Sound Design Themes and Goals

I've written several posts now about learning and practising sound design.  When it comes to practicing, you could just sit down and experiment until you come-up with something that you think is good.  Although this is likely to be a very creative process, unfortunately it is not the way that most sound designers really work.  Sound Designers will generally work from a script or brief, and will only experiment with specific goals to achieve.  This being the case, a good way to practice your craft is to set yourself specific goals for your practice projects.  These should include aesthetic goals as well as technical requirements.  This will allow you to be much more focused in your practising and is more like how you will have to work in the real world.

First decide what kind of project you are going to do: music, soundscape or soundtrack.  (As mentioned previously, if you want to get into sound design for moving image, take a video clip (film, TV or game) and remove the original soundtrack).  Then set yourself a "theme" for your sound.  For visual based content this will be partially defined by the images, but still think about what you want to achieve with the sound and formally define your "theme".  (Remember you can give the visuals a completely different feel with different sound.)  For music or soundscape projects the definition of a theme is even more important and it will give you a clear remit within which to work.  Just to give you a few examples: Summer Rain, City Streets, Jupiter's Moons, Apathy, Sea Breeze, etc.  You get the idea.

Having defined the theme for the project, next you should think about the main, over arching aesthetic/style/genre goals that you want to achieve.  These will inform how you go about all stages of the sound design process and what you are trying to accomplish.  Try and keep this short and succinct, using only three or four descriptive words.  So for something like the Transformers movies it may be something like: powerful, bold, dynamic and clean.  Although movies will have other sound styles in them at different points, these are the overall goals that set the mood of the final piece.   These would be completely different for other projects, but should always define the sound design direction.  Added or combined with this should be the aesthetic goals.  You will have much more influence over the aesthetics if you have full control over the project.  Having said that, at least think about whether you want the impact of your sound to be overt, subtle or subconscious.  This will at least give you a level to aim your sound at.

Once you have defined the main goals for the project it is then time to dig down into the piece and define what you are trying to achieve with each scene, act, movement, section, etc., of the project.  Again this will depend on the type of sound design project you are working on, but think about things like the message you are trying to convey, emotion and listening modes.  It is at this point that you can start thinking about particular sound design techniques that you want to use.  For example, Sound Narrative, Stylistic, Realistic, Hyper-Realism, Empathetic, Synchresis, Anthropomorphism, Leitmotif, Vectorisation, Temporal Linearisation, Counterpoint, Musique Concrète, Contrapuntal Music, etc.  Think of these definitions as a skeleton or framework on which you will hang your sound design.

Finally, you need to define some technical specifications for the project.  If you want to work as a professional you will always have to make sure your work meets the technical requirements defined by the initiator of the project.  Again, some of these will be define for you if you are working with image, but think about things like levels, format, spatialisation, duration, etc.

When you have defined all of these, it is then time to start practising your sound design.  Remember at all stages of the project to reference the definitions and ensure they are being met.  Be critical of yourself as in the real world this will be done by someone else and just because you created something, it does not by default mean it is great!

Doing all of this will give you a more realistic way to practice, you will create content for your showreel and you should be able to clearly explain what you were tying to achieve in the sound design.

Train Your Ears

Following on from my previous post on practicing sound design (http://sound-sculpting.blogspot.com/2011/07/practice-makes-prefect.html), another aspect that should be taken into account is developing "critical listening" skills.  Again these will take time and practice to develop and will not just happen over night.  For a newbie I would recommend taking a reference track, which could be music, soundscape or soundtrack and first listen to it as a "whole".  Then listen back to it and in your "minds ear" try to isolate one particular sound element.  The human auditory system as actually very good at this and with a bit of practice it is actual fairly easy to do.  When you have an element isolated see if you can work out its attributes: pitch, duration, timber, loudness harmonics, rhythm, envelop, textures, speed, frequency, length, panorama, intensity, dimension, interest, balance, etc.  Write down your findings so you can refer to them later.  When you have fully characterised the sound, move on to the next one, until you have decomposed the whole track.  Writing down the characteristics will help you when moving on to other sound elements as you can refer to what you have written and sometimes you may find that you will want to modify what you have previously written in-light of the sound element you have just listened to.  When completed it is really important that you listen back to track and listen to it again as a "whole" so you can hear all the elements together.  This is a vital process as it is so easy to design a number of great sound elements, but when they are put together they do not "gel".  This is often best done with fresh ears, after a period of rest so that you are not suffering from listening fatigue.  The more you go through this process the better you will get and the more your ears will be able to identify subtle sound elements that may have been hidden before.  It is my suggestion that over a few weeks you do this for 20-30 reference tracks.  Then when you reach a point that it starts to become easy, go back to your first reference track and listen back to it and evaluate the notes you wrote.  How did you do?  Can you pick-out things now that you missed before?  If you can, your ears are getting better so work back through all your previous reference tracks and see if your evaluations have changed.  It should also be noted that this practice should be kept up.  Even when you get really good at it, still analyse audio content that you listen to, especially your own sound design! 

