Reading for week 18

Introduction

The composer John Cage tells the following story in his book Silence: after he played the same sound on a loop nonstop for fifteen minutes to a class of students, a woman got up and ran screaming from the room, “Take it off, I can’t bear it any longer!” Cage turned the sound off, only for another student to ask, “Why’d you take it off? It was just starting to get interesting” (2013, 93). Throughout this book, I hope that you will learn to “find the interesting” in sound. I aim to take you on a journey from being the person who might run out of the room screaming in annoyance, to being someone who is very comfortable thinking and talking about sound, who can focus on sound and learn to listen to different aspects of sound. A person who finds that the more they listen, the more interesting their world becomes. Other books about sound design are available, but in my experience, sound design tends to be taught as sound for moving image (that is, sound for film/television, animation, theater, or games). The reader is left with no time to cultivate an appreciation of just sound, or to develop a language and rhetoric of sound on its own, to explore the potential that lies in sound as a medium and as a rhetorical device. The complexity of sound on its own is often rushed through in order to get to the technical aspects of sound for moving image. Part of this oversight is the fault of an educational system that focuses on other aspects of the production of media, and the entire world of sound is often forced into a thirty-hour course over one semester. The result is that sound designers are always enslaved to the image, creating sound for that purpose, rather than developing their skills in actually designing sound. I’m not suggesting that sound design for moving image doesn’t have a purpose: clearly, it has a very specific purpose.

I’ve spent years studying the relationship that sound has to image, and image to sound, and at this point published seven books and countless research papers on that very subject. However, sound for moving image has often assumed the role of a subordinate: sound is there, we are told, to support the dominant image. The eye rules supreme in our ocular-centric Western culture. Is it any surprise that image dominates sound design practice and education, too? Of course, most sound design jobs are in film or games, so it’s understandable that sound design programs focus on sound for moving image, but having a background in sound-for-image misses out on all the possibilities that can be created by sound design as “just” sound design. An interview I conducted with a video game sound designer, Adele Cutting, made me think there may be a better way to teach sound design in schools, by focusing on sound before moving on to sound for picture. Cutting had been hired to design the sound for an audio-only video game: that is, a game designed with little to no visual component.

She explained some of the differences when there’s no image to design to: I worked on Audio Defence: Zombie Arena (Somethin’ Else 2014), the audio-only game, the zombie shooter, and that’s like the Holy Grail for a sound designer, isn’t it? An audio-only game! It was a short turnaround—like four weeks—to do all the sounds. And it took me a good couple of days—probably three days—which is a lot of time when you’ve only got four weeks, to get my head around it. Because all these tricks that I did [with visuals]: Say, you were making a giant sound, you learn every time all these tricks to make it weighty and heavy. But when there’s no giant’s foot falling [visually], it didn’t work. I really had to get my head around it. That there was no visual clue to hang on with, because I’m always talking about how audio fills in, how audio is the glue that holds everything together, and we fix things. We make things look better when the animator hasn’t had time to do this, so we’ll put a sound in, so nobody notices. We’re always fixing things, and if things are far too slow, you can add audio and it speeds it up. You can add audio and make it go slower, but all of a sudden, [without visuals] it’s just you. I found that game at the start very, very difficult because you have to be so focused. There can’t be any fat on your sounds. It’s just got to be the one thing that you need to hear, and you can’t mix in [with visuals]. . . . I found myself chucking a lot of things out with the sound, to get the focus on it. . . . I felt it was so important that if there was only one sound going to be playing, or if you could only focus on one thing at once, it had to be the right thing. (quoted in Collins 2016, 119)

I am proposing that sound design, as a practice, may be better approached as an art form that stands alone from image, prior to learning about the complex things that happen when we put sound and image together. In other words, before we learn to put sound to image (looking and listening), sound designers are better served learning to just listen. I’ve designed this book based on my own teaching of sound design for about fifteen years now at several universities and in industry presentations and workshops, with the aim of helping others to structure a course in sound design beyond image. In an ideal world, students would then go on to learn sound for moving image in another course, and sound for interactive media in yet another course. We don’t often get the luxury of teaching multiple courses on sound, however. Anyone studying visual production would get all kinds of courses in drawing, illustration, painting, printmaking, typography, digital arts, graphic design, and so on; sound designers rarely get that same kind of scaffolded and multifaceted approach to learning. This book is about sound design as “just” sound design. I bring in examples from other media, but the many exercises I include are meant to focus the student of sound on just that—sound. But what does it mean to design sound?

