Hello, Terrans, and welcome to another interview on our Between the Seasons.
Guess what?
Today we have a brilliant sound designer, audio engineer, immersive audio, installation kind of guy who also happens to be a professor at Michigan Tech University where our
post-production team is located.
Introducing the fabulous Christopher Plummer.
Ah, the crowd goes wild.
Okay, I'm gonna get specific.
Christopher Plummer has, multiple arts stuff across a broad expanse of arts, doing all the things that I said, sound designer, audio engineer, mixer.
He also directs theater sometimes.
And specifically, he was the keynote speaker at an immersive audio conference in Kyoto, Japan.
has mixed some PBS specials, is the sound designer in a lot of theatrical productions from off-Broadway to Montana, creates immersive installations and does nature photography and
art soundscapes and photos, which all come together in things like, for example, at COP27 climate accord meeting in Egypt.
when his installation was part of the US State Department Pavilion, both for the part open to the public and the VIP part.
And last year, if you excitedly went to the brand new Haunted House things, and they'll be here this year at Six Flags.
Yeah, guess who that was?
Christopher Plummer!
He designed the whole thing and is the show controller so you can enjoy his work while you're screaming your face off.
And in a couple weeks, well by the time you listen to this, he will be at a workshop, I think actually won't be at a workshop, I think he's giving the workshop, I totally missed
that.
He'll be giving a workshop and an arts installation in the UK.
Christopher Plummer is also one of my favoritest people of all times and I will pretty much embrace with giant arms any opportunity to work with him.
That's fabulous.
It's uh same.
And of all the things you said, that's, think, my most important, my favorite.
It's really been such a joy to work with you on this project and on several others.
I'm sure I 100 % messed up some stuff in my very clumsy introduction.
So please do take the opportunity to do some corrections.
when you've done that, what are some of your favorite projects and what makes them a favorite?
Yeah, you maybe got a little carried away there with some of the flowery language about what I've done.
For example, I didn't really design the whole Six Flags, haunted houses, uh was just the show control programmer and audio engineer making it all work.
uh And that was...
a small thing.
Yeah, I mean, there's at least a dozen people that could do that.
Yeah, favorite projects.
mean, one of the things that's really fun to me about this project that we're working on is that this has been an area where I've been um super interested for a long time.
um And it really, well, it goes back to my love of Douglas Adams, really.
And when I started the sound programs here, this doing radio dramas was a great way to get the students engaged with um creating sound effects, integrating them to story, really
understanding story arcs, um and really giving them the opportunity to dive in deep to really valuable production experience.
And...
exploring stories that really uh where sound was an integral part of the storytelling and not that's not true of all stories, you know all stories um Particularly if you're doing
film you need sound there to make it real But you don't necessarily need sound there to tell some of the story, you know If you're doing horror films absolutely story sound is so
important to the story uh
But in other films, it's important.
And then when you get to books on tape and stories in an audio only medium, sound is sometimes you can create some oral worlds that really add to the story, but sometimes um
it just distracts, right?
And you just want the words.
um Interestingly, Douglas Adams, who started me down this, my love of his work started me down this path as one of the authors who I'm like,
You know, he's done his stories in so many different formats, so many different media.
The one I always go back to is the novels because he is so good in playing with language.
um But when he was working with Dirk Meggs, one of the things that they were looking at was really trying to create a really full-fledged radio experience, sound experience.
um
where the stories and the sound effects and the music all created this, what they referred to as an audio movie, and that they really wanted to push the boundaries of that and
redefine what a radio drama was.
And that was something that I really brought to my teaching and brought to as an opportunity for my students to explore and play in and have that opportunity to be in a
production
where sound was really an equal partner with everything else going on and that we were building stories around sound as a storytelling element.
That the world was going to exist in sound and that was going to have impact with the actors.
It was going to be something that they played off of and that they played into and that influenced their behavior and that helped us understand the subtext and
and all of those different layers of storytelling, that it's all going to be beautifully meshed together in that way.
uh So that's in sort of experience directly related to what we're doing here.
