DIGIT - DIGItal sTeps

Abstract

Despite the great technological evolution felt in recent decades in the media field towards the automation of audio post-production processes that did not occur in the practise of sound foley, which remains a manual process that is based on the technical and interpretive skills of a foley artist. In the moving image, the latter offers sonic meaning through an expressive manipulation of objects by matching its performance with the moving image. With recognized significant impact, foley sound is a lengthy process and requires a great deal of material resources, and therefore have been recently developed digital proposals to achieve these kind of sounds, and more specifically for the production of footstep sounds. However these solutions have limitations in (1) rapid exhaustion of proposals in the case of the use of sound libraries, (2) MIDI control limitation in the case of the use of plugins to produce footstep sounds and (3) a lack of realism in the case of recourse to techniques of procedural audio. In this dissertation, and in order to respond to those previously raised limitations I present DIGItal sTeps (DIGIT), an interactive digital system to achieve footstep sounds in a sound foley context. DIGIT is based on the concept of the acoustic profile of a gesture produced by the impact of the hand on a surface and captured by a contact microphone. Through the description of the acoustic profile of these movements and their mapping to concatenative synthesis control parameters, it is intended that DIGIT performs an automatic search in a database comprising pre recorded sounds of footsteps, and subsequent choice of the most suitable segment according to the acoustic description of the gesture.

DIGIT enhances the expressiveness and operation through the use of gesture as a way of recreating the footstep sounds in an audio post-production environment of a movie or game, giving a follow-up to the traditional practice of sound foley, which through tactile exploration of physical objects, and recognition of its acoustic qualities, adjusts them to the thematic narrative of the moving image. DIGIT has advantages over previous solutions in that it uses the description of the acoustic gesture profile (in its multiple dimensions) as the main system control in a way to circumvent the limitations of the MIDI communication protocol. DIGIT also has a granular audio playback engine that enables a change of the unique features of a sound in order to create more possibilities from a small number of samples. This feature contributes to a decrease in the size of the sound database of prerecorded footstep sounds that comprise the system unlike the solutions presented by sound libraries or plugins. Also a feature of DIGIT system in relation to existing solutions is that it can work by layers in a same instance of the software giving the user the possibility to create a more complex sound.