Do Make Say Think is a Canadian instrumental post-rock band from Toronto, Ontario. Their music combines jazz style drums, distorted guitars and wind instruments as well as a prominent use of the bass guitar. Their music is featured in several movie soundtracks due to their diverse sound.

Human Emotions

Emotions; “sadness” (loneliness), “happiness”,
Feelings; Anticipation- “hope”, “dread”

Brief –

Our finished project would deal with a series of very different emotions and feelings conveyed through sound. We will create 4 tracks that deal with each emotion/feeling using instruments that evoke these feelings. We will also us sounds from outside/world that help to construct these feelings as well. The finished pieces will be presented to each person individually through sound cancelling head phones in a darkened room (With or without the use of visual aids).

Theme (2) -

Exploring Nature

Brief -

Research into the ambient sounds of nature by building up a collection of natural atmospheric sounds. These sounds will be placed together in a collection of tracks in the hope of re-creating the scenes. For example, the use of wilderness/outdoor sounds would help re-create the feeling that you were outside, even though you are sitting in a room. We are hoping to trigger the listener’s imagination.

Theme (3) –

Video Soundtracks

Brief -

Research into motion picture soundtracks; We will be looking into the effect sound has when accompanied with a moving image. Using the same video, we will change the audio to a selection of ambient (found sounds) and musical soundtracks to create a series of different moods and atmospheres. One video, 4 different tracks.

Track 1  – “Space and Melancholy” – Audacity Image

Track 2 – “Music Is Just Colourful Noise” – Audacity Image

Track 3 – “A Slow Beginning” – Audacity Image

Track 4 – “Interval from a Dinner Date” – Audacity Image

A concept EP titled “Somewhere they can’t find us” by Brian Ward and Scott Ormsby. The CD will be presented to the listeners in a darkened room with sound canceling head-phones with accompanying video. The 4 tracks will all have different moods that change the feel of the video. Although the 4-tracks will also be consistent in style.

“Giacchino wrote a character theme-based score that the filmmakers felt enhanced the story of the film. At the beginning of the movie, when young Carl is in the movie theater watching a newsreel about Muntz, the first piece of music heard is “Muntz’s Theme”, which starts out as a celebratory theme, and echoes through the film when Muntz reappears 70 years later. “Ellie’s Theme” is first heard when she is introduced as a little kid and plays several times during the film in different versions; for instance, during the sequence where Carl lifts his house with the balloons, the theme is changed from a simple piano melody to a full orchestral arrangement. Giacchino has compared the film to opera since each character has their own theme that changes in shift during a particular moment in the story.” – wiki

Tempo: one of the most noticeable things about the soundtrack is the constant change in tempo that helps change the mood dramatically. This is a very common and important method used in all movie soundtracks. Here’s a fantastic example:-

Found Sound: Another fantastic technique that Michael Giacchino and some of the guys at Pixar researched and used to great use in the soundtrack of their movie was found sound. Like most films by their studios, a great deal of time and effort goes into finding sounds by using house hold objects and basically anything they can find. Here’s an interview with the sound engineer discussing the Wall-e film:-

Mood and Sound Design: Michael’s music bleeds emotion from every note. But this is no mistake. Giacchino takes great care in every track making sure he is presenting the characters well. Mood is very important in music, well, successful movie soundtracks anyway. Here’s a fantastic interview of Michael Giacchino talking about mood/sound design:-

Sigur Rós is an Icelandic post-rock band with melodic, classical, and minimalist elements. The band is known for its ethereal sound and lead singer Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto voice. Most of their influences come straight from their homeland ‘Iceland’ and it becomes very apparent if you listen to a few of their tracks. Sigur Ros are also common on television adverts and Film. Their music gets used to generate emotion in the viewers/listeners.

Guitar Sketch (Eerie, General Build with change in Mood) – Sketch 2

Guitar Sketch (Fast Tempo) – Sketch 3

Guitar Sketch (Nature found sounds, double-tracked Guitar) – Sketch 4

Found Sounds Sketch (Build Up) – Sketch 5

Ambient, added Piano and sound effects – Sketch 6

Rate Shifter Sketch – Sketch 7

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.

Revered for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, Bach’s works include the Brandenburg concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, the Magnificat, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, the English and French Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, the Cello Suites, more than 200 surviving cantatas, and a similar number of organ works, including the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D minor and Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor.

Bach’s abilities as an organist were highly respected throughout Europe during his lifetime, although he was not widely recognised as a great composer until a revival of interest and performances of his music in the first half of the 19th century. He is now regarded as the supreme composer of the Baroque, and as one of the greatest of all time.

Harold Budd (born May 24, 1936) is an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, California, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires. Budd’s career as a composer began in 1962. In the following years, he gained a notable reputation in the local avant-garde community. In 1966 he graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in musical composition.