That's really where I came from, where I developed that sort of thing.
uh Yeah, in terms of...
Mysterious CHIRP.
Indeed indeed.
Yeah, I have to say it's common for actors to have not, you know, watched the film that they were just in or listened to the thing they just narrated or voiced or whatever.
Especially if it's like longer form, you know, if it's a commercial, it's, you know, 30 seconds out of your life.
um But the actors in The Mysterious CHIRP have all loved listening to the episodes.
partly because it's really a big cast, so it's an ensemble piece, but hugely because of how the sound design shapes the story and isn't just the glue that makes sense of all of
the words, but really creates the environment in which all of this happens and...
makes it so that the actors things that they're saying make sense because there's been plenty of times because we don't have the sound first.
We have the sound second.
That they'll be like, what am I doing?
What's going on?
And I'll do my best to explain.
And then like, you know, a few months later or two months later, or even like a couple weeks later, I'm working with you talking to the students explaining it in reverse.
And I'm like,
Well, the room is shaped like this or there's, or we're outside and the market has this really long alley and...
But I love their questions.
The questions they come up with, I think...
Go ahead.
Yeah, so many times we're sitting there trying to sketch out like who's sitting where and what does that mean that they can see or hear interact, you know, that's going to
influence their behavior and, ah and then also in terms of, well, they're going to talk to this person.
So they're going to have to raise their voice, right.
And it's going to sound a little bit this way.
And where is the listener?
Where are we watching all of this action from?
And making sure that everything plays out the way it needs to.
And then just subtle things can really help make a scene fall into place and sound right, especially as we get into action scenes and you need that.
Oh, well, they're going to trip over this thing and so they can't be too close.
But yeah.
Yeah, that's been so exciting and new for me, listening to people think about like, okay, so this conversation is now the conversation that the listener is kind of standing next
to.
But we kind of hear the other conversation in the distance.
Then we pan across and now we're as though we were walking, but like ghosts, you know, and then we're now we're next to the other conversation and
And that's been like so exciting.
And I have to say some of my sound design friends um and actors that do kind of both have messaged me privately saying, the sound design is really amazing.
And um it's been a joy for me to be able to pass those messages along.
But I think I also think that in terms of how that benefits the students when they're doing projects for school,
It's like a small thing.
It doesn't need to be necessarily 100 % polished.
They're working on their own or with a small team.
They get to make all the decisions that they want.
And this, and they do more than one job and they share jobs and all that.
Whereas this is like, no, this is, this is a thing.
You have a job.
Yeah, and I think it, for me as a teacher, any time I can get students to produce their work, not for me, ah it has huge impacts on what they do, right?
That suddenly uh it's a real thing and there's going to be a real audience and this is going to be out in the world.
ah Whereas if it's an assignment that they're just turning into the teacher, then, eh you know, that's just a thing.
We do lots of those and, um but when it's real, it's cool and it's gotta be good.
And you get a different level of work.
I also want to compliment you on the way that you helped last year's production team.
Learn what questions to ask each other and how to improve the ways that they can support each other in terms of data sharing and all of that.
You know, what questions should they ask?
They didn't even know that at the beginning.
And then I think about where they were at the end, where they were planning on how to make things clear and smooth and like, my goodness, it was just so exciting.
They had a workflow that was a real professional workflow.
Yeah.
that, and working with you in terms of, uh because there's one way that they work between themselves, which does need some help and development.
uh But then also having that added layer of, they're going to be interacting with professionals and they're getting this and they're getting that.
And sometimes things are, uh something has happened and we need to need to ask for a uh redo or a new recording of something.
And how do we go through that process?
And also, what have you done to look at this recording and is it fixable?
And what are the tools available to fix it?
um But yeah, it's been really great in terms of those dynamics of different people doing different jobs and supporting one another in the flow of information and communication and
really working on their professional personas and clarity.
um What's really great is that
You know, at the end of the semester, I was listening and responding to their work.
