Beast Edit Audio

[Jenni Israelsen]

Themassive speed increase is due, no doubt, to not only the processors but the H.264 acceleration in the nVidia card. Together with Adobe Creative Suite 4 support, it makes doing anything in H.264 mega fast. Generating raw Flash movies (FLV) is notably slower, but still incredibly faster than my old setup.

With The Beast, while I still have to go through those silly steps, they just take minutes as opposed to hours as they used to. The end-result (seen above) are excellent, high quality moderated screencasts.

More importantly, the integration between Premiere and Soundbooth, crossed with the speed of the new machine is fantastic. You can export sound for a video clip in Premiere straight to Soundbooth, fiddle around with the audio (fading in and out, cleaning up pops and fizzes, etc.) and clicking save syncs it right back to the video project in Premiere. That sort of work-flow is possible in Final Cut with an external sound editor, but the speed for doing it on my Mac was terrible.

Disclosure: not only is Dell a client, they sent me that $12,000 box for free without asking for it back. Adobe is also a client, and sent me a copy of CS 4 Production Premium for free. Thanks to both of them for those. Spiceworks and Microsoft are clients as well. IBM and Genuitec, depicted in some of the above screenshots and screencasts are also clients.

But working with audio is different from working with text. Building the Apple Report Card calls on my skills as a journalist, taking relevant quotes and dropping them in as I write. But when I decided what I wanted the 20 Macs for 2020 podcast to sound like, I was baffled about how I would achieve a similar effect.

Then I realized that there was a perfect tool for this project, and it was one that I had looked at months before and discounted as being irrelevant for the kind of podcasts I do: Descript. This is an app that consumes audio files, generates text transcripts, and then lets you edit audio by editing the text transcriptions. Delete a sentence in the Descript text editor, and that sentence is edited out of the audio.

Even better: You can create new documents inside Descript and copy and paste text from other documents inside, and their audio comes along for the ride. So, for example, I was able to paste all the interview comments about the Blue and White Power Mac G3 from all my interviews into a single document, and then craft my script within that document, switching back and forth between different comments from different voices. (Descript also supports entering text into documents by typing, so I was able to write all of my lines within the app, too.)

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And most recently, Supreme is a symbiotic world on the back of a mythic beast - a slow-thinking ecosystem where archaic non-human Critters find stories in vibrant objects to help them uncover a pre-history. Supreme is also host-being for tentacular writings by several different authors and artists who have created texts from a shared starting point: Symbiosis and Co-existence.

As mentioned above, Supreme is a symbiotic world on the back of a mythic beast. This oneiric space is home to a number of different non-human Critters which interact with each other and with the world itself. Their worldview consists of a series of myths about the workings of their universe.

All non-human entities in this virtual universe interact using an animistic neural network system to give them life as an emergent property of the network. It is a virtual living symbiotic ecosystem which can be watched in the form of an infinitely unfolding animated story.

The piece is imagined in the form of a diptych on two screens which offer two synchronised windows into the world. One screen shows a close-up view of the world with a focus on the entities which live there. The second presents a zoomed-out view of the world in which we can see the World Beast itself. In this way, the piece dynamically presents a multitude of perspectives from the individual to the hyperobject scale of the world itself.

In its essence, Supreme is a non-interactive video game. We made it using tools which will be familiar to any small independent team making a game: Unity for our game engine, Blender for 3d modeling and animation, Photoshop for creating and editing textures, Ableton for sound design and Wwise as our real-time audio engine.

Supreme is designed to be presented in a gallery or art space as part of a scenographic art installation, as seen in the photo above from an exhibition in Arles, France. It is presented as a diptych on two 4K displays with stereo sound on speakers. The scenography can change from venue to venue, but the basic setup remains the same.

Here is an encounter with the World Beast in a booth at ArtVerona 2021:

In Wwise I try to keep the setup as simple as possible, especially because we are only two people working on all aspects of these quite big projects.

For Supreme, all of the samples are arranged in the Actor-Mixer Hierarchy and nested in various containers (Random, Switch, etc.) depending on their use cases.

One of the Critter Voices is set up like this for example:

These are called using Events and local Game Parameters and Switches to change parameters for the sound.

Keeping this simple and organised within the Wwise Authoring tool allows for easy iteration on both the Unity side and in terms of sound design in Ableton and Wwise. As most of the logic for the audio is controlled by classes within Unity, I am able to make changes to this and test it immediately without having to re-configure the setup within Wwise each time.

Finally, I use the real-time effects in Wwise to add atmosphere and variety to the samples, as well as for the mixdown of the audio. The initial mix is done in our studio; however, we tweak this in-situ for each presentation of the piece.

Our pieces are designed to be shown in galleries or arts venues as part of custom installations. Therefore, each presentation is unique and has to be adapted to work for the space available. This is particularly important for the sound, as the speakers and the physical dimensions of the space have a big impact on the way a piece sounds.

With that in mind, as part of an install for our work, we usually dedicate a good chunk of time to edit the mix and EQ of the sound in the exhibition space. This is one of the big benefits of working with Wwise as an audio engine in this context - the Wwise Authoring tool makes it really easy to mix and change effect parameters as the piece is playing in real-time.

In order to do this, we use the Remote Connection capability of the Wwise Authoring tool to connect to the piece from another computer. Then we sit in the space, walk around, listen and make adjustments to the mix until we are happy with how it is sounding. After that we can easily rebuild the SoundBanks for that particular presentation.

For some of our pieces, we have even integrated a UI for mixing and EQ into the user interface of the Unity app. While this takes a bit more development time to set up, it allows for someone else to install our work without the need to rebuild SoundBanks each time. This is important for our piece Sunshowers, which is part of a touring exhibition about AI.

What best describes you? What best describes you? Audio DirectorSound DesignerAudio ProgrammerAudio EngineerRecording EngineerAudio Integration SpecialistComposerProducer / DirectorCEO / Studio DirectorLead Software EngineerSoftware EngineerGame DesignerStudent / InternTeacherITOther

Beast is a music composition and modular synthesis application released as free software under the GNU GPL and GNU LGPL licenses, that runs under Unix. It supports MIDI, WAV/AIFF/MP3/OggVorbis/etc audio files and LADSPA modules. It is capable of multitrack editing, unlimited undo/redo support, real-time synthesis support, 32-bit audio rendering, full duplex support, multiprocessor support, conditional MMX/SSE utilisation for plugins, precise timing down to sample granularity, on-demand and partial loading of wave files, on the fly decoding, stereo mixing, FFT scopes, MIDI automation and full scriptability in Scheme. The plugins, synthesis core and the user interface are actively being developed and translated into a variety of languages, regularly assimilating user feedback such as from the Beast_Feature_Requests page. BEAST is an abbreviation for Better Audio System. BSE is an abbreviation for Better Sound Engine, and it implements all the necessary music processing logic required by BEAST in a separate reusable library. The "Better" portion of the names refer to the complexity and many iterations involved in implementing such a "BEAST".

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