We hear the term “sound designer” applied to film or video games, but what exactly does a sound designer do? In fact, although the term is fitting, it was an almost accidental title. In the Hollywood movie system, a sound editor was (and still is) the person responsible for creating and selecting sounds for film (by substituting, eliminating, and adding to the original live recording or creating the sounds in postproduction). The term sound designer was first used to describe the work of Walter Murch. Director Francis Ford Coppola recalls: We wanted to credit Walter for his incredible contribution—not only for The Rain People, but for all the films he was doing. But because he wasn’t in the union, the union forbade him getting the credit as sound editor—so Walter said, “Well, since they won’t give me that, will they let me be called sound designer”? We said, We’ll try it—you can be the sound designer. . . . I always thought it was ironic that “Sound Designer” became this Tiffany title, yet it was created for that reason. We did it to dodge the union constriction. (quoted in Ondaatje 2002, 53)1 Although the term sound design is most commonly associated with film and more recently video games, it is also applied to radio, theater, product design, and more.

Traditionally, the goal of product sound design has been to reduce or remove sound, by engineering products that absorb (incorporating foam, perforations, etc.), block, or enclose the sound. Today, however, a growing awareness of the important role that sound can play in products is redefining the role of a product sound designer. Product sound design now has many of the same concerns as film and game sound design, that is, driving our emotions, rather than strictly information. Increasingly, sound designers are finding a role in the growing audio-based media world of podcasts, smart speakers, and audiobooks. We can also add to sound design the growing field of sound art, in which artists use sound to convey their thoughts and feelings and express themselves, much as they have done for millennia using visuals. Artists are no longer confined to canvas; they can create multimedia works that incorporate sound or make sound the primary focus of their work. Sound design can take place at the level of a single discrete sound or at the level of an entire soundscape. Tomlinson Holman, the inventor of the THX sound format, provides a succinct definition of sound design that will suit our purposes: “getting the right sound in the right place at the right time with the equipment available” (2002, 26). Of course, describing what is the right sound is a more complicated process that requires further exploration. Sound designers must work within the constraints of context, in addition to budgetary and technical constraints. But there are additional elements that must be satisfied: the aesthetic choices made will affect the overall reception of the work or product. Is it pleasing? Is it annoying? Designers must make choices about sounds based on the ways in which they want the audience to (consciously or unconsciously) interpret the sound. Designers design sounds by: (1) Choosing recorded sounds which, by their selection, context or combination, create something new.