But especially when I get a good group of students, usually by the end of the process, they really know the story so well and they're so deep into their work and working on it
so detailed that I am providing some outside.
reflection and sort of audience experience.
But there's a lot of things that take a while for them to go, okay, here's all the little pieces that are moving around in there that we're trying to balance and make work.
And they've usually done a really good job of balancing all of those things.
And there's this, the sort of the process as a teacher, as a parent, as just a...
this is the way to be in the world, is caring for the people around us and supporting them and building them up and then watching them grow into their own people and go off into the
world and be responsible for their own things and do things.
And then on their projects, they are the expert.
And I'm sort of just giving them some feedback uh that...
even as experienced professionals we need.
We need those processes of revision and refinement and input and getting other ears on it and that sort of thing.
But just to have that point of having a group that you've been working with and really feeling that shift to these are the experts on this project.
And I can give them some feedback and stuff, but.
if we're really gonna get into it, they're gonna have to explain a bunch of things, because they are the experts on this project now.
And that's just such a fabulous, fabulous process.
So I know a lot of people have really enjoyed the Foley videos that we've posted, the scenes sound effects, like everything from the internal computer ones to they're standing
somewhere recording something to change it into something.
And I'd love it if you took a second to kind of explain sound effects like.
How do they work?
Where do they come from?
What's going on?
And because there's such a wide variety of that, and I know people really enjoy learning more about that.
It's kind of like a special feature, you know, on a movie.
So, ah and I thought it was truly exciting how they would be wanting to, for example, how do I make the voice sound like it's on the phone or a com or the other side of the wall,
were questions that they came up with to ask.
which provided a learning opportunity.
But then they also got really creative of how do I create a sound that sounds like, for example, a ship slowing down where I can't actually record that?
Or why doesn't the thing I just recorded that should be what it is, like a cabbage, why doesn't it sound like I want a cabbage to sound and what can I record to add to that?
So if you would just...
give us a little bit of like, what are various sound effects?
What does that mean?
And how does that, how does that go?
Yeah, think the...
I'm going to start with the engine slowing down because that was a great moment and I want to forget that and there's something I think really important about the ways that we can
work that I like to work.
And that's starting...
I like to start with organic sounds so that they still feel like a real world, a lived-in world that we're trying to create.
something that has an underlying natural feel to it so that we relate more to this being real people, even though they're aliens and they have, they're maybe radically different,
but they're still real.
And so for the engine, got, they had a variety of drills and other things that they recorded and then they pitch shift and they processed and
But in terms of slowing it down, what it gave them was a physical object that they could slow down and they could work with that.
they could then accentuate that digitally by slowing or speeding back the playback of the file.
So that also gave that aspect where you still have the organic sound, but you're able to manipulate it in real time to land exactly like you want in the story.
But the more that you can...
to get the base of things with real sort of complex objects, um the better I think the sound design usually ends up.
There are other sound designers that really work with synthesized things and there are ways that that's getting more and more powerful, especially as we look at physical
physical models of sounds where you'd say, I want to build this thing and I'm going to make an acoustical model of all of the devices that are in there and how they're
interacting and how fast they're moving and their vibration and all of that and using that as a base for sound But that's obviously a lot of computational work, a lot of planning
there.
Whereas if you can find the right object and you just record it, you're good to go.
And so that comes out a lot of like a lot of the Disney approaches to sound.
Although they were often sort of uh an over the top cartoony effect, right?
And whereas we're sort of looking not to make that cartoony aspect of it, but still to hit what are the essentials?
What are the things that are really going to advance the story?
What are the...
things that are going to make this environment real.
What are the aspects that as we have this little tiny room, we have this really big room, we have this other, this long hallway, how do we help the audience feel that they're in
those different spaces?
And not necessarily, there's a lot of things that we're going to do with sound that are not.
that you're not gonna hear.
