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  4. Dealing with room tone & human noise in MIR...

  • Dealing with room tone & human noise in MIR...

    L
    L

    In listening to the demos of MIR, one thing that I noticed that really calls attention to the fact that I'm listening to samples is the extremely low noise floor. There's no sense of having a number of people in a room (breathing, etc.). Has anyone dealt with that issue totally within MIR, or is must one take the output of MIR and then mix in some amount of "scoring noise" afterwards? If so, it would be a shame if the noise wasn't subjected to the same convolution. 

    Sorry if this has already been explored (and if so, please point me toward a link).
  • DietzD
    VSL Team
    DietzD

    Each Venue of Vienna MIR offers a dedicated "RoomTone" recording, consisting of the unique natural noise floor inherent to any room. Actually RoomTone is available for each microphone individually, and its volume can be set according to taste (or switched off completely). But of course, these recordings are made from complete silence, without anybody in the hall.

    I have experimented with looped "scoring noise" from various sources quite a bit, and while I found it helpful on some occasions, it somehow destroyed the feeling of "being there" most of the time, as the noise establishes the sense of a different room, thus concuring *) competing with the space MIR creates. To my ears, things got worse when routing these loops through the convolution-engine ("reverberated room").

    I came to the conclusion that there is no meaningful "one size fits all"-solution, that's why loops of scoring noises are not available within MIR. You will have to mix MIR's output with recorded noises of your choice, if this is what the piece you're working on is asking for.

    HTH,

    *) edited ... see below

    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • L
    L

    Interesting. I wonder what the true solution for this would be. Perhaps bring groups of 10, 25, 60 people into VSL's studio and record them in different states? You could record them at rest, and also record them in more agitated states. Maybe they could be "playing" air violins, violas, wind instruments, etc. at a fast and slow tempo. It's all that breathing and slight rustling that forms an acoustic dither that makes things sound more realistic. You don't need a lot of it, but you miss it if it's not there.
  • DietzD
    VSL Team
    DietzD

    (Sidenote: Re-reading what I wrote above, I spotted a silly error that came from using an English word that sounds similar to a German one, but has exactly the opposite meaining [*-)] - resulting in a completely meaningless sentence ...the German "konkurrenzieren" is not "concuring", but "competing". Sorry for the confusion ...)

    The idea of recording people "doing nothing" comes up every now and then. In fact the audio-player built into MIR for the RoomTone would allow for this task, too (provided that the file comes in the 4-channel Ambisonics B-format MIR uses internally throughout its whole signal path). We have this feature on a "maybe nice to have"-list since the very beginning of MIR's development, but it's priority is not very high, to be honest.

    Kind regards,

    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library