The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post is about sharing our work with other musicians, producers, and folks in-the-know that we trust to get a second opinion on things.

A couple of days ago I was sitting on my computer getting ready to do some work when a friend of mine from high school came online.  He’s been doing very well for himself doing commercial music for film and advertising, while also performing his own music as Glorious Monster.  Every now and then we’ll contact each other and get a feel for what we’re up to.  It’s really nice to have other people who produce music to talk to and geek out with.  Anyway, he was working on a potential soundtrack for a theatrical trailer and wanted to get my opinion of the piece.
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This post focuses on capturing ambience by playing back and re-recording sounds in acoustic spaces.

The idea of piping sounds into a space and retracking it isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination.  Before the advent of reverb processors it was common practice to route audio to speakers in reverb chambers to achieve ambient effects.  Now it seems rather quaint to do so, but there are a good number of engineers who simply don’t like using artificial ambience.  And real rooms offer a very different, tangible process as opposed to the knob twiddling of ‘verb processors.

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This post focuses on convolution as it applies to audio - the capturing and reapplication of the qualities of sound.

A few years ago some new-fangled audio processing engines started to leak out of the lab and into the market involving a process called convolution. The name convolution comes from the type of math involved, but applying the process to audio signals provides for some pretty interesting opportunities.

Essentially, the process of convolution really requires two things: deconvolution and convolution. It’s actually a little backwards from the conventional use of the prefix ‘de’, although that again comes from its math roots. Deconvolution is the process of capturing the audio changes imposed upon a signal when fed through an environment, whether that be a physical room or a piece of equipment. Convolution is the process of applying those changes to a different signal. So, in essence, deconvolution would be ’sampling’ the way an environment affects the signal, whereas convolution would be making that sample into an effect, which is applied to other signals.
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