The vast majority of people have never heard the names Vienna Symphonic Library, East-West Quantum Leap, Gary Garritan, Sonic Implants . But it is extremely likely that they have heard their products while watching a TV documentary, commercial, or sitting in a movie theater. These are namely some of the cutting-edge companies and brand names in a fairly new and highly competitive market in the modern music industry: virtual orchestral music production using software applications on modern PC or Apple computers.
Today they are so commonly existing and integrated into our society that one hears them everywhere, and with such high quality that even highly trained ears might not even realize that it is a virtual orchestra they are hearing.
"There are practically no technical limits anymore to how composers can realize their musical pictures. Today even composers in the realm of the so-called 'high arts' who were reluctant to use computers because of the poor outcome of conventional synthesizers or samples take the plunge and start to use sample libraries," says Herb Tucmandl, founder of Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL), one of the most successful virtual orchestral developers. He continues, "Now it makes sense to try out several different arrangements and listen to how it sounds. All of the sounds are available, even from lesser-known instruments, and they are authentic."
Samples and Technology
This is how it works: Notes and phrases of single instruments in the symphony orchestra, as well as the sounds of complete instrument groups ("sections" or "ensembles"), are performed by classical musicians in all possible playing styles and expressions, and recorded, edited and mastered by professional audio staff.
The collection of the recorded instruments (each recorded note and playing style is called a "sample" - see below) are then arranged into libraries that the user can purchase in the form of CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs, copy them over to big hard drives, load into his or her computer and then compose and arrange with the aid of a electronic MIDI keyboard (2) and sequencer software (3).
The technology has developed closely with the development of the computer industry and electronic music instruments (e.g. synthesizers). The term "sound sample" came about in the 1980s when technology started to allow sound to be recorded digitally. Instead of recording the way one would with an analog magnetic tape recorder, digital sound recording takes thousands of continuous snapshots ("samples") per second of the audio source. The more of these samples per second, the higher the audio quality will be (the same technology is used when you record audio on your PC or on your mobile phone).
In the 1980s, music instrument samples were recorded and played back by expensive digital hardware units ("samplers") that were connected to an electronic MIDI keyboard, which could play back different pitches of the instrument. Compositions, with the help of special software (sequencers), could be recorded in a computer.
"At that time, the common samplers couldn't hold much more than 4 or 5 sampled notes in the memory per machine," says Christian Kardeis, a professional user of orchestral libraries in Vienna who has composed music with the help of computers and sampled sounds since the beginning of the 1990s.
So to produce something that sounded remotely similar to a real symphonic orchestra ten years ago, you would need to spend at the very least $20,000 to $30,000 for a bunch of hardware samplers that could cover the different instruments of the orchestra - though with substantial limitations.
As personal computers got cheaper and faster during the 1990s, with bigger data storage possibilities, a number of companies came up with the idea of placing all the sounds on ordinary PC or Mac hard drives and let the computer act as a sampler (using specially developed software - sampler engines), skipping the earlier hardware boxes.
Virtual Orchestras Have Changed the Way Soundtracks Are Being Made
Computers have left a mark in almost every field, including entertainment. Through blockbuster movies like Lord of the Rings , Matrix and Harry Potter , we are all familiar with what can be done with computers in terms of special effects. But less familiar to many of us is how composers are using the latest computer technology to assist them.
Even though big-budget movies, mainly from Hollywood, still mostly use real orchestras for their symphonic soundtracks (and few people, including the sample developers themselves, would probably want to change that as nothing can beat the real thing), famous movie composers like Howard Shore, James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer and many others use the virtual orchestras extensively to compose and to work with their compositions in the early stages of a movie project. These renditions are then presented to the movie director and producer, whereby it becomes possible for them to hear the orchestral cues in their fullness without the need to hire a whole orchestra. This should be compared to the old times when the director had to be satisfied with listening to a piano. The modern technology has made it possible for film and television composers to quickly adjust the music according to the wishes of their clients and to make changes very late in the production process.