As well as training your ears on reference tracks you will also need to train your ears on the kind of audio processing you are likely to want to use.  This could be done by simply using a DAW with some audio content and just listening to the effect of changes you make, say to EQ settings or any other form of processing.  However, in my opinion some form of "testing" will yield better results.  There are web-sites and apps available that have been specifically designed for the testing of critical listening skills.  I have not reviewed all of these and I'm sure there are some other good critical listening testing solutions.  However, I would recommend the book, Audio Production and Critical Listening: Technical Ear Training by Jason Corey (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Audio-Production-Critical-Listening-Technical/dp/0240812956).  This is a great text and comes with an app that compliments the contents of the book and allows you to test your audio production skills.

A final area of useful training is the identification of audio "problems".  For this I recommend you take an audio track and apply processing to it to generate as many audio problems as you can think of.  Here are a few to get you started: over-compression, poor EQ, clipping, quantisation noise, reduced bandwidth, stereo width too wide or narrow, poor spatial impression, etc.  Bounce out several examples of each with different settings and name each file to correspond with the particular issue and the settings used.  Listen to the original audio and then playback the bounced files in a random order and see if you can identify the issue and settings used in each.  This will work even better if you have a friend that can generate the files for you so that you are listening to them fresh.  You could then return the favour.

Suffice to say, the more you practice listening, the better you will get at it.  This time and effort will then pay you back in your sound design and the more you design sounds the better your ears will get.

David Sonnenschein Blog Posts

Apologies for not writing very much lately.  I currently have so many on-going projects, I'm struggling to find the time to write-up the many ideas I have in my head.  I promise to write up some of my post ideas as soon as I have a bit of free time.  In the mean time I have just discovered a blog series by David Sonnenschein that considers using sound effects in sound design.  Worth a read if you are new to the field:

http://www.prosoundeffects.com/blog/category/david-sonnenschein/

I'd also strongly recommend checking out David's book - Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema.

What Isn’t Sound Design?

I've just come acorss this blog post with the title "What Isn’t Sound Design?": http://altdevblogaday.com/2011/12/13/what-isnt-sound-design/

Although this post is specific to Sound Design for Games, much of the content is the same for all areas of sound design.  In addition, much of the sentiment of this article is "right on the money" and it also nicely complements some of my earlier posts.

Practice Makes Prefect

No matter what discipline you want to be good at: athletics, writing, singing, sound design, etc., then you will need to practice.   Contrary to popular opinion, natural ability will only get you so far!!!  No one gets to the top of their game on talent alone.  David Beckham, Michael Schumacher, Whitney Houston, Eric Clapton, Ben Burtt - all had to practice their craft.  Becoming a Sound Designer is no different - you will have to practice.  This will do two things: first it will let you hone your technical skills and second it will allow you to train your creative skills and ears.  In other words, the "how" and the "why" of sound design.  So you need to practice generating, synthesising recording and manipulating sounds.  Then practice some more.  Practice, practice, practice!!!!

How you practice will depend on the kind of sound design that you are interested in.  If you want to be a synth programmer then practice creating patches on a broad variety of synthesizers and samplers.  (Do not ignore the manipulation of acoustic sounds.  Working with real sounds is invaluable for learning "how sound works" - an important aspect of being a sound designer.)   Then once the patches have been created, integrate them into productions of some description.  These could be musical compositions, soundscapes, sound sculptures or preferable a mixture of all three.  These productions will give you practice of not only creating sounds, but will also demonstrate how the patches could be used.  This is vital knowledge and will greatly improve your sound design skills.

If on the other hand you want to get into sound design for moving images then take a video clip (film, TV or game), remove the soundtrack and create your own.  Again, not only create the sounds, but integrate them as a new soundtrack so that even if you don't want to work as a sound editor you will be fully aware of the whole post-production process.  You could even practice being a Foley artist.

Not only will these productions be invaluable practice, but they will give you a portfolio of work to show potential clients.  This is always useful as it will allow you to actually demonstrate what you can do across the entire production process.  What is more, as you will have full creative control over the productions it should be a fun and inspiring experience!  So if you are starting along the path towards a career in sound design, then get practicing.

Sound Design: To Tweet or Not To Tweet

Now this post might be a bit off topic, but if I'm honest I've never really understood the point of Twitter in any context.  Why would someone want to hear sound bites from me?  Why do I want to hear from others?  For me, what is the benefit?  It is going to cost me time and effort.  Important news is almost instantly lost in a timeline that continually updated.  People seem to tweet so often it just becomes noise (when I hear noise, I just want to process it into something interesting).

However, while on the Social Sound Design site (http://socialsounddesign.com/) the other day, someone asked which sound designers tweet.  To be honest I was amazed at the response.  Within a very short space of time several pages had been filled by fellow sound designers, not only saying they used it, but strongly singing its virtues.  So convincing was it, I started to wonder if I was missing out on something?  Is there more to tweeting than I realised?

