Excerpts from The Oxford English Dictionary:
Sound: "The music, speech, etc. accompanying film, television broadcasting or other forms of visual presentation."
Design: "To fashion with artistic skill or decorative device."
Simple enough then: Sound design is the process of applying artistic skills to a film or video soundtrack.
At least it would seem to be that simple. But professional sound designers today say that their skills and contributions to the film production business aren’t always appreciated or understood by their clients—those clients being the advertising agencies that call on them to enhance television commercials. Sound design, almost by its very nonverbal nature, is a difficult term to pin down, even for some of its better-known practitioners.
"Sound design is taking something that’s original, that would sound like what you’re looking at, but making it stand out more, making it a lot more special and interesting," states Jimmy Haun, composer/ sound designer in the Santa Monica office of bicoastal Elias Associates.
Stephen Dewey, creative director/sound designer at Machine Head, Venice, Calif., says it’s "reckless" to try to define sound design in a sentence, but he tries: "My latest brief one-liner is, ‘It’s really the sound of the feeling of the image, rather than necessarily the actual sound of the actual visual event.’
"Sometimes, sound design is an elaborate process to end up making a sound that is more or less what you would expect to hear," continues Dewey. "A dog bark—you may use a child’s toy, you may slow down a bird chirp or something to make that dog bark sound like you want it to. That’s a sound design. At the same time, you may choose to insert the sound of Pablo Picasso saying, ‘Mama.’ That will create a feeling. So that’s sound design, too."
Chris Bell, creative director/sound designer/composer of Chris Bell & Company, Los Angeles, offers another nuance: "Sound design is usually made up of sounds that are not ‘real’ to the picture," he explains. "Elements of the sounds may be real, but they are usually bigger than reality; maybe the sounds are odd or abstract. Whatever they are, the idea is to draw added attention to the shot or object."
Marc Levisohn, sound designer/composer at Hum Music+ Sound Design, Santa Monica, likens sound to music in its ability to create a feeling. "I create a unique sound to create a mood, a feeling or specific emotion for a scene," he relates. "Music does that, as well, but sound stretches the boundaries of what something would sound like. It’s not just mimicking it. It’s bringing out what something you normally wouldn’t hear would sound like. It could be a hallway in a castle—creating the mood, the setting of what the hallway sounds like. It could be quiet, which is extremely effective. It can be a feeling of emptiness, of suspense, or creating a very distinct sound."
Cause And Effect
One point sound designers are clear on is that sound effects are not sound design. They are an element used in sound design. "For me, sound design denotes something that is beyond working in an effects capacity," comments Jeff Elmassian, composer/producer at Endless Noise (formerly digihearit?), Los Angeles. "It’s doing something that’s stylized in such a way that it is music, or that it is integrated into a piece of music. When I first came into commercials and people referred to work as sound design work, often I would look at it and say, ‘That’s great sound work but that’s not really sound design to me. That’s glorified Foley and effects work.’ "
For Bell, the biggest problem with agency creatives and producers comes when a spot needs sound design and his clients are thinking sound effects. "They’re saying, ‘It’s just sound effects.’ They hire me to do the music and the editor may not be capable of doing real sound design, so we have a spot in which somebody needs to spend some money on sound design but nobody is aware of it," Bell observes. "Sound design is a sound that needs to be created. You’re not just going to pull it out of a library or stick a mike in front of something and get it. You really have to work at it and make it."
Dewey says sound effects are a tool and an ingredient of sound design. "A sound effect is something that is recorded, put in sync, without any particular interpretive postulation," he says. "Sometimes sound design is taking the music, the dialogue, sound effects, and manipulated sounds, then melding them all together. As a sound designer, that’s one thing I do."
To help assure that the clients of sound designers understand what sound design means and what designers can do to enhance soundtracks, Marshall Grupp, head of Marshall Grupp Sound Design, New York, has been visiting ad agencies with a presentation called The Art of Sound, on these subjects.
In a nutshell, Grupp—who has visited such New York agencies as Lowe Lintas & Partners, Deutsch Inc., Bozell, Merkley Newman Harty, D’Arcy, J. Walter Thompson, and Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/Euro RSCG —is trying to make sure agencies understand the process and appreciate what sound designers contribute to a spot. "Sound has always been considered a stepchild of the postproduction process," contends Grupp. "It’s the last thing the agencies do. It has the least amount, percentage-wise, of the total budget. It’s always been an afterthought. The [agency people] say, ‘Do we need sound, or don’t we? Forget about it; we don’t need sound.’ Those are the kinds of people we’re trying to reach."
April Jaffe, executive producer at Marshall Grupp Sound Design, says many agency creatives and producers don’t appreciate the impact of sound design. "We’re trying to get them to look at their boards and say, ‘Sound design may be an element of what we’re going to need,’ " she notes. "We thought it would be a good way to get people educated so they would have more time to do the sound design."
