How's It Sounding?

I was recently reading a forum thread in Gear Slutz about which movies have the best sound effects.  There were a few shared responses, and one of those was The Matrix (1999).  First off, let me say that this is one of my top favorite movies.  The concept, the graphics, the settings, and the sound were just stellar for the time, and even now.  Reading that people believed The Matrix had great audio gave me an excuse to watch it for about the hundredth time to do “research” for this blog.  Before I get into the audio, let me inform you readers that I DO NOT have surround sound.  The judgment of this audio is based off of my 2.1 system.

If you have seen the movie, you know everything action in the movie is digitally and electronically based (I don’t mean the way it was made, I mean the fact that the Matrix itself is a computer world.)  Also, everything action of the characters is based off of speed.  The audio reflects this very well!  There are TONS of whooshes and electrical sounds throughout the movie.  As you no doubt have guessed, I think Dane A. Davis did an amazing job as the sound designer for this movie.

Robert Alexander is a “Data Sonification Specialist”.  That is an awfully fancy term right?  Well it simply means that he takes any type of data and turns it into sound.  A basic example of this would be a heart rate monitor.  That “beep, beep, beep” sound that you hear is essentially the sonification of someone’s pulse.  This is very basic though.  Alexander takes this to the extreme.

Recently I was talking to a friend of mine named Darrell Seale, the Director of International Programs for Fixed Wing Sensor Programs at the private defense contractor Lockheed Martin.  Now what does this have to do with audio?  Well actually, absolutely nothing.  However, this man negotiates multimillion dollar deals for breakfast, and it got me to think, how does deal making like this compare to deal making and negotiation to someone in the entertainment industry?

After Seale received his bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Aerospace Engineering from Oregon State University, he did a lot of satellite imagery work, and was a program manager as an officer in the US Air Force.  After that, he was negotiating national and international deals for Lockheed Martin.

So what makes these negotiations different from that of someone in the audio field?  Well, Seale deals with defense products (high tech military weaponry) and someone in the audio field will be talking about who gets to record what.  Price is also different.  An extreme case in the audio world would be Jay-Z’s $150 million dollar record deal back in 2008, but it is not uncommon for Lockheed Martin to close a deal worth over three billion dollars.  Seale also informed me that these negotiations could go on for months at a time.

 Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod: Some of what Seale Negotiates.  Courtesy of Lockheed Martin

It seems that if you don’t have a Turtle Beach headset, you are a loser and cannot call yourself a modern day console gamer.  Call me a loser then, because I don’t have any.  I have the alternative: a game chair.

When I first heard the name “Turtle Beach”, I thought it was an Xbox Live Arcade game or something.  After all: who would think that something with a name like that would go on your head?  Well I started using sound localization before it was cool.  Anyone remember the old X-Rocker game chair (about $145)?  I had one of the original ones from back in the day.  It’s so old, I only found one picture of it after searching for an hour.