Click.
It’s incredible how much sound is part of our world, sometimes in ways so profound we actually somehow miss them.
Tech site The Verge wanted to spice up a story on the anniversary of IBM’s Model M keyboard, a product for which sound was an integral part of the experience. (That’s so true, in fact, that people will pay a premium for products like Das Keyboard that emulate it.)
The result will come as beautiful music to touch typists everywhere, an etude in spacebars performed on a dizzying array of gadgets of the past.
Producer John Lagomarsino goes into the how-to — the project involved extracting typing noises, then playing them back on Apple’s EXS24 sampler in Logic.
How we turned 12 clicky keyboards into a music video
That workflow falls apart when it comes time to add the videos back – the effect is beautiful, but the process is quite a lot of manual labor. My answer to this would have been Sony’s Vegas; that editor treats audio and video on level playing field and has thus been a tool of choice for AV mashups for the likes of Eclectic Method. (There’s a reason for this: Vegas was originally created by audio folks.)
There’s a deeper issue here: too many creative apps treat visuals and sonic as unrelated entities. (They’re distinct, but very often you want to do something … well, like make music out of people typing.) I’m curious if readers have other ideas for how to accomplish this? Regardless, fun to feast on this.
