 So hi everyone and welcome to the Sound Logo production masterclass which is part of Wikimedia's contest to find their Sound Logo via a global contest. So this masterclass is here for anyone and everyone that would want to enter and we hope that it will give you the essential information and skills that you would need to know to create your Sound Logo and put it forwards into the mix. So today we're going to be taking you through all of that and we're also going to be showing you Wikimedia's creative brief. Meet the team. So we are from Massive Music. We are a global creative music agency founded just over 20 years ago and we deliver everything that a brand would need to know in the field of music, sound and voice. And we are particularly interested and specialists in sonic branding, which you're going to hear more about today. So in the scenes on this project we've got a much larger team working on it but today we just have Joe and myself presenting. So my name is Emma and I'm an accountant project manager in the London office. And I've been working in collaboration with the Wikimedia community and the foundation team, helping to bring this contest to life and I'm really excited to bring it to you today. I'll pass over to Joe. Hi everyone. I'm Joe Bush. I'm a senior creative strategist at Massive Music. I've been working in sonic branding for years and years now and yeah really excited to get this project underway. Thanks Joe. So basic audio terminology so we thought we'd start here and really give you the key terms that you would need to know before diving into music production yourselves. So number one, we've got track. So track really simply is just a long form piece of music. So it's anything from a one minute pop song to a much longer symphony or opera. But today we're going to be focused on sound logos. So not a track and sound logos are much much shorter but we'll talk about these more shortly. Key, major and minor. So this is a term we often use to describe chords, scales and key signatures. And the easiest way to describe the difference between these is to hear the emotion within it or a piece of music. So if a piece of music sounds particularly happy or bright, it's often going to be in a major key. And if it sounds more sad or melancholy, it's probably in a minor key. And we've got two examples here for you now. The first is a major chord and the second is a minor chord. So hopefully you can hear the differences. Next up, tempo or speed. So I'm sure many of you know that tempo is the Italian word for time, and it simply means the pace or speed of the piece of music. In music we often measure this in beats per minute or BPM, or more simply we could describe it as up tempo or down tempo. So we now have two examples for you. The first is up tempo, and the second is a piece of music that's slower and it's down tempo. Instruments and timbre. So instruments are simply the tools that you would need to be able to create a piece of music. So this could be anything from a violin, piano and oud, or even your voice. Your voice is a really powerful instrument that you can use to create music. And when we think of instruments we also need to look at timbre because timbre is the characteristics of the sound. So two instruments could be playing the exact same note, the exact same amount of time. They will sound different because of their timbre. And this really gives them the tone or different tone or feel to it, and it may be why a composer may choose to use one instrument over the other when creating a piece of music. When also talking about instruments we need to think about whether it's real or synthesized. So a real instrument is a live or an acoustic instrument maybe that you would record in a room and then use within your composition, or an electronic instrument is simply electronically made music. So we've got two examples you now and the first is acoustic and the second is electronic sound logo. So this is why we're all here today and it's hopefully what we're all going to be creating. So a sound logo simply is a brief short collection of sounds chords melodies or beats used to identify a brand through sound. So what it means is that a brand doesn't need to rely on any visual cues just within a couple of seconds a very short amount of time they will be recognized through just that short sound. And to give you an example I won't be able to play it but if you think of one of the world's largest and well known fast food brands, they have a very iconic sound logo concept. So this is your big idea it's the story your creative concepts. So when you're thinking about a piece of music, what is your big story what do you think that composer wanted to represent through their piece of music. So if you think of a piece of music you particularly like the story and the concept behind it would help to give it more resonance with you and a greater connection. And when we think of sound logos in particular the concept really helps the brand tell that story to their audience in a very short amount of time cut through so when we're thinking about cut through we're asking ourselves does it stand out does it cut through the noise of anything around it. So a good example of a piece of music or a sound logo that has good cut through is if you were sat in something like a hairdressers and a radio on in the background does a piece of music or a sound like a particularly stand out to you can hear it above anything else that's going on. Often if sound logo has particularly good cut through it's normally more distinctive, it's more memorable and it's also has greater recall, which tends to mean you could harm or sing it back after you've heard it. But in terms of this is a really easy one, it's all around the feelings that it evokes that piece of music. And when you're thinking of sonic branding, we really want to make sure that you're trying to evoke the right emotion and attaching that to the brand through the sound