animal-behavior on S Anand

Cats are fooled by HDTV

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Cats are fooled by HDTV. Our cat tends to ignore normal TV completely. Guess HDTV looks real enough.

Comments

Dhar 19 Jan 2006 2:29 pm: I see you have given Ender’s Game 5 stars. Have you read Dune? You might like that too.
S Anand 20 Jan 2006 11:59 am: I HAVE read Dune. Thought it was quite different, but I didn’t like it as much as Ender’s Game, though. I started off on Dragonlance, but gave up mid-way. Now I’m reading Terry Pratchett.
SP 23 Jan 2006 4:13 pm: For more than one reason, i dont like Terry Pratchett, though I have read a lot of his books.. Always feel he’s ripped off Tolkien. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Dune are all pretty good.
S Anand 23 Jan 2006 9:46 pm: Haven’t tried the Dark Tower series. Will give that a shot.
Dhar 24 Jan 2006 3:12 am: Errr… Pratchett’s books are a work of parody. I wouldn’t be too surprised to find passages which seem to be “lifted” out of works of Tolkien and others…
S Anand 24 Jan 2006 5:44 pm: Haven’t read enough to spot lifted passages… let me see I can spot them :-)
Dhar 25 Jan 2006 8:45 am: Check the Annotated Terry Pratchett file.

Dogs laugh

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Dogs laugh.

Sound effects

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:00:00 +0000

It’s interesting how Steven Spielberg created his sound effects in movies. For example, in Raiders of the Lost Ark,

Indy’s whip is the treated sound of a jet taking off; the punches in fist fights are the result of bashing leather jackets with baseball bats; and the rolling boulder rumble is a Honda station wagon coasting down a gravel road mixed with a rocket blast-off.

… or in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

… the bulk of E.T.’s utterances were delivered by Pat Welsh, a 65-year-old Marin County housewife. The sound designer, Ben Burtt, overheard her distinctive vocals in a camera store and cheekily asked the retured elocution teacher to remove her dentures and talk without her teeth. Convinved that her screechy voice was ideal for the role, Burtt paid her $350 to spend a day recording E.T.’s minimal dialogue. Subsequently her voice was enriched by watery textures.

… or in Jurassic Park

… many raptor screams were taken from dolphins recorded at Marine World. The call of the brachiosaurus came from both whale songs and donkey brays slowed down with added echo. The dilophosaurus had its sound broken into two types: for the early, playful spitter, Rudstrom employed a variety of swan calls; yet as it turns nasty, and egret sound is mixed with Rydstrom’s own voice (to add a sense of weight) to suggest venom. The rattling noice produced by an exotic insect doubled for the sound of the spitter’s vibrating cowl.

Yet the most complex-sounding character was the mighty tyrannosaurus. The vocal effects came from a diversity of sources – elephant, alligator, penguin, tiger and dog sounds – all mixed together to create a rich, naturalistic dinosaur vocabulary. Whale blowholes repeated into a regular rythm created tyrannosaurus breathing patterns. For his world-shattering road, a blast from a baby elephant created the high end of the frequency, while the low end was provided by alligator growls and tigher shrieks.

Comments

Dhar 29 Jun 2005 2:33 am: Anand, can you put up the link from where you got this info?
S Anand 29 Jun 2005 8:01 am: Typed it in from The Complete Spielberg
jayant 30 Jun 2005 4:14 am: Will not mobile theft be very high in London given this door security system? Guess they must have some other system too, like some door code other than pressing just 0…may be ppl dont do such things there…
jayant 30 Jun 2005 4:29 am: huh..had put something on mobile phone and door security…where did it disappear?
S Anand 30 Jun 2005 6:40 am: Mobile theft is pretty high, but not because of the door security system, I think. That’s only for new constructions, and they are not too common.

Dogs prefer Bach to Britney

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Dogs prefer Bach to Britney. So do I.

Meows of cats

Wed, 15 May 2002 12:00:00 +0000

A study on the meows of cats.