The why in creative sound design

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about decision making in my sound design and that of sound design I hear. It seems to me that it’s far more important than any FX chain breakdown to understand why people made certain choices.

If all we do is copy someone’s effect chain or try to emulate the surface level sound, then I feel that the results of that can only be superficially impressive at best. There will be no surprises in the resultant designs that comes from this approach. You’ll be able to pick out the influences and if done skilfully enough, they’ll even be done in places that make sense. I think probably this is generative AI’s potential end game without the development of actual intelligence.

If you allow the pursuit of a particular aesthetic interfere with the job of sound in any media, then it will invariably leave a withered remnant of itself once someone robs it of its power to beguile us by simply turning their system down or having a “bad” system.

I think it’s incredibly easy to let every design you do go by without asking yourself why you made the decisions you made. What led to that instinct?

It was suggested to me by a former colleague who is just starting out in sound design that this would be a useful tutorial series to make. I agree it would be great, but it is incredibly difficult, at least for me, to explain why you make every choice.

So, I’m gonna start by trying to share how this probably works for me, with the caveat that as I continue thinking about this, I may completely disagree with myself later!

What’s the hook?

In order for me to make any successful sound I first need a hook to anchor into the design. That is potentially the beginning and end of it for some designs but more frequently than not I am either unsatisfied by the outcome or I have more time and I want to try digging deeper. So, I have to start generating new hooks for the design and this is where trying to open up my thinking becomes important.

Source as story

Is my source the right starting point? This is the first and most important decision we make and it’s perhaps the change you can make which will most drastically alter your design.

Theoretical example

Ok you’re making UI sounds for a sci fi game, so you’ve opened your favourite synth and followed the tutorials to create some squelchy sounds, and it sounds like the classic telemetry stuff. But what is it the UI tells us about the game world? Not a lot, right? It’s sci-fi therefore synth source.

Perhaps this game is set in a more broken world than clean UI would suggest. Maybe we can record sounds from our world on our phones, like traffic, like restaurants, like football stadiums and then repackage them to be tiny sounds that represent the world that was lost? So now the UI while sounding aesthetically synthetic like we’d expect is also imbued with a story of a world that is now forgotten.

I have no idea if that specific idea would work but it gets me excited to try it. Which is the point of trying to think like this.

What I’m trying to demonstrate is the extra depth and value that can be added by thinking about how your source can tell it’s own story and provide a unique opportunity to break out of surface level thinking.

The more you do this and the more you bank those ideas into your toolbox of ideas the more depth and personality goes into your designs. Then when you’re low on time, you will pull these things out without much effort but the quality bar will be so much higher.

Processing as story?

As of right now I can honestly say that my approach is highly dependant on what I’m trying to achieve. Does it need to feel real or hyper real? If it’s a hyper real sound then I am usually hammering away at the source with saturation, EQ, filters and modulation. But is it possible to be more focused on the story of the sound to lead to our processing choices?

It’s certainly more obvious when it comes to recording source and telling stories. There are some great examples of sound designers who have done this, Martin Stig Anderson sticks out in my mind as particularly inspired on this front.

But what about processing? To my mind I think we can see it if we squint in the aesthetic choices driven by certain genres of games. Shooters make great use of clippers and saturation to create impressive and loud experiences for players which tells you lots of important information about the emotional impact of being in those situations.

In complete opposition to this would be cosy games which are completely allergic to frequencies under 500hz and in some cases the sounds are almost certainly deliberately small. They often tell a story about escaping the noise of our modern world and the sounds in turn aim to soothe not excite the players. Some of that is down source choice but does also feed into how you process your source too.

Perhaps if I think about these two paradigms I can imagine new paradigms that lead me to new opportunities for storytelling.

Conclusion

I would imagine that most sound designers who are good at what they do make all these choices without thinking about them. But for those of us who are maybe venturing outside of our comfort zone or just learning the craft it is less than obvious that this process is going on.

The more time I spend thinking about my decisions the better my sound design gets, at least to me anyway! It’s slower for sure but it is also more rewarding to hear how quickly you can improve by trying to be more aware of your choices when creating your designs. I was never good at going slow to go fast when learning guitar and as a result I’m not the best guitarist but I’m not dead yet!