About Sound Design

1. About Sound Design ~ What’s involved / some examples ~ By Archer Endrich for Melksham & District Group of Advanced Motorists Thursday 20 January 2011

2. Foley • A whole branch of sound design • Recreates real-life sounds in studio conditions • To get a clean recording able to be placed on the soundtrack independently • Highly skilled and demanding great ingenuity

3. Foley-illusion • Enhancing existing Foley – e.g., a fateful walk on different surfaces and in different ambiences • Made by something else that is ‘more real than real’ – e.g., footsteps in Arctic snow • Sounds for something that isn’t real (but is meant to appear so)

4. Composite Sounds • Mixing together more than one sound source • To get the right dramatic feel to a scene (e.g., water doors closing on the Titanic) • Other tricks involving special combinations of more than one sound, such as cross-synthesis • Cat purr tractor engine • purring engine

5. Playing with the voice • Here is a vocal sound: • Here are a bunch of subtle transformations of that voice, played one after another – what emotional feel does each one have? • This gives some idea of how many ways there are to transform sounds to get it ‘just right’ for context

6. Imaginary Landscapes • Tremendous stylistic innovation in the 20th century in all spheres of music • Working directly with sound is one of the main new areas: electronic music, musique concrète, electroacoustic music, acousmatic music – largely depending on the source • Thousands of new compositions that create imaginary landscapes out of sound

7. Building a Sound • The starting point is • ‘Pluck’ algorithm to add fuzz • Chord from layered source + gliss • High Pass Filter to lighten source • Texture cluster of these • Make the texture gliss downwards • Final mix of all components

8. Some strange sounds • This is like the sound we recorded earlier: • Let’s lower it down 3 octaves • We tighten gaps duplicate ‘grains’ x5 harmonise it (rising chords) and stretch that 4 times • The sound-maker ponders to what environment, to what context such a sound might belong … • Sound-making interacts with our (real) world and our (real) lives …

9. Hands-on • Select a sound, such as the voice, or our button-cap recording, or a donkey or a tractor • Select a transformation from the list provided • Make the change • Describe the result • More complex results require multiple steps • Sound design: films, animations, ads, sound-bytes in songs, music of imaginary landscapes