Inside The Mix With Ana Monte And Daniel Deboy posted: 20/03/2020 NUGEN Audio Q&A with DELTA Soundworks Co-Founders
Q: Tell me about the company. What inspired you both to start Delta Soundworks?
Ana: Founded by myself (Ana Monte, lead sound designer) and Daniel (Deboy, lead sound engineer) in Heidelberg, Germany in 2016, DELTA Soundworks is a 3D/immersive audio post-production facility. Our projects span across installations, virtual reality, 360-degree films and gaming, as well as feature films, documentaries, TV shows and commercials, and more. Our team consists of a highly skilled and creative group of production sound mixers, recording engineers, sound designers, foley artists, composers and music producers.
DELTA Soundworks grew from the combination of my creative background in film sound design and Daniel's high-level understanding of the science of sound. I studied music industry and technology at California State University, Chico, and I earned my master's degree in film sound and sound design at the Film Academy Baden-W rttemberg, here in Germany. Daniel is graduate of the Graz University of Technology, where he focused his studies on 3D audio and music production. He was honored with a Student Award from DEGA, the German Acoustical Society, for his research in the field of 3D sound reproduction. He has also received gold, silver and bronze awards from the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for his music recordings.
Q: Do you have any favorite or notable projects of which you are really proud?
Ana: Too many to remember! My favorite project, so far, has been the Stanford Virtual Heart, which is a project we were able to work on because of a very happy coincidence. We attended this large IT/computer expo here in Germany and these two guys, the two Davids [Axelrod (MD) and Sarno, Stanford Virtual Heart creators] as we call them, were there with a prototype for their virtual cardiac training system. It helps not only medical students, but also families of children with heart defects to learn the various signs and complications associated with various conditions. A user can put the virtual reality glasses on and use the technology to [virtually] touch' the heart, open it and see the different sections, understand where the condition lives, etc.
Recognizing that diagnosing a heart condition is based largely on listening to the way it beats, they wanted to make it possible for people, especially med students, to hear what each condition sounds like from inside the heart. So, for our contribution to the project, we recorded and edited the auditory components of 14 of the most common heart conditions. We learned a lot about the different patterns and rhythms of 14 different infant/newborn heart problems. From a production standpoint, the project was very straightforward, but the sound design for this project was very interesting. In addition to the standard, mono source recordings of a heart directly in front of a person, we also had to transport' people inside the heart. We had to provide a perspective that essentially gave the illusion that each piece of the heart is surrounding the user, with the sound of each section coming from a specific direction. Since it would be very difficult to place a microphone directly into the beating heart of an infant, we had to take a very different approach to capture sound. Dr. Axelrod provided us with a database of pre-recorded heartbeat sounds, which we then used to analyze the sound and frequencies of the conditions to reconstruct the sound from scratch. We were able to accomplish it all with synthesizers and other recording techniques. It was an incredible experience.
Q: What other types of projects have you guys worked on? Beyond the virtual heart project?
Daniel: I think our biggest current project is working for The Science Dome at the Experimenta, a massive science center in Heilbronn, Germany. It's a 360-degree theater with a 360-degree projection system and a 29-channel audio system, which is not standard. We create the entire sound production for all the theater's in-house shows. For one of the productions, our composer Jasmin Reuter wrote a beautiful score, which we recorded with a chamber orchestra. It included a lot of sound design elements, like rally cars. We put all these pieces together and finally mixed them in a 3D format. It was a great ride for us, and I think it really hit on everyone's core competencies.
Ana: The Science Dome has a very unique format. Its not a standard planetarium, where everyone is looking up and to the middle, but rather a mixture of theater plus planetarium, wherein people look in front, above and behind. For example, there's a children's show with pirates who travel to the moon. They begin in the ocean with space projected above them, and the whole video rotates 180-degrees around the audience. It's a very cool format and something that is pretty unique, not only in Europe, but globally. The partnership with the Experimenta is very important for us because they do their own productions and eventually they might license it to other planetariums.
Q: With such a wide array of projects and requirements, tell us about your working style and your workflow.
Daniel: Something very unique to DELTA is that we are able to quickly and easily adjust to different workflows because we know, or at least love to be, at the edge of what's possible. We are always happy to take on new and interesting projects, try out new workflows and design, and look at up-and-coming techniques. I think that's kind of a unique selling point for us. We are way more flexible than a typical post-production house would be, and that includes our work for cinema sound production.
Q: What NUGEN software do you use and how does it incorporate into your workflow?
Daniel: We have ha
