In The Pipeline, May 29, 2018: Inspiring Podcast Intro

I'm pleased to introduce a new candidate for my Podcast Intro Music collection. "Inspiring Podcast Intro" is a bright yet stately track in :30 and :15 lengths, plus a six-second bumper for YouTube and similar bumper ad content. This is a great choice for public service or society/culture formats, and you could consider it for business positive content as well. Here's a preview:



I usually update on Twitter when my items go live. If you don't follow me there, just click the link in the top bar of this page to access my profile. Thanks for listening.

What's Happening: Week of May 28, 2018

It's another light week for me, with Memorial Day weekend here in the States, but I did want to briefly discuss something I had mentioned in a recent post and give an update on some changes since last week.

I had recently blogged about creating a video to commemorate my dad and my son for their military service on Memorial Day. I started work on the video, but found that the music I wanted to use was just too sad for what I wanted to convey. So I abandoned that project for this year, but I may take another look at it, perhaps with different, more uplifting music. I may yet use the "Memorial Day" music I had in mind, but maybe on a video with a more somber tone.

Also, after some review this week, I decided to remove some of my corporate/motivational tracks from AudioJungle. I think they're good, but they simply weren't going anywhere on AudioJungle. So, I've removed them, re-titled two of the tracks and am making them available elsewhere. The three items -- Ascending, For The Win (formerly "Inspiring and Uplifting Corporate"), and Hyper Efficient (formerly "Ambient Efficiency") are now available to license at MotionElements, and I hope will be available soon at Pond5.

Meanwhile, I made a couple of changes here on the blog to make it easier for me to comply with the new data protection regulations being instituted by the European Union. Specifically, I removed some third party widgets to ensure that I didn't have anything on the blog that Google (as host of Blogspot) wouldn't take responsibility for. I'll be looking at this again in the next few weeks to see if I can put any of it back. In the meantime, you can find a link to my Twitter feed at the top of the page if you want to follow me. Please do, if you haven't already.

And with that, I'll bid you a fond adieu until next time.

In The Pipeline May 23, 2018: Positive Perspective

My latest stock music item in the pipeline is "Positive Perspective." This is a bright, medium tempo track to help promote good feelings in your explainer videos and similar corporate media content. There are two versions, a 3+ minute full version and a 38-second looped excerpt, which I used for the preview below.



For updates on availability, keep an eye on my Twitter feed.

What's Happening: Week of May 21, 2018

Nothing new to report.

That might be an exaggeration, but I am in sort of a lull. If you kept track of my Twitter feed, you saw that several items I had in the pipeline are now online. I'm planning to work on some new ideas this week, but sometimes those pan out and sometimes they don't.

I was more active than usual on the Pond5 forums this week, and commented on a question from a fellow composer wondering how many tracks were needed to get sales. I was curious, so I checked my own portfolio. I found that I'm up to over 600 separate items. The bad news, though is that just ten of those make up more than one-third of my total downloads.

It got me to thinking: how much quantity is too much?

A lot of that output dates from times when my production skills were very raw. I've thought about trying to remix some of those older tracks, but am not sure if it would be worth my time.

In the meantime, my featured stock music item this week is Dark Tense Interlude. When I wrote this I was thinking of "dark secrets, tense waiting and other chilling scenes." I hope you'll check it out.

Sorry to be brief, but my dear Windows wants to run an update that it says is going to take awhile. That's also why this post and my other regular updates are appearing relatively early. Now, I'm going to go find something else to do.

Until next time, be well.

Don't Panic Over Laurel And Yanny

I woke up this morning, hopped on Twitter, and was confronted by the Laurel-Yanny debate. I happened to have my headphones on and took a listen. I clearly heard "Laurel." Show's over. Move on.

I was doing something else later, and ran across it again. This time I played the audio through my laptop speakers . . . I clearly heard "Yanny."

What gives?

I did some research and found where the New York Times had tracked it down to a high school student in Georgia (USA). In the course of his studies the other day, he used his computer mic to record the audio of the word "Laurel" being pronounced at vocabulary,com. When he played it back, it sounded like "Yanny." He posted the audio on Reddit with a poll asking what others heard, and it took off from there.

More than just a huge time waster (it's that too) this was in interesting exercise in psyhoacoustics. The mic used, in addition to the ambient background noise at the moment of recording, added certain frequencies to the original content. Those additional frequencies create the "yanny" effect. Depending on what you use to play back the audio, it might either emphasize those frequencies so it sounds like "yanny" or emphasize the lower frequencies that dominated the original recording.

There's also the matter of the age of the listener. As we age our sensitivity to higher frequencies decreases, so younger people would find it easier to hear "yanny" when the listen to the audio.

Out of curiosity, I used my own base mic to make some recordings. First, I recorded my own voice saying "Laurel." A spectrum plot of that looked like this.

My "baseline" recording

Then I used the mic to record the controversial Laurel-Yanny audio at different distances from my speakers. The first one was sort of middle of the road.

Notice the spikes in the 1500-2000 Hz range. My guess is this is what got picked up and causes the "yanny" effect. On the next one I held the mic closer to the speaker.

This one I heard as closer to sounding like "Laurel." The spikes are still there, but the lower frequencies where "Laurel" comes across most strongly are very full.

Finally, there's this one.

It was recorded with the mic at the greatest distance from the speaker, and the lower frequencies are less dominant, allowing the higher transient frequencies to shine through, making it more likely that you'd hear "Yanny."

If you go to the Times you can find where their staff has created a little app that lets you adjust the pitches and frequencies to hear more "Laurel" or more "Yanny." It's a pretty cool little effect.