Otherworld SFX

Crafting Other World Sounds:

This organic sound library has been created from the recordings of wine crystal glasses.

The phenomenon that occurs when a moist finger is rubbed on the rim of a crystal glass creates that the crystal resonates at one particular frequency.
The resonance of the glass has frequencies at which it organically vibrates, the resonance frequencies. By flicking a crystal wine glass a clear tone is produced as the glass vibrates, causing waves of air pressure to emanate out from it.

Furthermore, by adding water the inertia of the glass is increased, lowering the frequency of the resonances. In order to keep the safety of the facilities regarding the use of water inside the studios, the number of glasses was restricted to two instead of six. Nevertheless the outcome was still optimum and up to the expected pre-planned standards. The recording sessions were meticulous, spanning all type of sounds that a single wine can produce.

Several actions were taking as: gradually adding water and playing with the second glass, rubbing the finger on the rim, adding more or less pressure to the crystal, hitting the glasses, filling the glasses with little shells from the sea and more that emerged from the bliss of experimentation.

The recordings took place in the studios of Futureworks, the Neve and SSL. In the sessions 4 microphones were located in a quadrilateral shape pointing at the centre where the wine glasses were positioned. The microphones selected were the Neumman MK184 stereo pair and the AKG 451B stereo pair.

The sounds were sculpted on Protools, applying the rules of the Editing Mantra by Rick Viers in his book ‘The Sound Effect Bible’: L-I-S-T-E-N: listen critically, identify clicks, pops, and errors, signal process, trim/crop the file, examine bade ins/fade outs at zero line, normalize/name file. The four microphones that captured the glasses had each one its own characteristic, gathering different perspectives of the sound which were layered and assemble to individual effects.