Sound design
Sound design is the art and practice of creating auditory elements of media. It involves specifying, acquiring and creating audio using production techniques and equipment or software. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including filmmaking, television production, video game development, theatre, sound recording and reproduction, live performance, sound art, post-production, radio, new media and musical instrument development. Sound design commonly involves performing and editing of previously composed or recorded audio, such as sound effects and dialogue for the purposes of the medium, but it can also involve creating sounds from scratch through synthesizers. A sound designer is one who practices sound design.
History
The use of sound to evoke emotion, reflect mood and underscore actions in plays and dances began in prehistoric times when it was used in religious practices for healing or recreation. In ancient Japan, theatrical events called kagura were performed in Shinto shrines with music and dance.Plays were performed in medieval times in a form of theatre called Commedia dell'arte, which used music and sound effects to enhance performances. The use of music and sound in the Elizabethan Theatre followed, in which music and sound effects were produced off-stage using devices such as bells, whistles, and horns. Cues would be written in the script for music and sound effects to be played at the appropriate time.
Italian composer Luigi Russolo built mechanical sound-making devices, called "intonarumori," for futurist theatrical and music performances starting around 1913. These devices were meant to simulate natural and man-made sounds, such as trains or bombs. Russolo's treatise, The Art of Noises, is one of the earliest written documents on the use of abstract noise in the theatre. After his death, his intonarumori' were used in more conventional theatre performances to create realistic sound effects.
Recorded sound
Possibly the first use of recorded sound in the theatre was a phonograph playing a baby's cry in a London theatre in 1890. Sixteen years later, Herbert Beerbohm Tree used recordings in his London production of Stephen Phillips’ tragedy NERO. The event is marked in the Theatre Magazine with two photographs; one showing a musician blowing a bugle into a large horn attached to a disc recorder, the other with an actor recording the agonizing shrieks and groans of the tortured martyrs. The article states: “these sounds are all realistically reproduced by the gramophone”. As cited by Bertolt Brecht, there was a play about Rasputin written in by Alexej Tolstoi and directed by Erwin Piscator that included a recording of Lenin's voice. Whilst the term "sound designer" was not yet in use, some stage managers specialised as "effects men", creating and performing offstage sound effects using a mix of vocal mimicry, mechanical and electrical contraptions and gramophone records. A great deal of care and attention was paid to the construction and performance of these effects, both naturalistic and abstract. Over the twentieth century recorded sound effects began to replace live sound effects, though often it was the stage manager's duty to find the sound effects, and an electrician played the recordings during performances.Between 1980 and 1988, Charlie Richmond, USITT's first Sound Design Commissioner, oversaw efforts of their Sound Design Commission to define the duties, responsibilities, standards and procedures expected of a theatre sound designer in North America. He summarized his conclusions in a document which, although somewhat dated, provides a succinct record of what was then expected. It was subsequently provided to the ADC and David Goodman at the Florida USA local when they both planned to represent sound designers in the 1990s.
Digital technology
and digital audio technology have contributed to the evolution of sound production techniques in the 1980s and 1990s. Digital audio workstations and a variety of digital signal processing algorithms applied in them allow more complicated soundtracks with more tracks and auditory effects to be realized. Features such as unlimited undo and sample-level editing allows fine control over the soundtracks.In theatre sound, features of computerized theatre sound design systems have also been recognized as being essential for live show control systems at Walt Disney World and, as a result, Disney utilized systems of that type to control many facilities at their Disney-MGM Studios theme park, which opened in 1989. These features were incorporated into the MIDI Show Control specification, an open communications protocol for interacting with diverse devices. The first show to fully utilize the MSC specification was the Magic Kingdom Parade at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in September 1991.
The rise of interest in game audio has also brought more advanced interactive audio tools that are also accessible without a background in computer programming. Some of such software tools feature a workflow that's similar to that in more conventional DAW programs and can also allow the sound production personnel to undertake some of the more creative interactive sound tasks that previously would have required a computer programmer. Interactive applications have also given rise to many techniques in "dynamic audio" which loosely means sound that's "parametrically" adjusted during the program's run-time. This allows for a broader expression in sounds, more similar to that in films, because this way the sound designer can e.g. create footstep sounds that vary in a believable and non-repeating way and that also corresponds to what's seen in the picture. The digital audio workstation cannot directly "communicate" with game engines, because the game's events often occur in an unpredictable order, whereas traditional digital audio workstations as well as so called linear media have everything occur in the same order every time the production is run. Especially, games have also brought in dynamic or adaptive mixing.