At about the same time, on a forum I'd posted details of this blog, someone expressed their frustration that they could not follow the blog without having a Google account.  It struck me that Twitter might give me an opportunity to keep interested parties updated about content on the blog.  So off to Twitter I went and setup a @SoundSculpting account and I followed all the sound designers that had left their usernames on the Social Sound Design post.  This instantly put me in direct contact with other like minded people working in the same field.  Now I'm not saying I'm a complete convert (there is still a fair bit of noise - some of these people need to spend more time working and less time browsing), but I'm starting to see the benefit.  As I've just said, I have instant access to the sound design community.  This means I'm now getting updates of articles, job opportunities, new tools, projects others are working on and just general sound related musings.  This can be important for two reasons: first if you are new to the field and are an aspiring Sound Designer then it is a good way to build-up contacts and find out what others that already work in the area do.  Second, if you are already working in the field and tend to work with the same people, it is easy to become very insular.  Talking to others in the field gives the "cross-fertilization" that can be so vital in getting the creative juices flowing.  Find out what others are doing, how they are doing it and why they are doing it.  This can be a truly liberating experience and even if you have years of experience, you may learn something new.  You are never too old to learn.

Now as you may have noticed I have added a Twitter follow button to this blog.  If you want to be kept up-to-date with the blog and what I'm working on, then press the button.  Now I'm really keen that I don't just end up generate needless noise, however I will tweet about updates to this blog and other sound design related stuff that I think will be of interest to blog followers.  Equally if you have comments or sound design items I might be interested in then I look forward to hearing from you.

Leave Presets Behind

If you are going to "make it" as a sound designer then you have to be prepared to leave presets behind. This can be a daunting prospect, especially when you are fairly new to sound design, but in my view it is a necessary step.  When you are starting, think of your synthesizer or audio effect as a "system", what an engineer will call a "black box".  The system will have some input information that it will processed in some way, in order to generate some output.  In this area the inputs and outputs will probably be with audio or MIDI information.

Then research the operation of this particular "type" of system.  For example, if it is a delay effect then learn "how" delay effects work or if it is a subtractive synthesizer then learn "how" they work and their basic operation.  Although you can do sound design purely by ear, in my experience if you learn and understand the lower level technology it will give you more possibilities and when you combine this with your ears, you'll have a lot more flexibility and potential.

Next look up the exact operation of the system that you have.  It may sound obvious, but the best source of information is the manual.  Now believe me, I don't advercate reading the manual from cover to cover, but keep it close at hand for when you are unsure of something.  Manuals will tell you exactly what the system will do and will generally also explain how the system performs its operation (if you are lucky it will also contain a fair bit of background information).  I have to confess that I do find it frustrating when I am asked questions that clearly tell me that the manual has not been consulted, hence RTFM. (Look this up if you don't know what it means.)

As you gain experience with a particular type of effect or synthesizer you'll find that you will start to understand what the controls do, without having to consult the manual continually.  Having said that, when I pickup a new effect or particularly an advanced synthesizer I always tend to lookout for a "block diagram".  This will show the "signal flow" within the system and the connection of the systems sub-components.  In other words, it is what is inside the black box.  This for me is a vital asset in understanding the intricacies of the sound design possibilities that the system gives.  Block diagrams come in many different guises, from being a written description and/or a drawing in manual:

They might be given as a representation on the front of the device (hardware or software):

Through to a routing matrix that allows the user the modify elements of the systems interconnections:

These combined with my understanding of the operation of each block, helps me workout how my sounds can be generated and/or affected.  I can then use my ears to refine what is created.  This takes practice and is something I'll consider in my next post.

Before leaving this topic it is worth pointing out what may seem like obvious aspects of block diagrams, whatever form they are in.  First, the inputs are generally shown on the left and the outputs are on the right (occasionally they may go from top to bottom).  This then defines the normal direction of signal flow within the diagram.  If the signal flow is in the opposite direction (output to input) then it is called a "feedback" path.  The signal path may split into multiple paths, and equally, multiple paths maybe combined to a single path.  Each sub-component block will affect the signal at its input in some way and generate an output signal.  Often there will a hierarchical aspect to the blocks so each can the thought of as a black box in its own right and they themselves may contain a lower level block diagram.  The idea of using this hierarchical black box paradigm is that it gives a mechanism for managing complexity.  You can concentrate on what each blocks does without necessary worrying about how it does its operation.  This keeps happening until you get down to the low-level building blocks for the system.  The lowest level is where the engineers that build the systems, will do their stuff and the top levels is where sound designers and producers will work.  Now I have come full circle on myself where I said that an understanding and appreciation of the lower level operation will improve your sound design possibilities.  Keep going down as far as you dare, but take it slowly and don't be put off when at first you don't understand what is happening at a lower level.  Just do a bit more research and learning.