What is sound design, anyway?
- By Alan Hardiman
- Published 04/1/2010
Alan Hardiman
Alan Hardiman has been a senior engineer at Find A Way Studios for 3 years and in that time has recorded mixed and mastered many fine recordings for Find A Way. Alan's company Associated Buzz Creative is an entertainment, media, and publicity creative house. ABCBuzz works in film, TV, music, audio and video, bringing the impact of feature film production to the work they do for their clients, from audio post production to sound design for dramatic theatre and the creation of soundscapes for museums, events, and web sites.
Associated Buzz Creative also work in print media, primarily with trade publications serving these sectors of the industry. You can see more samples of Alan's work at http://www.abcbuzz.com.
Creative director Alan Hardiman is a specialist in sound design and music production. Making movie and TV soundtracks for over 20 years (Street Legal, Relic Hunter, The Twilight Zone, The Forgotten), he has gained a deserved reputation for outstanding recordings and sound installations.
I get asked this question all the time, so I guess it's confusing. In a
nutshell, sound design is the art or craft (depending on your
perspective) of recording, editing, processing, assembling, and mixing
sounds together to create informative, convincing or emotionally
suggestive listening experiences. While powerful software—such as
ProTools—is available to facilitate many sound design processes on
personal computers, keep in mind that using these tools doesn't
instantly make someone a qualified sound designer, any more than having
Microsoft Word on your computer makes you a professional speech
writer.
The term “sound design” originated in live theatre to describe the creation of sounds and aural montages specifically for stage plays. In theatre, sound design is a unique department, like lighting design. In the film world, the term first became synonymous with sound editing in 1969, when the great Walter Murch was credited as sound designer on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People. Coppola recalls that, because Murch “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.”
David Collison’s fabulous new book, The Sound of Theatre, is a wonderful, illustrated introduction to the development of sound design for theatre from the ancient Greeks to the modern digital age. For more information: http://www.lsionline.co.uk/books/?jzpz5l
The term “sound design” originated in live theatre to describe the creation of sounds and aural montages specifically for stage plays. In theatre, sound design is a unique department, like lighting design. In the film world, the term first became synonymous with sound editing in 1969, when the great Walter Murch was credited as sound designer on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People. Coppola recalls that, because Murch “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.”
David Collison’s fabulous new book, The Sound of Theatre, is a wonderful, illustrated introduction to the development of sound design for theatre from the ancient Greeks to the modern digital age. For more information: http://www.lsionline.co.uk/books/?jzpz5l