For instance, how sounds are juxtaposed—or the situational context in which they are used—influences their perception. This task may also include using unusual materials or getting unusual sounds out of everyday objects. Selecting or recording the right sound is an important design decision. Gregg Barbanell has talked about how he uses everyday objects for the sounds of gruesome bone-breaking in The Walking Dead TV series (2010–): “For ‘breaking bones,’ big, full stalks of celery are employed—not merely individual stalks, mind you, but huge bunches capable of producing layered, complex snaps. They give you this huge, sinewy stringy sound. . . . It’s very effective” (quoted in Eddy 2015). (2) Layering or combining several sounds to create a new sound, or splicing sounds together to create a new sound. For example, Ben Burtt describes the creation of the lightsaber sound for Star Wars (1976): I was a projectionist, and we had a projection booth with some very, very old simplex projectors in them. They had an interlock motor which connected them to the system when they just sat there and idled and made a wonderful humming sound. It would slowly change in pitch, and it would beat against another motor—there were two motors—and they would harmonize with each other. It was kind of that inspiration, the sound was the inspiration for the lightsaber and I went and recorded that sound, but it wasn’t quite enough. It was just a humming sound, what was missing was a buzzy sort of sparkling sound, the scintillating which I was looking for, and I found it one day by accident. I was carrying a microphone across the room between recording something over here and I walked over here when the microphone passed a television set, which was on the floor, which was on at the time without the sound turned up, but the microphone passed right behind the picture tube and as it did, this particular produced an unusual hum. It picked up a transmission from the television set and a signal was induced into its sound reproducing mechanism, and that was a great buzz, actually. So I took that buzz and recorded it and combined it with the projector motor sound and that fifty-fifty kind of combination of those two sounds became the basic lightsaber tone, which was then, once we had established this tone of the lightsaber of course you had to get the sense of the lightsaber moving because characters would carry it around. They would whip it through the air. They would thrust and slash at each other in fights. And to achieve this additional sense of movement I played the sound over a speaker in a room. Just the humming sound, the humming and the buzzing combined as an endless sound, and then took another microphone and waved it in the air next to that speaker so that it would come close to the speaker and go away and you could whip it by. And what happens when you do that by recording with a moving microphone is you get a Doppler shift. You get a pitch shift in the sound and therefore you can produce a very authentic facsimile of a moving sound. And therefore give the lightsaber a sense of movement and it worked well on the screen at that point. (Burtt 1993) (3) Altering sounds through analog or digital signal processing, such as morphing sounds together (as in ring modulation); time domain effects (phasing, flanging); compression and limiting; reverberation and echo; and so on. For instance, the sound of the disc flying through the air in Tron (1982) was “a combination of a monkey scream backwards processed through a flanger and it was also another one of those weird synthesizer effects that I was able to create through the modulator, and also I took a big wire cable spin and that was the whooshing element. . . . I turned it [the monkey scream] backwards and you couldn’t recognize that it was a monkey scream really” (Petrosky n.d.). (4) Synthesizing a sound, or creating a sound based on granular aspects that are recombined from other sounds. For instance, consider the THX sonic logo, known as “Deep Note,” created by Andy Moorer: I set up some synthesis programs for the ASP [synthesizer] that made it behave like a huge digital music synthesizer. I used the waveform from a digitized cello tone as the basis waveform for the oscillators. I recall that it had 12 harmonics. I could get about 30 oscillators running in real-time on the device. Then I wrote the “score” for the piece. The “score” consists of a C program of about 20,000 lines of code. The output of this program is not the sound itself, but is the sequence of parameters that drives the oscillators on the ASP. That 20,000 lines of code produce about 250,000 lines of statements of the form “setfrequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz.” . . . The sound was produced entirely in real-time on the ASP. (Whitwell 2005) This book focuses on the first three of these four means to design sound. The programming and use of synthesizers to create sounds is a fascinating topic, but it requires at least a book of its own as well as more advanced skills. Likewise, interactive sound also requires a separate book to understand the complexities and software involved.

The aim of this book is to provide a set of material that, with each chapter, builds on previous work that you have learned and put into practice. I have interwoven theory and suggested further reading and listening materials throughout, with the hopes that you will take it upon yourself to improve your skills by exploring the many resources available to help you to learn about sound. I have suggested exercises to help you put the theory into practice, and while you may not want to complete all of these exercises, I believe that the more you undertake, the better you will become. Most of the exercises you can do on your own, so there is no need to be enrolled in a class to do these exercises, but a handful of exercises are better experienced with the participation of a partner or class. In my experience, many introductory books on sound can get very technical with lots of equations and physics, which might put off a beginner coming at the field from an artistic background. It’s my goal to focus on the creative side of sound design, and give you just enough of a technical foundation to get you started so you can put your creativity to work. Learning more about the technical side is an important step in a professional sound designer’s training, but in my opinion that can happen after you begin to feel comfortable with the terminology and tools available. I use Audacity as the software sound editor for the examples that demonstrate the techniques in this book. The reason for this choice is simple: it’s free. Audacity has its limitations, and if you’re serious about sound design you’ll find yourself outgrowing it quickly, but if you’re just dipping your toes into the waters of sound design, it’s a great cross-platform tool or complement to other tools in your digital audio workstation (known as a DAW). It’s important to note that Audacity is designed as a sound editor, rather than a multitrack editor. It’s great for editing individual sounds, but as we’ll see, the software becomes more problematic when dealing with mixing multiple tracks. The exercises can be undertaken in any other audio software you are comfortable with, like Audition, Logic, ProTools, or Reaper. As well, there is a companion website to this book at studyingsound.org that provides examples, tutorials, some of the reading material, links, videos, and other resources that you can consult as you travel on your sound design journey.

