dreams. Understanding what Backgrounds are is important before digging right into them. And in the upcoming Part II, I will share with you my experiences about how to create, build, mold, and construct them. Happy cutting!
[...] Two great articles about ambiences aka atmos aka backgrounds – part one and part [...]