Much has changed since my visit to the studio last week. The advancing autumn has prompted the artist to let his trimmed facial hair develop into a shaggy grey beard which seems to fit the way his interpretation of your sound.ogg has also filled out. Last week’s audio has been worked on and is now more than 20 minutes in length. There is also much more depth to the mix.
You will get a fuller experience when listening to it this week and although there is still further work to do you will notice more processing and certainly more stereo. There are recurring themes through the movements and while the music element is clear the individual sounds collected from Lincoln are still evident throughout. Sometimes these are buried deep in the mix and at other times quite prominent.
This mix led to a debate about frequencies and the way in which an artist will cut certain frequencies from an “instrument” to prevent that from clashing with another. Using either digital or analog processing the person performing the mix will filter out some of the sound to form “a better sound”. I was and remain artistically worried about this. Is the piece, any piece, being acoustically castrated? There is more debate to be had on this but there seemed to be solid practical reasons for doing this process.
This brought us onto the”Munson curve“! This is really interesting from the sound.ogg point of view but also to anyone interested in the way in which we perceive a music mix.
I will let you look at the technical explanation but basically different frequencies come to the fore depending on the volume the piece is played out. 
Wow, so if I play something loud I won’t just hear it louder but I will hear a different mix! To a recording artist this is nothing new clearly but to me it has a massive implication. An artist will use a graphic equalizer to optimise the frequencies for a certain volume but this only matters if the listener replicates that volume.
I point out to the artist that this must mean if you listen to a piece at a different volume to that which was intended you get a different sound. He smiles and says “thats why you can never get the perfect mix”. When you listen to this piece you will not only get a different volume depending on how loud you listen but you will also get a different acoustic experience. That though is nothing to the complexities of the way the mind actually interprets the sounds and makes cultural meaning. I will explore that point with the artist perhaps next week .
So that leads us to Francesca! I don’t want to spend much time on this as the website will become a list of plugins with me raving about each discovery. Last weeks it was Monks and Wind. This week it’s the voice of Francesca Genco.
How does this work, indeed how does it work, for all these vocal plugins? Francesca is invited into a studio and sings a range of phrases. These are then edited, digitised and put into a piece of software which allows anyone who “buys her voice” to manipulate all its properties. These are Pitch, Loudness, Phase, Direction, Distance and Timbre Have a look at the Simple Guide by “Catching Waves”
Steve’s use of this plug in does not offer this middle-eastern interpretation but I include it as an example of how her phrases can be manipulated.