1 Hearing and Listening What is the difference between hearing and listening? Lift your eyes from this page and look straight ahead for a moment: Notice that we see many more things than what we are looking at directly. We can focus on an object, but the eyes—and the brain—take in a lot more around us than just what we may or may not be aware of. I’m looking at my computer monitor, but I see my speaker monitors behind, and the posters on the wall behind them, and my shelves off to the side, and a second desk off to my left where another computer sits. My dog curls up in the corner. There is a black rug under my chair, and I see my arms moving, and all kinds of small details that aren’t part of what I’m looking at. I see far more than I usually observe. A similar perceptual phenomenon happens with hearing. We are surrounded by sounds, and most of the time we are in a passive hearing mode, actively listening only when we are talking with someone (and actually paying attention to what they say!), in a potentially dangerous situation like crossing the road, or listening for a responding “beep” to a text message. What music we listen to is often just on in the background, a wallpaper of noise. Most of the time, sounds are just there, all around us. We listen with ears half open, not consciously paying attention to sound unless it’s something that we are actively focusing on. We hear without listening, just as we see without looking. Can we train ourselves to listen? How can we become better listeners? Like anything else we learn, what we need is practice, and we start our journey into sound design with becoming more aware of the sounds around us. We can learn, over time, to spend less time with ears half open and more time actively listening. Like a photographer walking around and mentally framing shots while scanning the landscape, we can learn to be aware of and thinking about sounds around us. Becoming a listener doesn’t happen overnight, but with time and patience and practice, you will find yourself noticing more and more of the sounds around you. You’ll find yourself hearing sounds that others haven’t noticed, and you’ll hear sounds that you never noticed before, and, sometimes, sounds you wish you hadn’t noticed! Unfortunately, once you’ve opened your ears, the world becomes a very noisy place. This chapter will introduce hearing and listening and begin to provide a language to think about and talk about sound. Listening is work that should be practiced and referred to again and again, until it becomes second nature. There are many exercises here to get you thinking about the sounds you’re hearing, and training you to listen to them instead of just hear them. Training your ears is just like training your muscles in the gym: you can’t transform yourself overnight. You have to keep going back and working at it, and it must be sustained or you’ll find yourself losing your gains. Exercise 1.1 Quiet Time We’ve probably all tried sneaking into our house at night: every sound we made seemed suddenly amplified. Trying to be quiet is a great way to focus on actively listening. Try standing up from your seat without making any sound. Try it again with eyes closed. Listen to the sounds. How was the process of listening to your own sounds different from the way that you normally hear sound? (adapted from Schafer 1992) 1.1 Talking and Writing about Sound Throughout this book you will find exercises and suggestions to get you to think about, experience, and practice sound in new ways. Keeping a notebook to write down your thoughts will help you to formulate your own ideas about sound and track your progress. You might also take a few moments to compare your own thoughts with those of friends, colleagues, or classmates as you follow along, or check the companion website (studyingsound.org) for another perspective. Purchase a new journal for your sound practice. It helps if it’s pocket-sized. You might wonder why I suggest a paper notebook and not your computer or phone. In theory, you could use a portable computer (laptop, phone, or tablet), but you’ll find a pocket notebook will be handy to keep with you on a walk where you may not want to bring a computer (for instance, out in the rain). A phone isn’t as effective to take notes on because the act of typing on a touchscreen requires you to focus visually on the phone and concentrate on that rather than the sound, which can interfere with the practice. You may also want to use your phone for other aspects of the exercises in the following chapters, as a pocket recorder, for instance, or to check frequencies or the volume of sounds you are hearing. Once a day, practice sitting still for five minutes and writing down what you hear. You can sit in a different place, or sit in the same place. Sit at different times of day, and in different moods, or the same time and place and mood. What matters isn’t so much what sounds you hear as your practice to actively attend to, concentrate on, and think about those sounds. You need to do this daily, rather than trying to pack in a week’s worth all at once, because you need to start training yourself to listen, and this takes time. If you’re serious about sound, listening is the most important skill you can have. In addition to this daily exercise, keep writing down your thoughts about the other exercises, any readings or news media you come across that are related, as well as note any interesting sounds you hear in real life or in movies or other media, so you can reflect on your learning, and refer back to it in a few months and see your progress. You may also come up with some great sound design ideas that you don’t want to forget, and your sound journal is a great place to jot these down as you go. To be a sound designer, we need a language to talk about sound. Language is one of the tricky aspects of dealing with sound. And even after we’ve grasped the language, chances are we’re going to have to talk about it with someone who hasn’t yet learned that language! As children, we’re taught a lot about visuals. We learn about shape and color and texture, and we learn the language to talk about these. If I asked you to draw a circle with a diameter of five centimeters and fill it in with a smooth, lime green color, you could probably come up with something very similar to what I have in my mind. But how do we talk about sound? Sound is time based, which makes it more difficult, and it’s never the same twice. Even if we use an electronic reproduction of a sound, we don’t hear it the same way twice, and the environment in which it’s played is also always shifting and plays a role in our hearing. More importantly, we’re also usually not taught a language to describe sound unless we are referring to musical sound, which has its own specialized language and doesn’t actually refer to the sound of the notes played, only the notes themselves.