You're not gonna consciously say, I hear the sound of the hallway, or I hear the sound of this, or I hear the sound of that.
But it's just gonna be, hey, this conversation is happening, and I feel that we've moved spaces.
I feel that the tension has increased.
I feel that this other thing is going on in the background.
And helping propel the story that way, helping to draw the listener in that way.
And that really starts with, uh you know, as we think about the production process, we get the script, so we get to start planning ahead of time.
And we're looking through that and we're going, okay, so we're going to have this thing, that's going to be challenging, we're going to have this.
We need to record the cabbages, we need to hack the cabbages up, we need to break some carrots, we need to squish some watermelon.
All of all of that and we can start building up a library of sounds for the show pretty early in the process and then we'll get all of the recordings from all of the actors and
We're working with really great professional actors that have good studios Usually all of those recordings are of high quality, but they are all different because they're using
different mics.
They're in different rooms.
They're in
different environments.
So there's a little HVAC in the background or whatever.
Usually it's super, super quiet because these are all, they are all designed to be neutral recordings and they're all really pretty good neutral recordings, but they are all just
slightly different.
And so one of our first things is sort of going through and figuring out the best
path to making them all sound like they're in the same space.
And usually it's a lot easier and until recently was impossible to remove the sound of a room.
You can add a new room, but you can't take away any room.
so finding that, here's our different acoustical spaces and getting all of the recordings to fit in.
our story spaces rather than their studio spaces.
And then from that, and that's we've got, we have some synthetic spaces, but we often will use measurements of actual acoustic spaces that we then use as reverb to put those
performances in the spaces of our story.
And we do the same thing as you mentioned with the, you know, on the phone calls or our computer who talks through various speakers in different rooms.
We have a library of measurements of different telephones, different speakers, different radio communications, different degradations there, you know, when you have a bad cell
phone connection.
that sounded different on a flip phone than it does on a modern phone and playing with all of those, we've got some tools that allow us to add some of that degradation.
And taking those measurements and layering them in and adding them to the sounds when we need to.
And then sometimes we'll take a speaker and play the speaker in a...
and a stairwell and record it with a microphone really far away, because that's just the sound we need and that's what's going to work at that moment.
And yeah, we run through the hallways recording footsteps so that we can get all those footsteps and figuring out the right shoes, the right surfaces, the right sort of
reflective environment, and how close or far away we have the mic, because as we get the mic closer, we get a lot of low frequency.
which can be really impressive and cool sounding.
It might be appropriate if we have a super large alien or something like that, but usually our heads are not oh inches from people's feet.
And so we have to get rid of a lot of that low frequency if we have the microphones too close.
But if we don't have the microphones close enough, then it just sounds really like whatever room recorded in and doesn't give us the capability
to put it in different spaces later on.
So there are lot of things that we're balancing.
And I should...
interesting problem.
And I should point out in deference to many of my film colleagues that in the film world Foley only applies to doing sound live to picture.
So you're watching the movie and you're making all the sound effects while you watch the movie, which is done in multiple passes.
You don't make all the sounds, you make one layer of sounds.
make the next layer and then the next layer.
So you do footsteps and then you'll do like clothing movements and then later do another layer.
We don't have a picture, so we're not technically doing Foley.
Although in deference to the rest of the world, Foley is often used for just recording sound effects.
In the film world, what we're doing here is more wild tracks.
So we're recording
So for instance, if you're filming with a really rare sports car, you'll have the location sound such as it is while they're filming all of the things in the movie, which might be
usable or might not.
And then you probably only have that car for a limited amount of time.
And so you'd schedule some time when they're not filming to record all the sounds that you could possibly get off of that car.
So you don't have to rent it again or
created again if it's you know a one-off creation and so that so those are usually called wild tracks but it's is really sort of the meat and potatoes of what we're doing with
Mysterious CHIRP where we don't have video we're looking at the sound and then we're
moving everything around within the mix to create these worlds, create these spaces.
