Numerical Sound has just won a Sonic Joy Award 2008 for Hollywood Impulse Responses from AudioNewsRoom.

The Nov/Dec issue of TapeOp magazine includes an interview with Bruce Botnick. Among many other projects he worked on all of the Doors albums, Jerry Goldsmith, and the Beach Boys Pet Sounds Album. He was talking about having to recreated the sounds of the echo chambers they had used, for a surround release of their back catalogue. He uses Altiverb and had this to say:

"The best impulse responses I ever heard are from Pure Space [Classical and Mystical Reverberation Impulses]....Ernest Cholakis out of Canada is the genius/mad scientist who listens to music. He's mathematically figured a way to eliminate all of the electronics from the sample. They sound extraordinary. An acoustic room-it blooms. You make the sound and then it [snaps] responds and the room does it's thing. The majority of the digital reverbs are very linear and they die off, but Ernest's samples are extraordinary. I've got one that I think sounds super close to chamber four at Capitol, which is *the* chamber."

Tempo variations are essential for a realistic midi performance. What is surprising is how complex and changing they are. Here is the graph of the quarter note tempo variation (bars 1-39) of the great French pianist Pascal Roge performing Gymnopedie No. 1 by Eric Satie.

Here is a midi sequencer based on these tempo variation on a sampled piano - the Blüthner Digital Model One. These tempo variation clearly add to the musicality of a midi sequence. Play recording.

Graph of the quarter note tempo variation (bars 1-39) of the great French pianist Pascal Roge, performing Gymnopedie No. 1 by Eric Satie.

Tailored for film composers, recording engineers and post-production houses, the Hollywood Sound Impulse Response Collection comes with 241 combination early reflection/reverb tail impulses plus 27 bonus reverb tail only impulses.  These accurately match the  scoring stage sizes of such recording venues as Abbey Road, Air Lyndhurst, the Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage at Sony, and others.