And even if composers follow the traditional school of composing with a piano, scoring paper and pencil, the whole media industry has turned into a largely digital working environment, which is why even the traditionalists these days have to hire assistants to do the computer work for them.
But even in the soundtracks of blockbuster movies, it is quite common to mix in sampled instruments to achieve certain desired effects, which is not possible with purely live instruments.
The composer Hans Zimmer ( Gladiator, The Lion King, Pirates of The Caribbean, Batman Begins and many more) is one of the Hollywood composers that is most renowned for this combination of real orchestras with sampled instruments to achieve that dramatic, bombastic feeling often sought after in action and adventure movie soundtracks. In his studio, Zimmer has reportedly something like 14 GigaStudio PC machines connected to each other that store musical instruments and that can be used to simulate an entire symphonic orchestra in real-time.
Once one come to the level under the bigger Hollywood productions though, one will find that soundtracks utilize mostly sampled instruments, combined maybe with a number of real players, or only some real solo instruments or vocalists when the budget is more limited. And when it comes to background music in TV programs and commercials, the balance is often around 10 percent live instruments and 90 percent digitally sampled instruments.
New Possibilities for Young Composers
One other effect of this technological development is that it has opened up the field for new and skilled composers to present their works with realistic reproductions of a symphonic orchestra.
"Without this technology, I would probably not even had started," says Oliver Wallner, a semi-professional user with formal music training in Vienna and orchestration education in L.A., who is composing music for commercials and companies from his home studio in Vienna. Like many other aspiring composers for different media, he cannot live completely on his music yet, although he already has done a number of professional projects - and he seems to like it a lot.
I also met Christian Kardeis in his Vienna studio, equipped with a Power Mac G5, a number of GigaStudio PC's (4), lots of hardware boxes, a huge mixer table and a big flat screen to show his work to clients. Kardeis comes from a music family, and started to play the piano when he was six. The desire to become a composer came quite early in life, and he later received a classical music education in Vienna.
"You have to know computers really well to utilize them for orchestral music production," he says, "but most of the young generation grew up with computers and have no problem with this."
Technological Take-over or Co-existence?
EW/QL Symphonic Orchestra Demos
SI Complete Symphonic Collection Demos
Garritan Personal Orchestra Demos
What are the consequences of the development, whereas music traditionally made by classical symphony orchestras now, in some cases, can be emulated with computers? With regard to his high-end sample libraries often used in media productions, I asked Tucmandl if there is a risk that classical orchestras and musicians lose jobs because high-quality orchestral samples are now available for composers and that film studio companies can save money by avoiding using real players:
"I think this trend already happened before the Vienna Symphonic Library was released," says Tucmandl. He continues, "In Europe nearly no classical orchestra musician makes a living from studio jobs. It is similar to a development 20 years ago: with the appearance of drum computers the situation of drummers changed, but there are still a lot of drummers around. Technology changes the way we produce music, as well as it changed the way drummers play nowadays."
In Los Angeles the situation seems to be an exception though, being the heart of the global, highly Americanized, movie and television industry. Here, even some TV series still have such big budgets that real symphony orchestras are exclusively used for the background music, which gives the daily bread to relatively many classical musicians.
According to one source, the orchestras in L.A. fear development in which the budgets of each TV series are squeezed down and more and more virtual orchestras are being used instead.
So, of course, the world we live in today is different from that of the 1940s, when orchestras did not have any competition. But people who enjoy classical music will surely still continue to buy classical CDs and go to concerts, and real orchestras will continue to be used in big movies. Virtual orchestral music production has mainly found its place in the busy media industry, with limited budgets and production times (e.g. commercials, TV series, documentaries, movies), and as a tool for composers to realize their ideas.
Technological Challenge vs. Creative Freedom
Oliver Wallner mentions the challenges of working with sample libraries on computers: "One thing is that you are restricted by the samples. You always have to compose a bit after the samples, and not exactly as you want it. This is different from how composers like John Williams can work, first with piano and pen, and then with real musicians and orchestras. But it's getting better and better."
