Room Sound as an instrument or effect

[FrankHudson]

I spent my month's budget on yet another set of VIs this week, the older East West Quantum Orchestra package. Hasty, first-impressions subject to change with experience: most of the common instruments, particularly the string instruments, don't seem to have the expressiveness compared to the smaller batch of East West "Hollywood" orchestra instruments I've been able to afford. But there are instruments I don't have, or for which the Quantum Orchestra examples are good alternatives to have. And at the sale price earlier this week, it's worth it for those alone.

But when I did a quick little "try some" fooling around yesterday I found a weird instrument while browsing: Room Sound.

Best as I can tell it's just what it says on the tin: a very low level (like -30 db or so) sound of the hall were the samples for the VI were recorded. I'm trying to think of what it could be used for.

I could suppose it'd might be for an otherwise silent section between movements. Or for my cover of John Cage's famous 4' 33" piece. Is that the idea of why it's there in a set of orchestral VIs?

It did lead me to think of other uses of "Room Sound." I happen to love a lot of the "Live at the..." jazz records of the 50's and 60s which usually capture not only silent room sound but some crowd rustle and whisper, and even occassional glass wear clink and expresso machines. One could just use a loop or sample, but for more Foley flexibility it might be nice if it was mapped to a VI so that each "note" could add different elements of the background club noise.

Anyone know of such VI at a reasonable price?

[Doug Young]

I'd think the simplest thing would just be a wav file of those sounds that you can mix in. There are plenty of ambient sounds on the web, often free. You could slice them up at will to put things where you want. Not as slick as having effects tied to keys (tho maybe that exists, too), but it'd work.

I recently did a video project where the video ended with people running across the lawn. I thought it'd be good to be able to hear them running, so I googled "sound of feet running thru grass" and sure enough, lots of choices.

[AcousticDreams]

This is a particularly interesting subject matter for myself.

Room sound, Room mics in general are a fascinating area in recording. It is talked about so much with special emphasis on recording Drums.

In an accidental discovery several years ago...I was recording a friend of mine and myself in my then, untreated room. I did not have the nice mics that I have now. I think I used a Sm-81(but might have been a 4050). I have three SM-81's that I purchase way back in the 80's(and I have barely used them since). I did not like the sound I was getting on my guitar with what ever mic I was using alone. However...what I noticed is when I turned up the fader of my friends Sm-81 on his guitar..(placed 10 or more feet away) I got a lovely sound when combined with my mic or mics, on my guitar. So much fuller and seemingly even more accurate tonal reproduction.

Having a room mic in essence is a sort of delay, reverb isn't it? There is so much talk about room mics...that I am wondering if there is something else going one that is different besides delay? After all, we can add delay, reverb, simulate different rooms with modern plug ins. Yet, people still strive to a room sound.

So what is it that is different? Why is this different than Reverb and delays? There must be something too it.

[Doug Young]

I was focused on Frank wanting "noises" - glasses clinking, etc. There are many reverbs that offer "room sound". For example the TC VSS3 has all kinds of interesting ambiences: Volkswagon Beetle, for example. Even "front car seat" vs "back car seat"! "public toilet" :-) and so on. And of course there are plugins like UADs Oceans Way that let you pick "room sounds" of their studio rooms, along with different positions, mics, mic placements, and so on.

[FrankHudson]

Thanks for the reply Doug. I've done the mix-in environmental recordings thing. Yes, that can work.

Here's an example where I wanted to recreate what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would sound like in a Beatnik Jazz club (I do weird stuff sometimes in my Project). There's a player gadget or audio link near the bottom of the post.

The Blog post with link to the audio file, used because I write there more about what I aiming at

In this above case I cut up the environmental audio and used a good deal of volume automation and the like to control the "ambience." More work than a simple "Riders on the Storm" lead in or the like, though even there I seem to recall a story that they worked to match the pitch or EQ profile of the storm audio with the electric piano intro. I thought it might be easier to "play" that sort of noises with a keyboard than modify audio loops.

I've listened to a lot of live orchestra and "classical" music and hear the room sound of the concert hall between movements, and oddly that sort of thing adds something. Weird huh? One of my piano VIs has a setting to introduce things like piano pedal noise into the audio it kicks out, something else that can help the illusion that it's a real "mic'ed" performance.

I doubt most AGF acoustic guitarists would ever do that for solo guitar -- can you imagine a setting for "chair movement," "breath sounds," "clothing rustle," or even "string squeak!" The main reason for that is that we a using microphones in a live room, and we will get those sounds, often more of them than we want. But with virtual instruments there's only IR reverbs and I'm not sure they are room sound as such when not responding to a note. With VIs such artifacts ("noises") of real mic'ed recordings might be costumes and set decoration to make something that exists only inside a computer sound "real" to a listener.