The World Wide Web has greatly enhanced the ability of sound designers to acquire source material quickly, easily and cheaply. Nowadays, a designer can preview and download crisper, more "believable" sounds as opposed to toiling through time- and budget-draining "shot-in-the-dark" searches through record stores, libraries and "the grapevine" for inferior recordings. In addition, software innovation has enabled sound designers to take more of a DIY approach. From the comfort of their home and at any hour, they can simply use a computer, speakers and headphones rather than renting costly equipment or studio space and time for editing and mixing. This provides for faster creation and negotiation with the director.
Applications
Film
In motion picture production, a Sound Editor/Designer is a member of a film crew responsible for the entirety or some specific parts of a film's soundtrack. In the American film industry, the title Sound Designer is not controlled by any professional organization, unlike titles such as Director or Screenwriter.The terms sound design and sound designer began to be used in the motion picture industry in 1969. At that time, The title of Sound Designer was first granted to Walter Murch by Francis Ford Coppola in recognition for Murch's contributions to the film The Rain People. The original meaning of the title Sound Designer, as established by Coppola and Murch, was "an individual ultimately responsible for all aspects of a film's audio track, from the dialogue and sound effects recording to the re-recording of the final track". The term sound designer has replaced monikers like supervising sound editor or re-recording mixer for the same position: the head designer of the final sound track. Editors and mixers like Murray Spivack, George Groves, James G. Stewart, and Carl Faulkner served in this capacity during Hollywood's studio era, and are generally considered to be sound designers by a different name.
The advantage of calling oneself a sound designer beginning in later decades was two-fold. It strategically allowed for a single person to work as both an editor and mixer on a film without running into issues pertaining to the jurisdictions of editors and mixers, as outlined by their respective unions. Additionally, it was a rhetorical move that legitimised the field of post-production sound at a time when studios were downsizing their sound departments, and when producers were routinely skimping on budgets and salaries for sound editors and mixers. In so doing, it allowed those who called themselves sound designers to compete for contract work and to negotiate higher salaries. The position of Sound Designer therefore emerged in a manner similar to that of Production Designer, which was created in the 1930s when William Cameron Menzies made revolutionary contributions to the craft of art direction in the making of Gone with the Wind.
The audio production team is a principal member of the production staff, with creative output comparable to that of the film editor and director of photography. Several factors have led to the promotion of audio production to this level, when previously it was considered subordinate to other parts of film:
- Cinema sound systems became capable of high-fidelity reproduction, particularly after the adoption of Dolby Stereo. Before stereo soundtracks, film sound was of such low fidelity that only the dialogue and occasional sound effects were practical. These sound systems were originally devised as gimmicks to increase theater attendance, but their widespread implementation created a content vacuum that had to be filled by competent professionals. Dolby's immersive Dolby Atmos format, introduced in 2012, provides the sound team with 128 tracks of audio that can be assigned to a 7.1.2 bed that utilizes two overhead channels, leaving 118 tracks for audio objects that can be positioned around the theater independent of the sound bed. Object positions are informed by metadata that places them based on x,''y,z'' coordinates and the number of speakers available in the room. This immersive sound format expands creative opportunities for the use of sound beyond what was achievable with older 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound systems. The greater dynamic range of the new systems, coupled with the ability to produce sounds at the sides, behind, or above the audience, provided the audio post-production team new opportunities for creative expression in film sound.
- Some directors were interested in realizing the new potential of the medium. A new generation of filmmakers, the so-called "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls"—Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and others—were aware of the creative potential of sound and wanted to use it.
- Filmmakers were inspired by the popular music of the era. Concept albums of groups such as Pink Floyd and The Beatles suggested new modes of storytelling and creative techniques that could be adapted to motion pictures.
- New filmmakers made their early films outside the Hollywood establishment, away from the influence of film labor unions and the then rapidly dissipating studio system.