Another thing that virtual orchestral composers regularly bring up is the time they need to spend to get everything working with the computer set-up: "You get it to work for a few months and then you change some configurations, and all of a sudden nothing works. Oftentimes, I need to sit a long time to get it to work," says Wallner.
But even though the virtual composers nowadays also have to be technological experts of sorts, probably few of them would want to be without this technology that has given them huge creative freedom in realizing whole orchestral compositions. It is now possible to be the composer, the "conductor", and each "musician" in a big orchestra in ones own living room, if one so desire. And no matter whether the music is played by a real orchestra or an orchestral sample library, nothing can take away the fact that genuine musical skills are necessary to produce high-quality orchestral music.
Kardeis tells how the knowledge of each instrument is essential: "You have to be the horn player, you have to be the first violinist, you have to shape every note like the real player would. The more you put into the making of a piece, the more the listener can take the piece to his or her heart."
The sample libraries are actually sounding "too perfect" compared to the real thing. In the real world, musicians inevitably play small errors in a live performance. Humans are not perfect, and it is also the human factor and individuality that makes music come alive by the players Furthermore, it is impossible to record all of the unique variations which a real musician play.
Because of the nature of present sample libraries, Kardeis, Wallner and many other composers therefore use several methods and tricks to make it sound more human and live, of which one is to sometimes slightly detune notes in musical passages.
Although there might be different opinions about the use of more and more technology to produce orchestral music once reserved only for the large classical orchestras, there is actually one interesting phenomenon that I have discovered during the research for this article: With the popularity of the virtual orchestras among young musicians who want to build a career in composing – some maybe inspired by great symphonic soundtracks like John Williams' Star Wars while growing up – it seems that these orchestral libraries and their user communities somehow have succeeded in promoting classical music from the old masters (such as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart) to a part of the young generation who does not come from a classical music background.
To me, this tells something about the power of quality music of the past and its timelessness.
Developing an orchestral sample library of higher quality is no small affair either, and comes with a lot of challenges. The work of recording only one instrument can take as much as one year.
"The most important thing is to keep consistency in the sound and performance quality over such a long time period," says Tucmandl. "It is absolutely necessary to record the same musician on the same instrument through all recording sessions. Furthermore, you have to install a consistent system of sample editing procedures as well as several levels of quality control in order to guarantee that eventually, e.g., a legato sample, which was recorded one year earlier, blends well into a recently recorded sustained note in the user's arrangement."
Tradition and Future
The developers don't like to rest. One of the most recent technological developments within virtual orchestral music production is so-called "sonic morphing technology" (led by Gary Garritan), which means that sound samples of different timbres of an instrument are aligned so that they can flow into each other seamlessly, creating even more realistic virtual instruments. Other prioritized fields for the developers are creating more realistic ambience (reverb) that nowadays actually are real recordings of the acoustics in real concert halls, as well as developing more realistic symphonic choirs to accompany the orchestra. The founder of VSL, Tucmandl, has this to say about the development:
"Hopefully the interfaces will be easier to use and more powerful hardware will be developed. I hope it will soon be possible to work with a big sized virtual orchestra on an ordinary laptop without worrying."
Surely many composers share that wish.
In the end, no matter if the music is produced with a virtual orchestra, a piano or a violin, and no matter how much the technology develops, it still comes back to traditional knowledge, training and the heart to be able to compose music that will touch people, elevate people's souls, and help us in contemplating the world and the self.
Anders Mahlen is a freelance writer based in Vienna, Austria.
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(1) Sampler – either a hardware unit or software application capable of recording (sample) sound sources and playing back recorded audio files, most often recorded instruments and sound effects.
(2) MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) - A music industry standard communication protocol that lets electronic instruments and computers running sequencer software "talk" to each other to play and record music.
(3) Sequencer – a type of digital recorder, nowdays mostly a software application in a PC or Apple computer, but also available as specialized hardware units. Can often record and combine both MIDI data and audio inputs.
(4) GigaStudio – One of the most famous software samplers. Used by many professionals in the music industry.
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