Oh. hey.

As I've said, the busiest times are the most interesting, but then there's no time to document it. I've waffled between slaughtered-with-projects and sleeping-over-ten-hours-daily for a while, with a fairly regular work schedule. Then the Survivor season ended and we finished that other show and things have been a little spotty and less consistent lately. Episodes deliver late, I cancel dinner plans, etc. etc.

But for as busy as I felt there, for a while, I can't think of much that happened. Predictable and boring heartache aside, the main thing that sticks out for me the last few months is that I realized that in American English, at the end of Zs and hard Ss, there's a short section of a soft S. I don't know why I never noticed before, but it kind of blew me away.

As you know, in addition to the more creative work of designing and editing sound effects, I (much more often) edit dialog. Sometimes this means cleaning up production sound in noisy environments, sometimes this means pacing out the sentences in interviews that have had content removed for more concise storytelling (removing ums or stutters, replacing pronouns with proper nouns, shifting sentences from the past tense into the present, etc), and sometimes this means editing voiceover to fit and play over action.

I was working on a 'wacky' series with two commentators who talked over each other fairly often and for the most part, fading one out as the other started speaking worked just fine, but in cases where they did a few takes of a section and changed up timing, sometimes a whole word or just a syllable at the end of one commentator's sentence would be masked by the other in one take, but not in another. i.e. you can hear Tom talking over the end of Jerry's line in Jerry's mic, but since the producers wanted to use a different take of the next line, we don't want to hear Tom start to talk, but we want Jerry to finish his line. Make sense? So in order to execute that, I have to find an acceptable substitute for the last few letters that Jerry was saying so his sentence ends cleanly. In the particular instance that I am talking about, the line ended with a hard S and I was having a difficult time finding a clean one in that episode. But as I mentioned, it turns out that in a hard S or a Z, after the vocalized part, there's a short voiceless part. Pure S. I figured I would try stealing a soft S (Ok let's get picky: a voiceless alveolar sibilant) and pasting it at the end. It sounded seamless and I added another tool to my toolbox!

And I do this stuff all the time. After a while you get notice that you can put in a long fade across a W and you won't hear it, you should always drop a short fade into the center-loudest point in a short I, etc, etc. You know that you can crossfade different Ss together and not hear it, paste a SH right before "He" and make it say "She" easily with some finessing, copy and paste "and" or "but" from somewhere else in the show etc, etc. But it was really nice to add another nugget of knowledge to that database and I was quite pleased.