Time Factor
Indeed, most sound designers say that they should be involved in the creative process earlier, especially if the spot in question is sound intensive. A prime example of how that approach can pay off is Nike’s current "Freestyle" ad, out of Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., directed by Paul Hunter of bicoastal HSI Productions, with sound design by Elmassian. "For me, sound design denotes some musical application," Elmassian says, "and something like the Nike project is true sound design."
The W+K creatives had conceived a spot showing the fun of basketball through the ball-handling abilities of top players showing off their skills in sync with a rhythmic soundtrack. Going into the shoot, they called on Elmassian. In 24 hours he came up with a piece based on "Planet Rock," by Afrika Bambaataa, who also co-wrote and co-produced the score to "Freestyle." Additionally, Steven Brown of Breakthru Productions, New York, served as co-composer/producer.
"We wanted to use that basic beat, but beyond that we needed a new piece of music and we wanted to use only basketball sounds," Elmassian remembers. (See separate story, p. 21.) Instead of doing the music to the picture, Hunter shot to the music. "I can’t stress enough the foresight and vision of Paul Hunter and [W+K creative director for Nike] Hal Curtis, and their having enough faith in their vision to do it the right way," says Elmassian, "by bringing the music person on early enough in the process so that they didn’t shoot a bunch of film that was completely irrelevant to the kind of music they wanted to do."
"Freestyle" was completed without visual manipulation, and Elmassian stuck with real basketball sounds. "They kept me honest through every step of the process," he reports.
"Once the filming was finished, I had a whole host of sounds I brought from the stage. Some were done on a raised stage with a nice hollow sound, and some were done on the floor, which is a very different sound. I wanted to have enough of those sounds specifically wedded to the sneaker squeak—that specific Nike shoe squeaking. Those sounds got me through the initial editing process. Once we had a locked picture, I went back and got all the specific little sounds we didn’t know we were going to need until we saw the final picture."
Machine Head’s Dewey says that some agencies are beginning to realize the benefits of bringing in a sound designer early in the process. He cites recent work he did on a Subaru campaign comprising the spots "Rally Spirit," "Flying" and "Can’t Touch This"—from Temerlin McClain, Irving, Texas, and directed by Jeff Zwart of bicoastal/international @radical.media. The charge was to portray a Suburu rally model in a way that hadn’t been done before, with sound-intensive spots.
"I explained that the shots that are useful for me to get into a sound-descriptive moment are shots that dwell for an instant, rather than quick-cutting," Dewey recounts. "There’s a shot of an axle from underneath and I talked about hanging on that shot for a moment. I said, ‘If we extend that shot, it allows me to introduce a new sound that’s abstract, that you can connect to the axle if you’re allowed to look at it for a moment and understand what’s happening. If it’s a quick cut, the sound is going to go by and it’s a meaningless thing.’ "
Dewey also stressed to the agency the need for dynamic, moving shots. "When you put a series of shots like that together, you have a rhythm, and that’s interesting in the way one sound hands over to the next sound. You can make a composition of a sequence of noises. It’s got an arc, a story, rather than being just a series of sounds that’s slave to a series of images."
Musically Inclined
Sound designers are a passionate lot when it comes to their craft, and many have backgrounds in music. Grupp doesn’t compose for commercials, but he says he is a "third-generation percussionist" whose grandfather played with Toscanini. After film school at USC, he gravitated toward postproduction work and sound.
Haun was a session guitarist and composer first, and moved into sound design to meet client needs. "I would do something musically and they would say, ‘Well, can you add a crow sound,’ or something?" he recalls. "I found myself getting interested in it." Bell started as a songwriter and composer for TV shows, who built his own studio at home and got some commercial jobs through a friend at a Los Angeles agency. "Sound design started creeping in the ’90s," he observes.
Levisohn started on the trumpet at 10, and studied music and recording technology at Berklee College of Music, Boston. Working with Hum principal Jeff Koz after college, Levisohn found he loved doing sound design for spots. Today, he often carries a digital audio tape (DAT) recorder to pick up everyday sounds.
Elmassian is a musician who believes that true sound design must include some musical elements. As for Dewey, he feels he has an affinity for music. "My preferred activity at any point in time would be to be noodling around with a noise rather than noodling around with a guitar," he comments. "I’m very much a person who thinks in terms of sounds and the emotional possibilities of a sound."
The traits and skills that make for a good sound designer are difficult to pinpoint, say those in the business. "You have to be creative in an abnormal sense," Bell suggests. "There’s an artistic, creative sense that a typical guy doesn’t have. I think a lot of composers do have it because it’s sort of a musical sense."
Levisohn says it’s very instinctual. "It’s like an artist sitting down to paint something," he notes. "When you sit down to create something, that’s very natural, and then to break it apart and talk about it is difficult. It’s having an open ear to not only what the client is saying, but to what the spot is about."
And Dewey believes the key trait is an ability to hear the overall story. "Although sound designers are able to focus on any individual component, they have a really strong sense as to how it works in the overall picture," he observes. "Sound designers are people who aren’t afraid to step away from the reality of what that sound should be. They are prepared to put that aside and find a story in the moment and make a sound for that story rather than for that particular event. If you can separate those things, you really are becoming a sound designer rather than a sound-effects person."
