Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504731
52 M PS E . O R G SL: The personality of the rovers … you created a performance from all the existing sounds that they made, that they came with. I called you on the little "uh-oh!" But you didn't overdo it, there was just enough character and emotion— but it was still very real. MM: Thanks. That was all very intentional and an outgrowth of a series of conversations with the director. We knew that to engage the audience, especially a younger audience, we wanted to make Oppy more anthropomorphic than it already was. As it happens Oppy, and they speak to this in the film, was built to feel slightly anthropomorphic—the cameras were at the height of human eyes. They were separated by the same distance as human eyes. And its mast-cam was designed to resemble a head. Ryan and I felt it was important to make Oppy feel a little more anthropomorphic than it already was by giving it sounds that indicated speech. In fact, Oppy DID communicate with NASA. NASA would send it commands, and Oppy would send data back. But of course, that's all at, 4 trillion baud—and you can't hear it because human ears can't hear something that fast. So we made this justification that Oppy does communicate, and it does use its technology to communicate. So I utilized the sounds of computers and hard disks that were actually onboard to send these signals. I just put them in the range of human hearing and put them in the cadence of speech. The Oppy "language" had syllables and utterances that resembled speech or intelligence. To get there, I literally recorded myself saying what Oppy might say—"Oh my God, I saw my shadow!" Now there's seven words and eight syllables. I would take that recording, send it to plug-ins that would trigger hard disk drives and chatter samples, so that they would have the envelope of my voice, what I just said—but it wouldn't be words. So it FELT like speech, it had the cadence of speech, and it made Oppy feel just a little bit sentient. Which it was. The joy of that movie is that the scientists all related to Oppy as their child. Whether they were parents or not, they identified with it as a loved one. SL: The audience too. I was weeping at the end of it. It's just so well done. So sweet. You guys did a great job. MM: Thanks. SL: Tell me about 32 Sounds please. MM: 32 Sounds is a documentary by Sam Green that explores our relationship—the audience's relationship—with sound. We work our way through 32 specific sounds, or sound ideas, but it's not about the sound itself. It's about what those sounds might mean to us and how sound affects our lives and the meaning sound has to us. So it's a pretty interesting exploration of sound. But we do some fun explorations of sounds themselves as well. How sound is recorded, how sound might be captured, how sound might be archived. It's unique in that it started life as a live-theater presentation. Sam shot film sequences that I added sound to but they have been touring with it with a binaural audio track, and they bring it to theaters, and the audience wears headphones—because our goal was for the audience to have a maximum audio experience, and the only way to control that was to give everyone headphones. So we bring 500 headphones everywhere we go. Sam does a live narration. JD Sampson, our composer, does live music. And then the rest is pre- made content that I did, which is all the film content. SL: I need to see it. MM: It's really compelling. And we also have a proper theatrical version in 5.1 and 7.1 as well. But the binaural stuff is really neat because you get to hear that 360-degree effect that you can only get in binaural that you can't reproduce in 7.1. Sam is touring with it all over the country, and the world, constantly—so it might be in a city near you! Check out 32Sounds.com. We are also trying to get it on iTunes, so that people will be able to very easily stream it whenever they want. SL: That's great, if it's binaural, you can make that same track available. MM: Hopefully, we'll also make a deal with Netflix and we can stream the 7.1 version as well. " There is great value in sound libraries— but I believe the best sounding movies always have the freshest ingredients. No selfrespecting chef would put canned peas in their featured dish. "