Gettin' Cozy with Jonathan Mitchell

"...when I just saw myself as a musician, I was very dissatisfied."

"Fecund" comes to mind when describing freelance producer Jonathan Mitchell. He's created more than 200 features, and reviews here and elsewhere comment on their high quality. Jon's work can be heard on Studio 360, Weekend America, Marketplace, Radio Lab, Living on Earth, The Next Big Thing, and All Things Considered, to name a few.

PRX talked with him about production techniques, Frank Zappa, and homoerotic public radio pieces that will never get aired.

PRX:
Are you a musician or a radio producer first, and how does each role inform the other?

Jonathan:
I'd like to think of myself as myself first, and let other people decide what to call it. I studied music composition in college and grew up in a very musical household, so to the extent that that informs my work, that's how musical it is.

During the times of my life when I just saw myself as a musician, I was very dissatisfied. I've always been equally interested in theater and film. And I like making both documentaries and fiction, and I like doing comedy and weird little art projects too. I love sound and exploring the nature of sound, and I also like interviewing really interesting people and learning about new things from them. Radio has given me opportunities to explore most of those interests. It's a good combination for me.


In reality, Jonathan is not nearly this fuzzy.

PRX:
It's said all artists suffer for their art. Is that true for you when it comes to making radio?

Jonathan:
I don't really like to think about how hard something is, I like to think about making a good piece and what that means to me. I usually forget about all the work involved after it's done. It's more painful for me to go back and hear something I did that I don't like, than it is for me to actually go through the work to bring it to a level where I might be satisfied with the results.

PRX:
Talk about Frank Zappa's influence on your work.

Jonathan:
Frank Zappa was one of the first musicians I heard who really used the recording studio as an instrument, not just as a way of capturing sound, but capable of it's own unique forms of expression. I think the simplicity of the tools Zappa was using at that time made it easier for me to hear how he was using the studio in really clever and effective ways. I also liked how he built momentum with editing. And most of all, I think I identified with his indiscriminate passion for cool sounds.

Other people whose work had a big influence on me early on include: Glenn Gould, The Beatles, Robert Ashley, Negativeland, Iannis Xenakis, Pink Floyd, Edgar Varese, The Police, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Gyorgy Ligeti, Randy Newman. And I learned the recording studio from Scott Wyatt at the University of Illinois, who taught me a lot of what I know about the potential of recordings.

PRX:
A number of pieces you've made involve taking out-of-context quotes from different characters and splicing them together, such as "Buster and Spongebob in Love", "Terminally Blonde", and "The Sopranos and the West Wing." The voices sound natural, despite being in completely different ambient environments. What kind of production trickery do you employ to make those sound so good?

Jonathan:
There are a couple of things going on there. The most important to me is the timing between the clips. It's really challenging to get just right. To make it sound like a real conversation, you really have to put yourself in the place of the character.

It's always easier to do this if there's no music scoring the scene, so I try to work mostly with unscored dialogue. If that's what I've got, then I always try to edit in some room tone before and after each line of dialogue. (Usually there's some long pause in the scene that I can loop and use as room tone.) But sometimes there's a really great line that you really want to use that's over music. In these cases, I try to find portions of music from somewhere else in the film or tv show that I can edit into and out of the music that's mixed under the dialogue. Making it sound just right can get complex, and many situations are unique. I try to start by getting a firm understanding of what my options are (given the material I have available), and going from there.


Jonathan's ProTools session from City X. (Click for a larger view.)

Also, I like to find environments (like an office ambiance, or a great forest sound etc.) from other scenes and layer them in, to create a sense of overall continuity in the scene. Music can do this kind of thing, too.

PRX:
How did you end up working for the (role playing software characters] Sims, and what served as inspiration for the audio you produced for them?

Jonathan:
A couple friends of mine from grad school ended up working for (software ganme company) Maxis. I did some freelance editing stuff for them one summer, and they had these commercial things they needed done, so I did them. In the game, when your character turns on the TV, you hear the sounds of the TV, and one of the elements in the TV sounds is these fake commercials I did.

I modeled them after actual commercials I recorded off the TV. Because the Sims use a gibberish language, the commercials I did couldn't rely on language to convey information. The product they were advertising needed to be apparent based on just the sound. I found that a lot of making it work had to do with the way the announcer uses his or her voice, (as well as the voice's overall timbre, and the kind of music used to underscore it.)

There are certain cliches you hear all the time in advertising, so I tried to play off of those, like the way oil companies always use heartwarming music when they're showing you how much they care, or the way you hear a doorbell at the beginning of a pizza delivery commercial, or the way movie trailers sound like movie trailers. It was fun.

© 2005, The Public Radio Exchange