Distortion: A distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of an object, image, sound, waveform or other form of information or representation. Distortion is usually unwanted, and often many methods are employed to minimize it in practice. In some fields, however, distortion is actually desirable; such is the case with electric guitar (where distortion is often induced purposely with the amplifier or an electronic effect to achieve an aggressive sound where desired), or censoring words. The slight distortion of analog tapes and vacuum tubes is considered pleasing in certain situations. The addition of noise or other extraneous signals (hum, interference) is not considered to be distortion,[citation needed] though the effects of distortion are sometimes considered noise.
Effects: Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds, or sound processes used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. In motion picture and television production, a sound effect is a sound recorded and presented to make a specific storytelling or creative point without the use of dialogue or music. The term often refers to a process applied to a recording, without necessarily referring to the recording itself. In professional motion picture and television production, dialogue, music, and sound effects recordings are treated as separate elements. Dialogue and music recordings are never referred to as sound effects, even though the processes applied to them, such as reverberation or flanging effects, often are called “sound effects”.
looping: In electronic music, a loop is a sample which is repeated. Loops may be repeated through the use of tape loops, delay effects, cutting between two record players, sampling, a sampler or with the aid of Computer Based Looping Software.
Balance: Balance can mean the amount of signal from each channel reproduced in a stereo audio recording. Typically, a balance control in its center position will have 0 dB of gain for both channels and will attenuate one channel as the control is turned, leaving the other channel at 0 dB.
Melody: A melody (from Greek μελῳδία – melōidía, “singing, chanting”), also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a sequence of pitches and durations, while, more figuratively, the term has occasionally been extended to include successions of other musical elements such as tone color.
Pitch: Pitch represents the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound.[1] It is one of the four major auditory attributes of sounds along with loudness, timbre and sound source location. When the actual fundamental frequency can be precisely determined through physical measurement, it may differ from the perceived pitch because of overtones, also known as partials, harmonic or otherwise. The human auditory perception system may also have trouble distinguishing frequency differences between notes under certain circumstances. According to ANSI acoustical terminology, it is the auditory attribute of sound according to which sounds can be ordered on a scale from low to high.
Rhythm: Rhythm is the continual beat of the music, a constant flow that guides the melody (often created with drums but not solely). The study of rhythm, stress, and pitch in speech is called prosody; it is a topic in linguistics.
Tempo: In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for time, plural: tempi) is the speed or pace of a given piece. It is a crucial element of composition, as it can affect the mood and difficulty of a piece.
Foley Artist: A foley artist on a film crew is the person who creates many of the natural, everyday sound effects in a film, which are recorded during a session with a recording engineer. Before the session, a project will be cued, with notes kept about what sounds need to be created during the foley session. Often, the project will have a sound supervisor who will dictate what sounds need to be covered in a foley session and what needs to be created by special (audio) effects, which is generally left to the sound designer. Sound effects and foley are added during post-production to dialog and real effects that were picked up by microphones on-set. Sometimes (especially in the case of cartoons, many Italian films, and almost all Bollywood films) there is no sound recorded on-location, and all the sounds need to be added by the foley artist and sound designer, and dubber. The Foley artist may also accent existing sounds to make them more effective—enhancing the sounds of a fistfight may require thumping watermelons or cracking bamboo. Many Foley artists take pride in devising their own sound effects apparatuses, often using simple, commonly found materials. Some making-of featurettes show Foley artists at work. The term Foley artist is named after Jack Foley, one of the earliest and best-known Hollywood practitioners of the art. Foley began his career in the film industry as a stand-in and screenwriter during the silent era, and later helped Universal make the transition from silent movies to talkies. The Universal Studios Hollywood theme park presented a demonstration of a Foley artist in its World of Cinemagic feature.
Dubbing: In sound recording, dubbing is the transfer or copying of previously recorded audio material from one medium to another of the same or a different type. It may be done with a machine designed for this purpose, or by connecting two different machines: one to play back and one to record the signal. The purpose of dubbing may be simply to make multiple copies of audio programs, or it may be done to preserve programs on old media which are deteriorating and may otherwise be lost.
Noise: In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is an unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the audible noise heard when listening to a weak radio transmission. Signal noise is heard as acoustic noise if played through a loudspeaker; it manifests as ‘snow’ on a television or video image. In signal processing or computing it can be considered unwanted data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. In Information Theory, however, noise is still considered to be information. In a broader sense, film grain or even advertisements encountered while looking for something else can be considered noise. In biology, noise can describe the variability of a measurement around the mean, for example transcriptional noise describes the variability in gene activity between cells in a population.
Furniture Music: Furniture music, or in French musique d’ameublement (sometimes more literally translated as furnishing music), is background music originally played by live performers. The term was coined by Erik Satie in 1917.
Silence: Silence is the relative or total lack of audible sound. By analogy, the word silence may also refer to any absence of communication, even in media other than speech.
Mono: Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction (often shortened to mono) is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or (in the case of headphones and multiple loudspeakers) channels are fed from a common signal path. In the case of multiple microphones the paths are mixed into a single signal path at some stage.
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