And we don't have people moving up on the mic and moving farther away and all of that, because we have these neutral, clean sound recordings of our actors, and then we figure
out what works best for creating the environments we want.
While at the same time, also,
In the radio world, we have this expectation of the neutral voice of this, of it being our nice little radio announcer, right?
On mic, nice and close, good low end to their voice, clear, ah no sound of room whatsoever.
And so in the narrative world, we have to really make sure that those rooms that we add sound like the story.
They drive us into the story.
and they don't distract us and they don't make it harder to understand the actors because, you know, lot of people are going to listen to this in their car.
They're going to listen to it in noisy environments.
And everything needs to be clear and easily understandable in those environments, not just in cool studios that are super quiet and ideal for listening.
That was awesome.
so listeners, this brilliant team of students who was with us for season one will be slightly different group, but still from Michigan Tech University for season two.
And these between the seasons episodes ah are basically just getting my best effort with no sound effects, just music.
So yeah.
Before we sign off, I'd love to ask you if there's anything else you want to say about your incredible students.
Also, we're asking all of our interviewees to recommend something sci-fi or mystery or sci-fi mystery to consume for our listening audience, like something they should check
out.
Excellent.
So yes, I would love to.
The other thing that was so amazing about our students last semester was the leadership that they took on in terms of organizing things, in terms of looking at the deadlines and
then figuring out, okay, we've got to move back from this deadline and we have to have all this stuff done here so that we have time to do that and move back and get this stuff done
by this date so we can put it all together.
And that
They did an exceptional job of looking at the overall semester and planning out their work and also um really communicating between themselves, hey, here's when I need this from
you.
This is when I'm going to give you this.
And also dynamically working with the semester and challenges and adjusting the schedule and figuring out, okay, you're
have a ton of stuff going on here.
When can you, what can you get to me?
What's most important?
How can we all keep working and moving forward?
Even though we've had some setbacks or some other outside pressures on our time.
And they just did a fabulous, amazing job last semester.
It was really great.
So, yeah.
to add that those skills that they had to really grow are going to serve them so well no matter what they're doing.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So in terms of things that I want to recommend, we want to move there.
Okay.
What should our listeners listen to or read?
They should read Light from Uncommon Stars.
It is such a beautiful book.
I just finished it a couple months ago.
It's not...
In some ways, it's not an easy read because there's some rough stuff that happens in the movie in the in the book.
um But ultimately, it's just so hopeful and loving and amazing.
And it's got aliens baking donuts and.
Devils tempting musicians, and it's it's kind of funny because the it's a novelist explaining sort of
an amazing musical experience, but it's clearly a novelist writing the description.
And even though I'm a sound designer, I got my undergraduate degree in English and philosophy.
And um that speaks to me well, this sort of novelist's description of experiencing music.
But it's just, it's so beautiful.
ah It's so uplifting.
The characters grow and support each other and there's ridiculousness and humor and connection and just is such a wonderful book.
Can't recommend it enough.
Light from uncommon stars.
Awesome.
Well, we're nearing the end.
And is there anything else that you want to say about your work, about your students, about sci-fi, or about mysteries?
I really love science fiction that expands what we think of the world, what we think is possible, what we think is real, uh how we connect to each other, that as we think about
all the different ways that AI is changing the world and that we're working through social media and that
connected digitally instead of physically.
You and I live very far away and continue to work together and collaborate and a lot of that is done digitally.
And how do we still connect?
You know, and it still comes back to those, like we were just talking, it comes back to those leadership things.
It comes back to working with other people all the time.
And that is, that's always going to be the core of everything is our ability to connect with other humans.
So that's the kind of sci-fi I like.
And I'm really looking forward to the next season of Mysterious CHIRP.
Yay!
Me too.
Thank you for joining us, Terrans, and please like and share and follow us on Patreon or Instagram.
And this episode and all of the other Mysterious CHIRP episodes are available on YouTube and Spotify and Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music and pretty much anywhere you would listen
to a podcast.
Journey on.