sound

The whole track for "Mother Liquor". It registers as the film stage sound (order 50) and is loaded by scenes/main.scene; nothing consumes it directly, and it reads demo/stages/light for the frames the tubes die on.

The room is small and hard, so its tone is its own axial modes rather than a hiss. Over that sit the practicals, each placed at the mark the thing itself stands on so the mix is made by where the camera is: a failing ballast humming on 100 Hz mains at each tube, the extract fan, the bunsen's roar, the stirrer's whine, and the burette dosing the flask every two and a half seconds through Act I.

Two events carry it. At shot 5 each ballast hum stops with its own lamp, in the same frame, off the light stage's own numbers — and what is left is a room with a fan in it. At shot 12 the camera goes under the liquid and the room is replaced by a second recording of itself with everything above ~300 Hz taken out; a low-passed room is a different sound, not a quieter one, so it is a crossfade between two beds rather than a fader. The frame that happens on is read from shot 12 itself — the frame the camera's height crosses Film.MARKS.meniscus — so it moves if the shot is re-staged.

The score is four beds, one per act, crossfaded between two decks so an act change is a dissolve. Three mixer channels move as wholes: room, under and music.

Every cue is a film time, so the track lines up with the picture whatever rate the engine runs at. The AudioListener is on the FilmCamera and is authored by the scene skeleton; this stage adds no second listener.