Steampunk Wonders Of The Worlds - Watercolors and Music

Have been working on a series of watercolor paintings that all involve strange locations and a Steampunk Airship with the theme of a tour of wonders of the worlds.  And by watercolor paintings I really mean black ink sketches colored with watercolors.

The music and surround sound effects for videos using the paintings has been an ongoing task for some time too.

We put up low and high resolution videos on YouTube today of what we have been working on.   The first new video for over a year now.

The HD version being here:

Even though the video is up, we are still considering the format, and how it should look.  We didn't just want a slide show with a soundtrack, so we have images titles, panning and zooming on the images....and a screen that could be from a following camera drone or surveillance video, but haven't made any of that clear.

It is put together in Sony Vega Movie Studio HD and rendered as mp4. The music tracks were done in Reaper and some of the strange sounds were done in SuperCollider, and others in the ArpV2600 vst.

The Dolby Surround Encoding just involves having effects sounds assigned to the rear, mono channel, which is encoded with +90 and -90 versions added into the front channels, all just done with the Reaper PhaseAdjust JS plug in.

To do more complex movement a Surround Panner is required, like this one, but we haven't done anything in this video using it.

We have our own simple LM833 based surround decoder device for driving the rear channels in our studio, prototyped on Veroboard and in a previous Blog post.  Have now also tried a HD Audio Rush Sound Decoder  (bought on eBay from HK) , just with the analog in and found our own device sounds better and is quieter.  The HD Rush also comes with a switch mode plug back that generates audible hash, that is not there when powered from a 5V linear supply.  

We have more ideas for the series, to make more episodes, but we will see.....  this type of music video, that isn't focused on cars don't get much attention on our video channel.  It is interesting to see that we have some 3 digit subscribers to our channel, yet only single digit views on a new video...

I guess they aren't interesting enough and don't say very much to a general audience.

SQ Quadraphonic - A Dead Surround Audio Format.... or is it?

The early 70s introduced the war of Quadraphonic formats that included SQ, QS, CD-4 and others. This was back when Hi-Fi was a thing, and was something a reasonable number of people had, even if only stereo systems.

None of those formats succeeded at that time and quadraphonic died out.  All the systems had problems and the early SQ and QS formats only gave an almost inaudible (3dB) front to rear channel separation in addition to costing twice as much... and the last thing a Classical record needs is to put the audience in the middle of the orchestra.  Rock didn't fair much better.

Later Full Logic decoders appeared.  These improved the channel separation  by using gain elements in the 4 output channels to exaggerate the difference between the channels in a controlled way to improve the channel separation.  Didn't help the market grow though.

SQ Full Logic Block Diagram

I have the 12" Vinyl Deep Purple Machine Head album emblazoned with a SQ logo and QUADRAPHIC, and have never heard it in 4 channels.  Been curious about that.

Now days every Home Cinema has Dolby Surround, and Cinemas are now going to Dolby's ATMOS system with some 60 channels.  But this cinema stuff doesn't really fit music, which doesn't have or want a centre channel, or delayed rear channels.

So could you use a Dolby Surround system with this old SQ Quadraphonic stuff?   That would  require some significant signal processing on the SQ encoded stereo signal first so your Dolby decoder only produced the front left and right and musical rear signals.  Even then, the rear channels were originally restricted to only 100Hz to 7kHz and had a 25ms or so delay added to them. Lots of compromises required, and the result wouldn't be what was mastered on the album.

Most people don't seem to care to sit and listen to music as they once did, unless it is on headphones from an MP3 Player,  so it would seem investigating and even SQ encoding our own musical endeavours in a dead quadraphonic system  is pretty much a waste of time and effort. 

That maybe, but we are considering it as we are pretty much set up to do it anyway with the Reaper DAW and it's JS development language and support for the encoder, and a switchable to  4 speaker and amplifier mixing environment.

The SQ Decoder, and doing that with a few transistors and a SMD based PCB for fabrication by OSH Park is not out of the question. either.  Not a huge Altium Project by any means.  

SQ Decoder Schematic

So not out of the question.   And these things from places like Sony still show up on eBay too.  A Development Kit with fast MCU and Stereo IN, Quad OUT, 16bit+ codecs would be a flexible approach for us C developers too.

So why?   But what about a music with visuals, as in a video?

Dolby Surround (Pro Logic) is a simple system, and what was used on the first Star Wars film in 1977. Their first Surround Decoders where actually designed by the people that did the best SQ decoders. What that system does give you is great separation between the front centre and mono rear surround speakers. Fine if you want Ambience in the rear channels. Not unworkable.

Now the original standard decoder filtered the Surround channel from 10Hz to 7.5kHz. Seems the later "Music" support of Dolby surround now actually has 5 equal full range speakers.
So a quick test of Surround  as L-R, with buffered inputs, and a L+R Center channel, and a level control on the front channels using dual LM833 Opamps looks like this when prototyped quickly. It is powered from a regulated 12VDC source.  The front channels are our standard mix set up, the rear are a DELL satellite + sub woofer we usually use for background music.