logo. So now that we're familiar with all those different musical terminologies and terms, we can start thinking about our musical language and how we start talking about music so Joe and I spend many hours of our days talking about music and evaluating music. We're going to play you two different examples and then talk about them afterwards. Here's the first one. So if we were going to critically evaluate that something we might say would be I feel that the track is high tempo, but lacks emotion. The next one. So I will play it first and then talk about afterwards. So we might describe that as the guitar part is great, but perhaps a little less rock. So when we're evaluating music and also when you're creating music, it really helps to think of music in this kind of critical way. And so for this, if imagine you had a brief and someone created this piece of music, if you wanted to critically evaluate it and the brief say we would like it to be less not a rock song. You would then maybe look at the instrumentation in this example so you may take out the bass guitar or to change the timbre of it, you may use an acoustic guitar over an electric guitar. But now that wraps that section so I'll pass over to Joe. Thanks Emma. So what are sound logos. Well, let's start by looking at where it all began. And years and years and years ago with the cereal brand on the left. They had a very, very well known jingle in the 1920s 1930s. And this was really prevalent. It became very popular and people started singing and knowing this jingle. This led other brands doing similar things. And the jingle, you know, the brand track really was born. It continued all the way up until the kind of mid 90s where we reached jingle or soundtrack saturation point really. There were so many brands using so many different songs. It was really hard to cut through as a brand. And then in comes the mobile phone on the right and that brand. The way that this brand started using sound with ring tones and UI sounds really was the new frontier and sonic branding, adding product into the mix and making it something that was liveable outside of just the television or the radio. Now we live in an audio driven world podcasts sound on social media and in home devices. We're listening to sounds all the time listening to music all the time. So it's really important that brands use sounds and music in a smart way so they can be a part of this conversation and stand out. So a nice little stat about sound logos and why they're effective. Well, people react to sound 17% faster than their reactive visuals. This means that we can really infiltrate the brain and the mind really quickly and really powerfully with sound. We can make people feel things in a really quick way and also stand out against all the visual noise that's around us every day. So why use a sound logo well operates directly on the subconscious is therefore the most effective way to modulate emotions. The sound logo will also add depth, significant emotional depth to how the movement is perceived. So this would be really helpful with media, in terms of giving this more, more emotion really behind the brand. So let's have a look at the example of two sound logos. We often define them in two very simplistic ways, melodic and atonal. So let's have a listen to what we mean by a melodic sound logo now. So you can clearly hear a melody there, kind of arpeggio and chord going up and then landing on the first note again. Clearly melodic, something you could sing, something you could hum, something you could whistle. And then we also have atonal as well. So you can clearly remove all kind of melody or harmony and focus on more just pure sound design really so let's have a listen to that. So you can hear some percussive sounds in there some kind of sound effects in there as well, very short and snappy, the very different from the melodic example storytelling through sound. So why is storytelling through sound important? If we could move on to the next slide, it gives your sound logo a really unique identity. And if you start telling stories, you can start translating the movement's values into sound. So what this means for Wikimedia is that the sound logo will be for the individual and it will have greater meaning, it will mean something for the Wikimedia movement. So we've given some examples of storytelling through sound for this for this presentation. The first one is an example brand. So the brand that we've come up with this fictional brand is called the Optimist. The Optimist is a nonprofit news organization. They share only good and positive news headlines through their app and online publications. So a brief for the sound logo of the Optimist could be how to capture the sound of optimism and positivity. So there's a few different ways that we could do this. Optimism and positivity so potentially it could be a rising sound that moves upwards in pitch or in volume. Maybe it's an angelic sound that also feels digital. Maybe it's an open free guitar strum in a major key, really accentuating that idea of happiness and positivity by using that major key. So we've got some sound examples of what these could sound like. Let's start with the first one, a rising sound moves upwards in pitch or volume. Okay, and what about the angelic sound? And then lastly an open free guitar strum in a major key. So there are three example sound logos for the Optimist, this brand that we've made up, and all following that story of representing optimism and positivity in sound. There's three different ways that you can hit that brief. Music production overview. So what we're going to do in this section is look at music production in a bit more detail and look at the technicality behind creating a sound logo. Starting we're looking at production platforms or DAWs. DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation and this is what we use to manipulate and create sound using computers. There's five