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Just in time for 2012 here is the School of Digital Media showreel with its new soundtrack (by BSc Music Tech graduate James Radford):

A great little video created by Stefano Ottaviano with music by Ben Williams:

Stefano and Ben have both just graduated from Swansea Metropolitan University (Animation and Music Technology respectively).

Good stuff.

The second day of the surround recording sessions at Swansea Metropolitan University with the final year students of the BSc Music Technology course produced this fine version of The Devil’s Dream/Mason’s Apron, as performed by Roots & Galoots:

[As usual, just recorded straight to my N70].

Around this time every year I organize a set of recording sessions for the final year students on the BSc Music Technology course at Swansea Metropolitan University. The idea behind these sessions is to record a band ‘live in the studio’ in full 24-bit/96kHz surround. The past couple of years I’ve booked Gypsy Jazz but they weren’t available this year, and so on the advice of my colleague Pete Williams I booked Roots & Galoots, a Bluegrass band based in South-West Wales.

I have to say that initially I was a little dubious because, with three vocalists, I felt that it might be difficult to achieve any decent recordings in the time allotted—each group of 3 or 4 students gets 3 hours to do the recording—without recourse to setting up a PA etc.. The whole idea of it is that it’s basically an acoustic session. Anyway, it turned out very well. Roots & Galoots were highly skilled musicians and very professional in their approach, and you can see from the following video how they managed to balance themselves up:

Brilliant! Like a ‘real’ recording session from the 1950s (or earlier). No overdubbing, no drop-ins, no MIDI, no samplers, no editing, and no place to hide for either musicians or engineers. Just good musicians recorded straight with good equipment. Deep, deep, joy.

[Note: the video was recorded with my Nokia N70. No post-production apart from trimming the start and finish.]

Clare Hale graduated this summer from the School of Digital Media at Swansea Metropolitan University with a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Multimedia. And very well deserved it was too!

Clare was also the outright winner in the ‘Web & Interactive Media’ category of Computer Arts magazine’s Graduate Showcase 2007:

Again, very well deserved and completely justified. Clare has a great range of skills: she’s a sensitive and talented designer with a good range of technical knowledge to back up her artistic flair; she does a mean presentation and is therefore really good at selling her work; she’s a very nice person who works well in a team environment. All of which would be meaningless without the fact she works really hard at it, she puts the hours in…

Her Major Project submission was an interactive web site built using Flash and called mythicalwales.co.uk. Clare’s attention to detail and instinctive design sense are well in evidence, as is her great appreciation of the use of sound in a multimedia object (which, for me, still remains the least-developed aspect of new media production). There are some fabulous touches: check out how she manages going through the front door, and compare that, say, to the way the same thing is handled in the early Resident Evil games. (OK, it’s not really a like-for-like comparison because the RE sequence is basically masking a background load operation, but stylistically the comparison is 100% valid.)

Anyway, you can check out all of Clare’s stuff at summonfire.co.uk. Well done Clare. Best of luck.

Here’s a short film I made showcasing this year’s BA Multimedia graduates from the School of Digital Media at Swansea Metropolitan University: Clare Hale, Sam Jones, Juliette Tessyman, Geoff Taylor, and Peter Boelen. There’s some excellent work on display here, so well done to all:

As with my last post, this was a project where I made heavy use of screen capture software. This time, because I made the film at home and it was therefore done on a Mac, I used SnapzProX. This seems to be the screen capture software of choice on Macs, and I must say it worked very, very, well. The unusual interface—i.e. there isn’t one when it’s in action—seems to cause people a few problems, but I must say I found it pretty straightforward from the off. We could either say that the guesses I made about its operation were correct, or that the software has been designed in an intuitively correct way…

Ciao!

This is Dan Pearce. He’s just finished doing a BSc (Hons) Music Technology degree at Swansea Metropolitan University. His Major Project was a very high quality piece of work on audio compression codecs.

Perhaps the most interesting part of his project was the listening tests carried out on a set of lossy codecs: MP3, Microsoft WMA, Apple’s AAC, and the open source Ogg Vorbis. Dan conducted a set of tests that compared the subjective quality on each of these based on a set of four criteria: bass response, treble response, clarity, and spaciousness. Each of these in turn was measured against four different types of source material: rock/pop, jazz, classical, and spoken voice. A standard bit rate of 64kbps was used. Here’s a graph showing the compiled results across all the tests:

We have a winner! His results clearly show the superiority of the Ogg Vorbis files in all categories except the classical! WMA and AAC are very closely matched, whilst MP3 consistently performs the worst. Dan puts this down to its age: originally released in 1993 it’s by far the oldest. Here’s a set of samples from Dan’s project which, I think, give a good indication of the relative performances of the codecs:
 
[If you're interested in more detail here's the methodology, results, and references from Dan Pearce's report (5.5MB .pdf). If you want to contact Dan, here's his email address.]

For me, the findings from this report beg a huge question: why are most people satisfied with the quality of MP3? It’s grainy, harsh, and has a poor stereo image. And yet it would seem that many people are now getting rid of their CD collections and switching entirely to MP3. Yes, of course I can understand the whole slew of benefits afforded by the digital files/downloads/iPod thing, but doesn’t anyone care how bad it all sounds?

And it’s not even as if “CD-quality” audio is all that good. 24-bit/96kHz digital audio is just so much better it’s unreal, and these days it’s pretty affordable too. We have this situation where—for music producers—audio quality has recently shot up, whilst music consumers now seem happy to settle for a substantially lower-quality product than they’ve been used to for the last 20-odd years. Odd, to say the least. Maybe, for most people MP3 is just good enough….

[Note: in order to get the audio examples streaming across the 'net without glitching I had to subject all the files to a further level of compression. However, they're all encoded equally at 160kbps stereo, and so the relative differences between them remain the same.]

This is a little Flash image gallery: very simple, very slick, and a total no-brainer to use. The only thing you need to know about it is that the images are loaded dynamically into an empty movieclip on stage, and that the images all need to be the same size. (OK: they don’t need to be but it’ll look rubbish if they’re not). If your images are lots of different sizes, create an empty .swf that matches your display area. Use this as a master template. Embed each image in a separate copy of this master template, and then load those.

Here’s the .fla (520kB) in MX2004 format. By the way, with a bit of tweaking this project also makes a pretty decent interface design: substitute tabs for the thumbnails, replace the images with contextual menus, and hey presto…

The photographs were taken by 1st year BA(Hons) Interactive Digital Media students at Swansea Metropolitan University as part of their coursework.