Surround = L -R, Centre = L+R matrix decoder

The schematic with a later added bypass switch, to disable the surround mix system is:

In Reaper, our music production DAW, we generated a surround channel by sending the rear tracks, that now aren't routed to mix output to Surround L and Surround R, with Surround L  inverted, and then add these to the mix.  So that tracks that are not dead Center or Rear are a bit of front and rear, and surround tracks are just from the rear. Dead Center just from the front.
The result sounds interesting, and stereo compatible, but not mono compatible. We will try a HD AUDIO RUSH decoder soon, and plan to do our mixes with these rear channels as one mix option.

It is surprising what a Mixed Media Concept Album can inspire in you.  I've spent the last couple of weeks listening to, and reading The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony. 

Now that isn't in surround, but has given us the drive to expand our own mixed media music art tech project....  An extension of our  SteamPunk Sunset.

.... unless life gets in the way, or something else comes up of course.

So SQ might be dead,  but surround and matrix encoding and decoding that came from it aren't.

And maybe this is a more appropriate logo for what we have done so far......

FREE: The Heavy Metal Garage Hot Rod That Ate My Wallet Calendar 2016

Free PDF download from here:
The Heavy Metal Garage Hot Rod That Ate My Wallet Calendar 2016

It is for planning your month, with lots of space to write stuff, like what to pay, or this to be done by....  or at least we use it that way.

But some assembly is required! And this is they way you do it, even if it is for a previous version...

We can be contacted at Art & Technology

How To Turn Your Car into A Billboard - The Car Wrap

These are every where now, at least where I am. I sit in traffic evaluating these things, and even once saw a company I needed to contact later to fix a stove.

The actual production of the design is just another vector file. You need the car dimensions and even better, a car template. But what is more important to me is what goes on it, and how much anyone can remember of it to be effective.

I can never remember any Phone number on these things. I'd have to take a photo with my phone camera, and that is only possible if you find it in a car park.

I can usually remember the company name and what they do, even if I do not completely remember their slogan.  May be the URL or the form of it.  Having the URL on the rear bumper helps here. But I may get enough to be able to find their website later, especially if the wrap design is reflected in their website design.

So, I don't think most of them work for me. I cannot always work out what they do, and remember enough to contact them if I did.

The lesson is KEEP IT SIMPLE.

The Making Of Steampunk Sunset, the Painting and Music.

This is the cover art for an instrumental track you can hear for free at our Soundcloud page called  Steampunk Sunset.   It is synth, guitar and drums. But it all started from a water colour painting.

The illustration work we do is mostly technical and very precise.  Lines and colours are very clear, with graduations being very linear, especially with the vector based illustrations.

Our recent joy in water colour is the ability for it to have random effects when you use lots of water on the heavy textured paper, and that is the main ingredient in the water and sky of the sunset painting. With a lot of water on the paper, when the pigment is applied, it kind of moves where it wants to.  This contrasts with the stark black silhouettes of the bizarre steam powered flying machine, land and trees, done in Faber Castell PITT artist pens, which are waterproof ink.

This is a not quite finished view of this A4 painting, done on CANSON 300gsm Medium Cold Press water colour paper with a small Winsor & Newton Sketchers Pocket Box Cotman Water Colour Set. I have replaced the China White with Ivory Black colour, as it is far more useful to me.

So from this painting we thought of what sound and feelings we wanted in the music, and that was to be a steam engine type sound, combined with a Bladerunner esq huge reverb and sparse synth pad.  That was the starting point, but we knew we would put loud guitar in their too.

Our V2600 VST is a semi modular synth with an old style step sequencer, and it already had a sample patch based around a noise source. Just what we were after. So this is the engine sounds that fades in and out for the duration of the track, with the help of a volume envelope in our DAW.

And here is the whole thing in Reaper our DAW. There  are tracks for Drums, Bass synth, Synth lead, Synth pad, Rhythm guitar, Lead guitar and Steam SFX.  All very simple.  

There are also long and short ping pong delays and the HUGE VintageVerb Bladerunner reverb. Just love it and don't have much opportunity to use it, as it is just too big for a usual track.

Everything was first takes in recording, then with some minor editing, put  together, mixed, then mastered. 

It starts with the Synth Pad and Huge Reverb and while not being directly in any way Bladerunner, has that feeling to me as the flying machine comes into the scene from the right.  It is supposed to sound a bit disjointed with the beautiful sunset polluted with this noisy, flapping flying machine, but then when the drums finally come in, it gels together, depicted for the actual moment in the painting.

So this track came out of an experimental water colour painting, and we hadn't done that before.

We can be contacted at Art & Technology.