Murray's Music II, Electric Boogaloo

Apr 06, 2010 21:25

Some of you may be aware that for the past five years the main composer for most of the music heard in Doctor Who has been a man named Murray Gold. Some may also be aware that the music in 'The Eleventh Hour' sounded a bit different to the music heard during most of Russell T Davies' tenure.

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commentary and criticism, doctor who, music

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Comments 18

airie_fairy April 7 2010, 03:27:14 UTC
Maybe now people will stop taking it out on the music itself, which is usually quite pretty.

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callmeromana April 7 2010, 03:58:55 UTC
Yeah.. I rather like Murray's music, but as they say, cognition comes through comparison.. Bad, bad beans mixing.

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iriandia April 7 2010, 06:31:03 UTC
Thanks for writing this. I know shockingly little about mixing in spite of being an amateur musician - devoted my time to learning the instruments not the mixing. Still, anyone can hear that the music is ridiculously loud in the Doomsday scene. I hadn't heard of dynamic range compression but it sounds like it is really being misused here. I wonder why they even do it - can't they tell it sounds crap?

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myfirstkitchen April 7 2010, 08:20:17 UTC
They do it on telly because the adverts started doing it to be louder than the programmes on commercial channels - this started as a radio thing and then moved on to TV. So you'd be watching a programme and then WOW you can't ignore the ad because it's so BIG and LOUD. All the ads did it as they didn't want other companies' ads to stand out over theirs. Then the programmes on commercial channels started doing it (music and FX are more "exciting" loud than the dialogue, though they do compress the dialogue a bit, it's a wham bam overwhelm you thing). Then the BBC started doing it for programmes it wanted to truly compete with the commercial channels so that channel hoppers didn't think theirs were less exciting - less than 10% of the Doctor Who audience watch every episode, so you need to hold on to the casual viewer. Remember RTD banging on about beautiful lighting and colours hooking people in when they flick through the channels? Hoicking up the music level so it never dropped was also part of that plan. If you went from one channel ( ... )

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iriandia April 8 2010, 07:58:17 UTC
So basically, those appallingly loud ads that I always grab the remote and mute to prevent deafness - those are at the root of the problem?
Figures.

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morgaine_nicely April 7 2010, 09:53:42 UTC
i see yes :) i loved the music in doomsday but yes, mixing. i'd have to agree.

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anya_elizabeth April 7 2010, 11:47:16 UTC
This is really interesting. I knew it was still Murray Gold, which I'm glad about because I think he's awesome and I was looking forward to him making something a bit more interesting than the Who music has been recently, what with this new series being a lot like a reboot. So I was putting the nicer sound down to that a bit cos I know nothing about music aside from when I like it... but this makes sense. Cool!

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