PixalH8 / Matthew Applegate sound lessons.

We had a special guest lecturer Matthew Applegate also known as PixalH8 who over six weeks taught us all about sounds and music , all the different ways they are used to change emotions like a really horrific scene wouldn't be anyway near the same if the sound was off, or if it had really happy jolly music to it.

The 1st few lessons we had were watching Star War's and looking at how they made the sound effects such as a laser sound is made by a slinky and dropping a ball down inside it, and a light sabre sound is made from a old 50's tube television with the back pulled off and a microphone being swung back and forth behind it near the tube.

Matthew also showed us about the Star Wars music how most the song's intertwined like Darth Vader's imperial march has slight hints of Luke Skywalkers Theme mixed into it, to give the hint that they are related, Leia's them also does this too, I found this really interesting it wouldn't be something you would normally notice till you analyze it, It made me want to find and watch other films to see where else this happens.

The next 2 lesson's we had we were shown how to make Foley sounds which are the Old School way they used to make sounds which were when they used items to create sound effects for example a tray of stones and someone wearing a pair of shoes on there hands and moving their hands on the stones to create someone walking over stones and they could make this sound like someone running, walking, walking quietly or if you were to drop a melon from a roof and record it smashing on to the ground it would make a sound like a head exploding.

Some of the sounds we created with Matthew were snapping salary to make it sound like a neck snapping, cutting a cabbage slowly with a knife to make it sound like cracking bones, and squeezing a cabbage to sound like a erm i guess way to describe it would be a egg sound from the film "Alien", we created a whole load of sounds, which was very helpful in creating sounds for our games or games we wish to make in the future.

The last 2 lessons were about editing the sounds we created with a programme called "Audacity" and how to get the sound effects to sound really good and realistic so it would sound even more like a neck snapping and you could edit it too sound truly horrific and brutal.

I really enjoyed Matthew's lesson's they were full of interesting pieces of knowledge and I learnt so much from them, he is a really interesting person, it's made me look at objects in a new way to see what sounds they could produce and even got me back into making music again but looking at it from a different perspective. I'm really looking forward to hopefully having more lessons with Matthew.