I am very honored and excited to have 'Devotion' released as the first DVD Audio disc... surround sound is amazing... The music comes alive and is so vibrant - it's unlike anything you've ever heard before!
You can't really imagine music without technology.
You know, sound was still a fairly new thing when I came into movies. And the reason musicals happened is because of sound. They could put music in the picture! That's how it all began.
The weird thing with 'Kismet' is that Vincente Minnelli didn't know what to do with a Cinemascope camera for that film - so he never moved it! It's like in the old days when sound first came in and was so complicated that the camera just sat there. There are hardly any close-ups in 'Kismet,' so everything's at a bit of a distance.
Every technology that comes into filmmaking is first a gimmick. Think about sound with 'The Jazz Singer' or the first colour or surround sound - it takes a while for filmmakers to understand how to use it.
When young people hear auto-tune, they think that's real R&B. You have to get rid of all of the gimmicks.
The rush of creating sounds and mixing sounds is always an interesting challenge, especially for someone like me, who doesn't know about sound.
For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.
I think that George Lucas' 'Star Wars' films are fantastic. What he's done, which I admire, is he has taken all the money and profit from those films and poured it into developing digital sound and surround sound, which we are using today.
Kids now are so used to surround sound and the power in theater speakers, that the concert hall is a disappointment to them.
PHONOGRAPH, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.
When it comes to orchestral music, whenever I see a concert with orchestra and strings, and I arrive and there are speakers up, my heart always sinks a little bit, and I think, 'It's going to be down to some sound guy's ideas.' Contact microphones on the violins. I'm a purist, I suppose.
I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.
Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. We had some of the most sophisticated sound-creating systems, and were instrumental in MIDI.
You can make yourself the greatest singer in the world or the best drummer in the world with the aid of technology.
You could make some great sounds with technology. That's what recording is all about. What happens in the studio is very magical, and should be, in my opinion.
You can find the greatest sound of all time, and someone's going to squash it down to a tiny little earphone anyway or play it through the computer, and that is a big thing people have to think about now.
It's a 360-degree sound experience. Like you're in the middle of the band. A lot of people have the technology to play the format, so why not put it out there. It sounds great.
It's safe to say headphones is a good business.
The major rock instruments and classical instruments were designed for performance, for sharing the music with an audience, and then later people put microphones on them and recorded them. But for electronic music, the opposite was true - they're designed in laboratories, and later, we tried to put them on stage.
Well, I happen to have a love of vocal reproduction devices.
You know, I do music. If you look under the hood of the industry I'm in, it's all based on technology. From radio to phonographs to CDs, it's all technology. Microphones, reel-to-reels, cameras, editing, chips, it's all technology.
Once upon a time, sound was new technology.
I think it goes back to me being a recording mixer and engineer. Because of all the technology now you can make music yourself and a lot of people are doing that now. I started out doing that a long time ago and I found when I did that I came up with a unique sound.
Dick Mills was in charge of sound effects and all the rest then, and he put the voice through a ring modulator or whatever gizmos he'd got at the time to make it sound a little more electronic.