listed here. These are all free and available for you to use and free of charge. So we have five different options, Ableton Live Lights or Dasty, which is also open source, Waveform or Tractation, Pro Tools First and Cubase LE. Already great tools to use in this presentation though we're going to be using Ableton Live Lights for our examples. So firstly we're going to look at recording. Recording is a big subject. You know you can go into so much detail on this but really we're going to break it down to the bare bones today. We're going to look at microphones and we're going to look at MIDI. So we're going to look at microphones first and I think you all know probably what a microphone is. This is a device that you can use to transfer acoustic sound within an environment into digital data and record it into your computer. Then we're going to look at MIDI as well. MIDI is a digital language, which means you can convert notes that you play on a piano or impacts or impulses that you play on a drum machine for example into information that a computer can then use to transcribe that to an instrument or a sound. So we've got two examples of this. The first one is the microphones example. So let's have a look. That's me simply sat where I am now at my desk with Ableton open hitting record with a microphone and clicking my fingers three times and that's now rendered into Ableton and I can use that sound however like next up we have the MIDI example so let's take a look at that. So there's the MIDI example. That was me just playing what's called a MIDI keyboard which is a keyboard that you can plug into your computer and I'm just playing through the white notes on the major scale there. What we do is we can use that data we can use that place we played in and we can put that onto a drum kit or a xylophone sound or synthesizer anything you like. So you can start creating melody and music that way too. Next up, editing. So editing, we're going to break this down to four different areas so adjusting audio so moving around, cutting, copying and pasting. So those three are something that you'll probably be familiar with, you know, use them all the time and word documents or spreadsheets as well. And it's the same with audio. We can move audio around, we can duplicate it, we can shorten it, we can paste it, we can do lots of things with audio. And we've got a video example of me doing some editing on the next slide. So let's have a look. So here we are back in Ableton with my clicks. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go in and I'm just going to cut the audio at the start of each of those click sounds that I've recorded in. The purpose of this is so that I can drag them and create a sort of very, very simple beat out of the clicks. At the moment, they're all over the place. They're not to a tempo, but I'm going to move them next to each other onto our grid that you can see. I'm going to shorten that last one and I'm going to duplicate it and then we can play through and we'll hear a pattern. So whereas before that was just loose and random. Now we have a four by four beat on the grid of the clicks and it's starting to become more musical. Next up we have mixing. Again, huge subject. Really, you know, you can talk about mixing days and days, but we're going to break it down to a very sort of simple overview. There are five sections we're looking at, so volume, so you know the how loud or quiet a sound is. EQ, which stands for equalization. And this is where we start thinking about frequency spectrum in sound. So low frequencies, high frequencies. And we can turn those up or down depending on what kind of effects we want to create. We then have compression. Compression is similar to volume, but what we're doing is we're automating volume parameters within the sound. So we're making everything the same volume or everything same quieter volume or rising in volume. There's lots of different things you could do with compression, but it's a very useful tool that saves a lot of, you know, hard work and personal time. We've got reverb. Reverb is about creating space environments within sound. So, you know, what's it sound like if you click your fingers in a cathedral compared to your bedroom? That's what reverb is. It's that space around the sound. And then lastly, we have delay. And delay is kind of like an echo. So it's going to sound repeats after you hear the source sound that can repeat for ages and ages or just a short little delay as well. So we'll have a look at these in action in the next clip. So here we are back in Ableton with my clicks. I've just lined up. Okay. And what we're going to do is we're going to add some EQ. So we're going to take out some of the low frequencies in this sound. Okay. So we've removed some of the low frequencies there. We're going to add a compressor and bring all of these clicks up to the same volume. Okay. So much more even there. Then we're going to add some reverb to create some space around the sound. Okay. So suddenly we're in a larger environment. And then lastly, adding a delay. So some echo. You can hear that sound repeating as it tails off at the end. What that does also, it can be used in the creative way to kind of add some sense of rhythm or more complexity to the sound too. So the Wikimedia sound logo. So this is the project that we're working on. And, you know, what we can are going to be basically asking people to submit. And yeah, we're really excited to hear the submissions that come through for the different sound logos. We're going to go through a bit of the brief for this project now. So we're starting with the objectives. So firstly, we want to make sure with future proofing Wikimedia for audio only platforms as we discussed earlier. We'd like to create positive sentiment around the Wikimedia movement through this project. And we'd also love to invite a global audience to engage with the Wikimedia movement and this project. So lots of people