Sound Advice: Doin' the Bump

In the broadcast world, they call it "dead air" -- that awkward silence between content where you wonder if the engineer took an extended coffee break or the station went off the air. In video production, we use bumper music, segues and other audio trickery to eliminate that uncomfortable feeling in our creations. Certainly, there is a time for a discomforting absence of sound and it can be used to great effect under the right circumstances. However, most videos could use a bit of a bump, so to speak, to keep things moving and retain our viewer's attention. In this month's Sound Advice, we'll look at some musical production tricks to keep your video bumpin'.

Television as Teacher

Anyone who has seen Seinfeld has heard bumper music. In the case of this particular show, the producers took the theme music and created little snippets of the signature bass guitar to move the program from scene to scene. It worked so well that they used the same set of bumper music through the entire run of the series. Of course, many other television shows use the same methods, but few are as easily recognized. Talk radio uses similar techniques to get in and out of commercial breaks and each show has its own special music for that purpose. So, if the big boys use bumpers, why shouldn't you?

The audio production world has an entire library of music-related terms. Two with similarities to our bumper music are segues and stingers. A segue is very much like bumper music with one difference: while bumpers are often complete musical thoughts, segues often fade up to fill the emptiness, then fade out when they are no longer needed. Stingers are short pieces that have a definite, satisfying ending -- a musical way of saying the video is finished now, and you can go home. The next time you watch TV, listen closely to how the various shows -- from news to sitcoms -- use bumpers, segues and stingers. They're all over the place and you can use them to achieve the same …