Tag Archive for: Christopher Hancock

Open Spaces – The Wandering Mind EP

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One of my ambient music aliases, Open Spaces, has released a new EP of works titled The Wandering Mind. The EP is released by the Australian imprint, lo fi spiritual, and can be found on all digital platforms.

This alias focuses on creating ambient spaces and moods that engage the listener in a two way relationship rather than the usual one way consumption of pop music. This ambient release aims to have an ambiguous edge to the music, in other words to create a sonic environment where the listener is unsure of what is part of the music and what is sounds from the outside environment. A metaphor if you will, for the wandering mind, that is shaped and influenced by both the internal and external environment.

The moods of this record therefore rely on a combination of field recordings, synthesis and 360 mixing to create immersive sonic environments.

For those interested in such concepts of ambient music, here’s a great introductory video of one of the ambient music forefathers, Brian Eno, talking about such concepts.

 

Sound West – Immersive Sound conference presentation

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In August I was invited to speak on Immersive Sound at the Sound West conference at the CommBank Stadium at Parramatta.

Chaired by Radovan Klusacek (SAE Sydney Campus Manager) and joined by Stewart Gedes (301 Studios), we covered many aspects of the emerging field of 360 audio.

The session gave a history of immersive 360 audio, from university based researched through to the easily available plugins and DAW enabled 360 tools available to the modern producer.

The Q&A at the end of the panel was interesting in that it definitely appear that we had engaged some of the young producers in the room to experiment with some of these new production tools and capabilities.

If you are a producer and are interested in the creating 360 music and audio, here are a few links to get you started.

Ableton Live user try the open source freeware – Envelop For Live

All DAW users try the free dearVR micro plugin

ProTools users try the FB360 suite

Logic Users – enjoy the fact that as of Logic Pro 10.7 (2021) dolby atmos spatial mixing is now native to Logic. Here’s a quick youtube tutorial to get you started.

 

Electric Korma recording session

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On the 14th of July I had the pleasure of tracking a rather curious band by the title of Electric Korma at Stranded Recording Studios.

Effectively they are a red hot trio that do abstracted, rocked-out Hindi Hits / Bollywood covers. A bizarre niche, as admittedly by the front man George, but profitable, and popular amongst the affluent Australian Indian community.

The emphasis of the session was to get great drum takes, and possibly some keeper bass takes and guitar takes. But band leader George and Bass player Joey, stated at the onset that they might do overdubs after the fact at their home studios. The Input list below confirms such, the emphasis being on the drums with minimal mic’ing of other elements.

ELECTRIC KORMA – 14/7/22 INPUT LIST

  1. Kick In – AKG D112
  2. Kick Out – AKG D25
  3. Snare up – Shure SM57
  4. Snare Down – Shure SM57
  5. Hat – Rode TF5
  6. Rack –
  7. Floor – Sennheiser MD – 421
  8. OH L – Coles 4038
  9. OH R – Coles 4038
  10. Room – Gefel – Um-70
  11. Bass DI
  12. Bass Amp – M88
  13. GTR Amp – Shure SM57 – LP 3
  14. Scratch Vox 1 – Shure SM58 – LP 4
  15. Scratch Vox 2 – Shure SM58 – LP 5
  16. Scratch Vox 3 – Shure SM58 – LP 6

The band wanted to play live, and this has informed and directed the mic choice to focus on dynamic and ribbon microphones to minimise bleed between instruments.

The mic choices are fairly standard, but a few things excelled or impressed me during the session.

Firstly, I’m loving the Beyerdynamic M160 double ribbon mic on toms. They have that ribbon warmth and have great rejection past 110 degrees (according to the manufacturers) which keeps down too much cymbals or other drums getting into the mic.

Secondly, The Coles 4038 ribbon mics are such a warm lovely choice for rock drum overheads, and in this particular application, really minimise bleed from bass and guitar amps compared to condenser mic options. They also respond so nicely to a bit of a high shelf lifting those higher frequencies that aren’t so pronounced in ribbons generally.

Lastly, a bit of an AKG overkill, but the D112 and D25 made for a solid, warm thumping kick drum sound.

Below are a few pics from the session.

 

Solfeggio Sculpture in 360 audio

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During 2021 I wound back most of my freelance work in order to finish my masters. For my final masters project I focused on creative research into the emerging technology of 360 audio spatialisation. In particular 360 spatialisation that can be encoded to binaural format for headphone listening.

I reviewed the literature on human spatial perception and looked at what is and isn’t possible within the 360 compositional space.  

This creative experimentation within the 360 space explored concepts brought forward from the literature review, and resulted in 4 EPs of spatialise compositions for headphone listening. Some of the compositions have become quite minimal in order to leave space for perception of the 360 space, in particular 360 parameters such as azimuth, elevation and radius. Further, the academic atmosphere of the research has put me in the mood to return to my on going interest in the esoteric side of audio, ie binaural beats, solfeggio frequencies and the like.

The first of these works has recently been released through lo fi spiritual and can be heard below. The title of this first release is Solfeggio Sculptures and is released under my own name rather than any of my previous aliases.