Using Music
Music Tips!
‘Science is hard,’ people complain. Not compared to finding music to go with your SciCast film submission, it isn’t. We get more questions about music than almost anything else, so let me try to make some sense of your options.
Most obviously — and most obviously not an option, sadly — is ripping a track off your favourite chart CD and plastering that over your movie. Sorry, that’s straightforward copyright infringement, which the music industry seems to believe is a capital offence these days.
Your next option, if you’re in a school, is to use so-called ‘production music’. Many local authorities have a blanket arrangement with one of the music libraries — most often the brilliant Audionetwork — which allows full use of their vast archives in your school projects. Go online, audition some tracks, download the one you want, bung it in your movie — done. Right?
Er… no, sorry. See, the blanket deals cover you copying the music into your film, but they don’t cover subsequent publication. That part of the awkward music licensing waltz happens via the Performers’ Rights Society (PRS). To publish your film on SciCast we’d need to pre-buy download minutes from the PRS, and collect from you full track information including exact durations used. It’s not so much the monetary cost of doing this that worries us (it’s potentially expensive, but not as bad as we’d feared), it’s the amount of paperwork we’d all have to do that seems crippling.
Note, by the way, that if you’re publishing films using production music on your own school website, you’re very likely in a situation where you should be talking to the PRS too.
So you can’t use off-the-shelf music at all, right? Well, not quite. At SciCast we ask you to sign a Creative Commons publication license. This makes it clear to everyone (including us) what they can and can’t do with your film, but it also has some fringe benefits. Like: there’s a huge community of musicians releasing their work under the same licenses.
For the SciCast ‘Coming Soon’ clipsreel I used a track I found on the excellent site Jamendo. So long as you pick something with a compatible license (we’re using “attribution/non-commercial/share-alike”), you’re fine. Download a track you like, put it in your film, acknowledge the performer in your end credits, and you’re done. Other sites to explore include Magnatune, cc:Mixter, and OWL.
However, you’re still having to wrap your head around licenses, and sometimes you just want something you know you own yourself. Which means composing your own music. How?
Well, by this stage in the article Mac users will have launched Apple’s excellent Garageband (link) software, thrown some loops together, and finished scored their film themselves — which is exactly what I’ve done with films like this and this, and even this and this. So long as you use Apple’s loops in your own compositions rather than just on their own, the music you make is yours to do with as you wish. Hooray!
Windows users, then, need an equivalent to Garageband. As ever there’s a plethora of choice and no clear winner. Abelton’s Live 6 LE has a strong following but looks more geared to live performances than the clueless-but-effective mucking around with loops favoured by the likes of me. For the latter, Sony’s Acid XMC is almost impossible to find out more about, but looks good if you can work out how to buy it.
Worth a quick look are Magix Music Maker (now in version 14, I think) and eJay’s plethora of choice in their various products. Search around and you’ll find very mixed reviews for all these, but at least they’re all fairly cheap.
Closest to Garageband, however, looks to be Steinberg’s brand new Sequel. I had horrible problems with the downloadable demo (couldn’t find any of its own loops on my Mac; plain didn’t run on my PC), but reviews around the web are extremely positive.
It sounds like there might at last be a Windows equivalent of Garageband, so get composing. Heck, if this tuneless physicist can do it, anyone can. The trick, of course, is that peoples’ attention is on your film: your music helps set a tone, but nobody’s actually listening to it. So — luckily for me — ‘rough as boots’ is more than good enough.