involved on a diverse set of contributions for this project, definitely. So the brief and a bit more technical detail. Obviously, we're going to create the sound logo for Wikimedia. It should be between one and four seconds in length in terms of formats that we're accepting. We're accepting WAV files, MP3s or OGGs. You should use original sounds that you've recorded or played, or you can use a copyright free samples which have been provided as well. The sound logo should contain multiple layers, textures and sounds. So ideally it's not just going to be one sound, it will be sort of built up of a few different ones to create something truly unique and original. We want it to sound global and not pertain to one particular culture or style. You know, we want this to be sort of culturally agnostic, if possible. And of course it should represent the Wikimedia movement. So we've got some creative prompts to get yourself started. Similarly to how we did with the optimist. We're going to look at this, but in Wikimedia. So we want you to imagine the sound of these five things. The first one is connections forming. Secondly, we have this idea of question and answer. So, you know, core and response idea. What about the sound of trusted information? So what does trust sound like? Free and open knowledge. So that could be a starting point as well. And then lastly, knowledge growing is this idea, you know, one idea expanding and growing over time. We also have some tonal prompts. So how the logo should feel. We'd like the logo to feel human, inspired, smart and warm. And we're looking to avoid anything that feels too technological, too cold, synthetic or aggressive. So just things to keep in mind when you're working on your own sound logos that you can keep referring back to these terms as well to kind of keep you on track and make sure we're along the right lines. So we've got some examples of creating some logos for these prompts to that we're going to share with you today. And the first one is knowledge growing. And we're going to go back into Ableton and have a look at how we create a sound logo that represents knowledge growing. So let's have a look. So we're back in Ableton. We've got the clicks that I recorded dragging those back in. We're going to do some editing, just to start lining those up. Similarly to how I did earlier, this time we just copy and pasting that first click onto the grid. We've got three clicks in a row there. Okay, but I thought that to be a bit slower. So I'm just going to create a bit more space between the sounds. I'm also going to automate the volume of the clicks to rise up over time. So we have three clicks in a row. I'm now going to record some MIDI to record a virtual instrument into Ableton. It's just one note there. I'm going to go into the MIDI here and I'm going to duplicate that one note to match up with those click sounds that I recorded. So there'll be a layer on top of that original sound, something with a bit more kind of tonal content. Okay, so now our three beats have the melodic sound as well. And then I'm also going to add a chatter sample. So this is one of the royalty free samples. And this is a sound of people chatting in a room really. I'm going to underlay this underneath our three beats. I'm going to make the volume rise over time. It's a little bit quiet, though. So I'm just going to turn the volume of that individual sample. Okay, and there we have it. So let's have a listen to that knowledge growing logo on its own here. Okay, so just an example of, you know, sound that kind of expands, it grows over time. There's also sort of this idea of like knowledge and humanity in there with that layer as well. Next up we have the example for connections forming. So let's go back into Ableton and have a look at creating this one. So this time I'm going to start by recording in some MIDI on an African bar instrument. What I've done is I've recorded a chord there in MIDI. But I'm using an arpeggiator as part of the instrument to make it move between the notes in sequence rather than having one chord playing at a time. So we'll move between those three notes that we've recorded as the chord plays. I'm just lining it up here to make sure it starts on the groove and in time. That's great. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to automate a parameter on the instrument so it gets brighter as we move through the sound. So we'll start a bit duller and end slightly brighter to create some movement. Okay, so getting brighter over time. And then we also have this kitchen clock sound, a row two three sample. I'm going to use as a layer to kind of add a sort of a thin beat underneath this. What I'm going to do is here in Ableton, I'm actually going to use the warp function in Ableton and speed this sound up so it's like faster click. So you can hear that underneath but it needs to be a little bit louder. So I'm going to turn up the volume there. And I'm also going to add some reverb. Okay. I'm going to automate the volume of this as well so it gets louder over time. And I'm going to take out some of the low end on the sound as well in our EQ. I'm also going to just compress the click sound to make it a bit louder. Okay, and I'm just going to add one more effect here on our MIDI instrument, which is a filter and just to create a little bit more of a sense of movement over time. I'm going to sweep through low to high frequencies here. I'm going to go to a bit more movement. And that's our second example. So let's have a listen to that in isolation. Okay. And there's the connections forming logo. Thanks very much, Joe. And yeah, thank you everyone for watching. We really hope that you found this useful. And we're really looking forward to hearing your submissions coming in over the next few weeks. And if you have any more questions, we hope that the FAQ section on the contest platform will have all the answers that you need. So yeah, that's it. Thank you very much.