Katie Zwirner

Sound and Sound Editing

Introduction
1. Six duties of a sound editor are cleaning up dialogue tracks, cutting layers
of special effects, placing sounds at certain times, create ambiance tracks,
cutting out unwanted stuff, and mixing in unnecessary sounds.
2. Sound editing is about cutting, placing, fading, cross-fading, shifting,
duplicating and adjusting the volume of audio material.
3. Principal photography is usually shooting the scenes with actual live actors
or real backgrounds.
4. A boom pole is an extendable stick with a microphone attached to it.
5. Production sound is the raw sound material of a show and the only
desirable parts it usually contains are the dialogue and body sounds.
6. Unwanted sounds that may be cut away during scene editing are creaking
chair legs and sharp impacts of objects on tables.
7. Ambiance is the background noise of people talking and things moving.
8. Foley is the sounds of clothes rustling, footsteps and objects being handled.

Digital Audio
1. Sounds are pressure waves of air.
2. The speed of sound in 340 meters per second.
3. When you clap your hands the air that was between your hands is pushed
aside in all directions, when the pressure wave reaches your ear, it pushes
your eardrum slightly causing you to hear the clap.

4.

5. A microphone converts acoustical waves into electrical waves.

6. A tape recorder translates waveforms from an electrical signal on a wire, to
a magnetic signal on a tape.
7. The ADC captures a snapshot of the electric voltage on an audio line and represents it
as a digital number that can be sent to a computer.

8. The sample rate is the rate at which the samples are captured or played back,
measured in Hertz (Hz), or samples per second.
9. An audio CD has a sample rate of 44,100 Hz, often written as 44 KHz.

10. Sample format or sample size is the number of digits in the digital representation of
each sample.
11. Humans can't hear frequencies above about 20,000 Hz.
12. Higher sample sizes allow for more dynamic range - louder and softer softs.
13. Your computer has a soundcard and your sound card comes with an Analog-to-Digital
Converter (ADC) for recording, and a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) for playing
audio. Your operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) talks to the sound card
to actually handle the recording and playback, and Audacity talks to your operating
system so that you can capture sounds to a file, edit them, and mix multiple tracks
while playing.
14. Two main types of audio files on a computer or Pulse Code Modulation and Compressed
Files.

File Formats
1. AUP: audacity projects are stored in an AUP file, this format has been highly optimized
for audacity so that it can save projects extremely quickly.
WAV: the default uncompressed audio format on windows, this is supported on almost all
computer systems.
AIFF: is the default uncompressed audio format on the macintosh, this is supported by most
computer systems but is not quite as common as WAV format.
MP3: is a compressed audio format that is a very popular way to store music, it can compress
audio by a factor of 10:1 with little degradation.
Oggs Vorbis: is a new compressed audio format that was designed to be a free alternative to
MP3 files, they are not as common but are about the same size as MP3 with better quality and
no patent restrictions.