Exercise 1.2 Describing Sound

Undertake this exercise every day, and we’ll build on it as we go: Take five minutes and sit quietly, writing down all of the sounds that you hear. The first time you try this exercise, you might come up with a list a little like this one, which are the sounds currently occurring as I type this out: • Music in the background • A car driving by • My fingers typing on the keyboard • Breathing of my dog next to me • A scraping sound of someone shoveling snow outside • The backup beepers on a truck at the construction site • My own breathing • Whirr of the heating duct • Hum of the overhead light

This list is a good start, and we’re training our ears based on how we’ve been taught to listen in the past; but let’s dig a little deeper here.



1.1.1 Sounds and Their Causes There are two ways I’ve described the sounds I heard in my listening exercise

1.2. The first is in terms of their cause—in other words, the thing that is causing, or making, the sound: for instance, “a car driving by.” The problem with such a description when used to describe sound is that it only tells you what sound I’m hearing if you know what type of car is being driven (a truck sounds different from a Porsche), what the weather conditions are (tires in rain sound different from tires on dry road), what time of day it is (a car in the middle of the night will appear to sound louder), what the speed of the car is, what gear it is in, what the mechanical condition of the car is (is there a hole in the exhaust?), what kind of tires it has (winter tires make a different sound from summer tires), and more. Without all of this detail, we might conjure up a generic concept of “car-ness,” but it’s not a very accurate descriptor of what I heard. How the car is moving is an important indicator of what is happening: Are they squealing tires with some bass thumping out the windows, or are they creeping past very slowly, eerily, suggesting some form of surveillance or stalking—these are two very different sounds! We have to have an agreement on what my description of the car means to even begin to guess all of the associations with the sound of a car driving by. Let’s look at another from my list: “my fingers typing on the keyboard.” We’ve all typed on a keyboard, but keyboards have very different sounds, and the speed of typing depends on the skill of the typist. The volume of the typing might depend on whether or not the person is frustrated or angry. The tempo may be altered if they are stopping and thinking about what they are typing, or if they know what they are going to type in advance. An Apple keyboard with its low-lying keys sounds very different from a cheap PC keyboard. I have one key that sticks and requires me to hit it harder. So again, “typing on a keyboard” is not really an accurate description of what “typing” sounds like, only the cause behind the sound. The first thing we can learn as sound designers is to be more descriptive in our journals. Moving forward, as you practice listening, get as descriptive as possible for each sound. This requires us to really concentrate on the many attributes that go into the sound, rather than just the cause behind the sound. Concentrate and think about the sounds you hear and imagine trying to describe them in a way that someone could use to reproduce the sound.



Collins, Karen. Studying Sound : A Theory and Practice of Sound Design, MIT Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=6296059.
Created from ual on 2021-01-05 07:14:04.