Music for Installations

I've been asked to do the music for an installation. Gallery space, very dry and relatively boxy, but I'm not going to be able to visit the room beforehand and have no idea of the speaker set up.

The brief I've been given is, well, brief, but from what I can gather they want something sinister, cinematic and a bit droney, but including samples of people sleeping. That's fine, but I'm wondering whether to do a more 'live' dry type mix, i.e. ease off on the reverb, or just mix as I normally would.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Kah kah poh

Mix the way you usually do but make sure that you high pass everything and add a MaxxBass to bassy parts to enhance the harmonics and turn down the low frequencies.

I've done quite a few compositions for art installations and the acoustics in the galleries suck shit each and every time.

good advice from Squee, not to divert the thread but do you find MaxBass a good go to tool in general for doing classical type compositions? i've started using it again recently with some physical modeling string stuff and its been very useful. I figured there would be a better plugin out now that did something similar, but maybe there isn't?

  On 5/26/2015 at 10:23 AM, John Ehrlichman said:

good advice from Squee, not to divert the thread but do you find MaxBass a good go to tool in general for doing classical type compositions? i've started using it again recently with some physical modeling string stuff and its been very useful. I figured there would be a better plugin out now that did something similar, but maybe there isn't?

Not quite sure I know what you mean? :)

But as a follow up on my last post, I was thinking a you could do something like this...

Find the low frequency that you want to add some harmonics to, turn down the "original bass", and pump up MaxxBass slider.

A good idea is to mix your stuff on some smaller studio monitors (maybe the small Genelec speakers - 8010 or 8020). I mixed this on a pair of small Genelecs in order to keep the bass to a minimum and it turned out pretty well in the gallery.

By the way, you should definitely visit the gallery before doing the final mix in order to do a sweep and find out how terrible the acoustics are. Maybe play a couple of old tunes you've created to find out if there's something you usually do that you SHOULDN'T do.

For instance, when I made this "soundtrack" for a video installation...

...I visited the gallery the day before finishing it and then I found out that they had hooked up a terrible subwoofer which made the whole room vibrate. You don't want that. The track isn't that bassy, but it was bassy enough to make the subwoofer go fucking nuts and the whole thing ended up sounding terrible. You couldn't hear the piano at all.

Cheers, that's all useful stuff, I'm mixing on small Focals in any case. I'm not going to get a chance to check the room until the installation is being put in, which will allow only a few hours to change any mix, so I may do 3 mixes prior and take along laptop for any final tweeking.

  On 5/26/2015 at 2:47 PM, kakapo said:

Cheers, that's all useful stuff, I'm mixing on small Focals in any case. I'm not going to get a chance to check the room until the installation is being put in, which will allow only a few hours to change any mix, so I may do 3 mixes prior and take along laptop for any final tweeking.

Yeah, just make sure there aren't any annoying resonances that drowns out the rest of the mix. I'm always having trouble around 500hz when it comes to galleries for some reason...

As with any live sound application, you should mix to the room. Make a few mixes and test out which ones work best.