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The CD contains music from the movie The Empiricist; which
was made by Phosphorus Alights. The movie tells about a
physician in training, Winston, who discovers that conventional
medicine has many basic flaws; and about his fiancée,
Claire, who discovers what makes up quality relationships.
Loretta
Jankowski composed all of the music except for track one.
She received her musical training at several schools of
music in this country, as well as in England and Poland.
Her music has been performed by many orchestras, including
the Chicago Symphony and the New Jersey Symphony. Loretta
began to collaborate with Phosphorus Alights shortly after
its creation. She composed the music for one of the shorts
the company did, and then composed the soundtrack for The
Empiricist.
The
Soundtrack CD could have consisted of an exact rendition
of the music heard during the playing of the movie, which
were 44 separate tracks. But it was decided to record entire
pieces. Plus to add variety to the CD, six tracks from the
movie's soundtrack were included: Balstrom's Theme, Later
at Night, Valerie's Theme, The Confrontation, Winding Down,
and the song that plays at the end of the movie, You and
Me Together, Forever.
Recording
Technique
Due
to the uniqueness of the recording technique, it is warranted
to briefly describe it. Typically, when recording many instruments,
a microphone is assigned to each instrument (and with some
instruments, such as percussion, several microphones can
be assigned). As a result, the initial recording consists
of many tracks (sometimes over 100), which have to be reduced
to the two stereo tracks that appear on the final CD. The
reducing of the initial many tracks to the final two is
called "mixing the music." It can take hours to
place all the mikes during the actual recording session
(because in certain locations they can cancel out each other's
sounds via a process called "phasing out"); and
the mixing process can take a long time (up to several hours
for each minute of final song time).
The
mike placement technique that is used in recording the music
on this CD is not conventional. Two very small (but very
high fidelity) microphones - each one's dimensions being
about half an inch in diameter and one and one half inches
in length - were placed inside a tennis ball; arranged so
the angle between them was about 70 degrees and the recording
end of each mike was flush with the surface of the tennis
ball. During the recording, the tennis ball is placed at
the front edge of the stage (on which the musicians are
located) and raised to about ten feet in the air. In this
location, the mikes pick up the sound coming directly from
the musicians, as well as the sound that is bounced off
the walls, and the audience, of the auditorium. This location,
plus the placement of the mikes in the tennis ball (giving
it a unique and excellent acoustical environment), provides
the listener with the sense she is live in the concert hall.
This
technique allows the music to be recorded in a concert hall,
with the hall's acoustics, instead of being recorded in
a recording studio (which is designed to deaden any sound
that does not go directly from the instrument to the microphone).
Also, since the initial recording is the two tracks that
will be on the final CD (eliminating any mixing requirements),
and since the mike placement time (during the recording)
is minimal, significant cost savings occur.
User
Comments: David said: "An appealing mix of classical
and jazz pieces."
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