Written by Peter Doyle (2004) Popular Music, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 31-49.
Cambridge University Press. Useful Quotes;
Doyle (2004)
discusses that fact that echoes have a mystical quality then analyses various
recordings from the period of 1920 through to the 1950’s looking at the use of
spatial effects.
“Reverberation
does much to define what we perceive as timbre, volume and sound colouration,
and largely determines our perceptions of directionality and nearness.” (Doyle
2004 pg.3)
“Recordings
became capable of picking up room ambience, of carrying, in other words,
significant sonic information about the spaces in which they were made. Of this
last point, Gelatt says:... the 'atmosphere' surrounding music in the concert
hall could now be simulated on records. Musicians were no longer forced to work
... directly before a recording horn but could play in spacious studios with
proper reverberation characteristics.”
(Gelatt 1977, p . 223)
“Increasingly
during the late 1940s and early 1950s, some producers and musicians began to
use echo effects to render unfixed, or (at least in part) anti-linear, self-consciously
weird and/or futuristic spaces. And certain of the older style pictorially
anchored spatial recordings during this period began to display an increasingly
exaggerated pictorial field, as echo and reverb effects changed (in some cases
at least) from being a covertly used producer's technique to an increasingly
emphasised, featured gimmick.” (Doyle 2004 pg.9)
“Les Paul
arguably did more than any other single operator in the recording industry to
break the 'authenticity nexus' between the actual performance and the final
recorded product, and some of his most arresting devices involved deliberate spatial
plays.” (Doyle 2004 pg.10)
In order to investigate how the spatial effects used in dub
have influenced other genre first we must define what effects are used to
create the illusion of space and how they have been used in dub.
Reverberation is the most commonly used effect used to
create space. Izhaki (2012 pg.405) describes reverb in the following way,
“In nature, reverb is observed mostly within enclosed spaces, such as
rooms. Reverbs are easier to understand if we imagine an impulse sound, like a
hand clap, emitted from a sound source in an empty room. Such a sound will
propagate in a spherical fashion and for simplicity we should regard it as
travelling in all directions. The emitted sound will travel in a direct path to
a listener (or a microphone) followed by reflections that bounced from the
walls, floor and ceiling. These will be gradually followed by denser
reflections that have bounced many times from many surfaces. As sound both
diminishes when travelling through air and being absorbed by surface materials,
the reflections will slowly decay in amplitude. Reverb is the collective name
given to the sound created by bounced reflections from room boundaries (which
we consider to be the main reverb contributors, although in a room there might
be many surfaces). In mixing, we use reverb emulators, either hardware units or
software plugins, to simulate this natural phenomenon.”
“Each time a waveform reflects
some energy is absorbed by the surface and each time a waveform is diffused the
energy is divided among the reflections and so over time the amplitude of
reverberation decays until it is inaudible. As sound takes time to travel
around a room (344meters per second at room temperature) each reflection
arrives at the listener later than the last reflection and so the reverberation
is audible for a longer period of time than the direct original sound. Diagram
1 below shows the decay of reverberation overtime.” (http://www.magicmess.co.uk/electronics/spring.php)
The amount of reverb in
a space is dependent on the volume of the room but also the rate at which sound
is absorbed by walls and other surfaces.
Wallace Sabine did some
pioneering research in this area and came up with a formula that relates the
quality of a room’s acoustic with the size of the room, and the amount of sound
absorption surfaces present.
His formula calculates
the reverberation time which is defined by the time taken (in seconds) for a
sound to drop by 60 decibels.
RT60 = 0.161(V/Sa)
V is the volume of the
room in cubic meters. This is divided by the total absorption of the room
expressed in Sabines which is calculated by the sum of all the surface areas in
the room multiplied by the absorption coefficients for each material.
A characteristic dub
reverb sound is the spring reverb. The spring reverb works by using the
physical movement of a spring to generate the reflections.
Spring Reverb Demo
Delay is another common
effect used to create space in audio recordings. Hodgson (2010 pg.124) states
“the simple delay line is the building block of all delay processing
techniques.” Then continues to describe how audio signals are fed into a delay
line where the signal is split and a copy is stored for a certain amount of
time before being passed to the output after the direct signal.
All delay units and
plug-in effects have 3 basic settings which are the Delay time or the amount of
time between the input signal and the copy arriving at the output. The mix
setting which adjusts the balance between the input signal and the delayed
copy. And the feedback which controls the amount of the delayed signal which is
routed back to the input. Hodgson (2010) states that recordists have created a
“staggeringly diverse array of musical techniques” by adjusting the 3
parameters listed above.
A common delay sound
used in dub is the tape delay. Case (2007 pg.224) states that
“Before the days of
digital audio, a common approach to creating delays was to use a spare analogue
tape machine as a generator...During mixdown the machine is constantly rolling
in record mode. The signal is sent from the console to the input of the tape
machine...That signal is recorded at the tape machine and milliseconds later is
played back...(the tape machine) remains in repro mode so the output is what it
sees at the playback head...The signal goes in gets printed onto tape the tape
makes its way from the record head to the playback head (taking time to do so)
and finally the signal is played back off tape and returned to the console. The
result is tape delay.”
Analogue tape delay also
adds tape saturation and tape hiss, these sounds have also become a highly
sought after additional qualities of tape delay. Many hardware and software
emulators try to recreate these qualities of tape delay and one such emulator
used significantly in the production of dub is the Roland RE 201 Space Echo
which uses a magnetic tape loop to simulate tape delay.
Roland RE 201 Space Echo
Another aspect of the use of space is creative sound staging. Moylan
(2008) states "The sound stage is the singular area occupied by all of the sound
sources of the music, as an aggregate or group.
It has an apparent physical size of width and depth that are defined at
the level of the individual sound source: (1) the dimension of width is defined
by the furthest right and left sound (lateral localization) and (2) the
dimension of depth is defined by the most distant sound source and the closest
sound source."
Zagorski-Thomas (2010) takes this idea of the sound stage further to
functional staging “Functional staging is a concept building on the idea of
phonographic staging developed by William Moylan and Serge Lacasse and related
to Allan Moore’s ‘sound-box’. The staging of sounds in the record production
process is considered to be functional if the reason for their particular
placement or treatment is related to the practicalities of audience reception
rather than to aesthetics.” (Zagorski-Thomas 2010 pg.1)
“Functional staging relates to the size of the
perceived space and the perception of distance rather than lateral placement.” (Zagorski-Thomas 2010 pg.6) References and Bibliography
Case. A. (2007) Sound FX: Unlocking The Creative Potential
Of Recording Studio Effects
Hodgson. J. (2010) Understanding Records: A Field Guide to
Recording Practice. Continuum International Publishing, New York.
Izhaki. R. (2012) Mixing Audio: Concepts Practices and
Tools. 2nd Edition. Focal Press
Moylan. W. (2008) Considering Space in Music. (Accessed
21/09/12) http://www.artofrecordproduction.com/content/view/180/109/
Zagorski-Thomas. S. (2010). The stadium in your bedroom:
functional staging, authenticity and the audience led aesthetic in record
production. Popular Music, 29, pp 251-266.
