Dr. Peter Rothbart demonstrates the impact of the aural on the visual in the surround sound critical listening classroom.
Music for film is a topic widely talked about by UMass Lowell students. Many of them, especially so for SRT students, plan on going into audio for video as a career. Around campus, people were very excited to have Dr. Peter Rothbart, the Professor of Music and Director of Electroacoustic Music Studies at Ithaca College School of Music and audio-for-video composer and engineer, come and talk about this popular topic.
The majority of Dr. Rothbart's talk dealt with music as a dramatic element. As an example, he played four versions of the title sequence from Hill Street Blues. In each version, different music accompanied the picture, changing the mood of the show from a comedy to an action/adventure to a gritty drama and, finally, to the original, character-study that the show actually was. He was showing that by changing the music, our impression of the picture morphs to fit.
He also went into the technical side of audio for film. He played the opening of the 1992 version of the film Dracula and asked us to listen to the separation between the basses, cellos, voiceover, and fire sound effect. As a group, we then spent several minutes discussing how this was achieved and why this separation was critical to the final product.
It was a great presentation and the students who attended all seemed to have enjoyed it thoroughly. We would like to thank Dr. Rothbart for sharing his time and experience with all of us.
- Jeremy Wegrzyn
