The art of sound design

Post, Nov, 2002 by Christine Bunish

Diving into the question: Is sound design an art?

"Absolutely," affirms Tim Gedemer, sound designer with Santa Monica's Spank! Music and Sound Design (www.spankmusic.com). "The process of creating sound design to picture is inherently subjective and therefore needs to be linked to art. You have to put it in front of people to be judged like music and theatre. And if you buy into film being an art form, then sound design is a subset of that art. Since sound design is a relatively new discipline, many first-generation sound designers have musical roots. "The skill set required to produce sound to picture -- but not musical sound - is similar to the production of music;' he notes.

But in the past decade, sound design has become its own art form, recognized for what it contributes to pictures, both longform and shortform. The next wave of up-and-coming sound designers can take a more direct path to sound design. "They're not necessarily musicians:' Gedemer says. "Sound design is fast approaching equal appeal with music in the popular culture."

Gedemer's sound design credits include Spiderman flying on his Web forthe movie's trailer; Eminem's Without Me and U2's Elevation music videos; the Hughes Brothers' From Hell Jack the Ripper flick; and a Wrigley's quirky Eclipse Gum campaign.

GOTTA MAKE THE DONUT SOUND

He recently did sound design for a comic Hyundai spot from The Richards Group/Dallas in which a prospective car buyer at a Hyundai showroom wonders about the vehicles' need for side airbags. He fantasizes a bizarre accident scenario where the airbags would come in handy He imagines a trucker carrying a giant "donut" that he's going to hoist atop a donut shop. But the huge prop breaks loose and begins rolling down the street until it appears ready to slam into the side of the man's car. A quick cut finds the driver back to reality and back in the dealership where he concedes he could use the security of Hyundai's side airbags.

Gedemer created the initial rolling donut sounds from his own pre-recorded library But the options he selected didn't quite meet the agency's desire for a heavy-but-hollow sound as if the mammoth donut were made of fiberglass. So Gedemer went out in his own quiet neighborhood to custom record plastic garbage cans rolling down the street.

"I was working after our garbage had been collected, and the best sound came from the recycling bin, which was thicker plastic and bigger than the others." Gedemer explains. The challenge was "to not get too much grit" in the roll.

Gedemer processed the sound to make it more dramatic and used some animal screams and squeals from his own library to heighten the sense of jeopardy as the donut accelerates. He used a subtle whoosh as the donut sped by the window of a diner; unnoticed by the eatery's patrons." I didn't want anything too loud or too big or the people inside the diner would have reacted to it, and they were deadpan," he says.

Gedemer worked with orchestral elements from Spank! and a "groovy" jungle drum track by Spank's Chicago-based Matt Walker, which begins as the donut is set in motion. He uses a Digidesign Pro Tools/24 Mix Plus system and a vintage Synclavier updated to smoothly integrate with Pro Tools-formatted sounds. While he admits the Synclavier is "a dinosaur" Gedemer is fond of its keyboard interface.

SOUND EFFECTS AS MUSIC

Jeff Elmassian, the Grammy-winning creative director of Endless Noise (www.endlessnoise.com) in Los Angeles, views sound design in a couple of ways. First there are projects that work with traditional Foley sound effects that follow literal movements or actions on screen, then there are graphic sound effects that accompany the on-screen action but do not actually match it.

From the beginning of his career, Elmassian - a composer orchestrator, conductor and musician - has been involved in yet another sound design arena: sound effects as music.

When Elmassian got his first sampler in the I 980s, sound design for him meant sampling different musical phrases from guitar; trumpet and his own clarinet and using them in the context of music.

"That evolved to a style of sound design that runs the gamut - from musical instruments to musical sounds to sounds I've recorded," Elmassian says. But it wasn't until he did Nike's Freestyle, for which he made music from the sounds of a dribbling basketball and sneaker squeaks on the court, that he got to "bend and stretch the sounds into phrases in their own right until they became more musical, until you feel a piece of music is made of the sounds," he explains.

Elmassian, who uses Digidesign Pro Tools 5.1 with a ProControl/24 surface and Sample Cell and Opcode's Studio Vision software for sampling and sequencing, respectively recently finished another landmark Nike spot from Wieden & Kennedy/Portland.

Before is a montage of professional and amateur athletes shown at the moment before their sports begin - a diver preparing to jump, a pro ice hockey goalie engaging in a pre-game ritual. At first, Elmassian and agency creative director Hal Curtis "went through very abstract musical ideas to get to the tension of the moment," Elmassian recalls. "But something wasn't working. So we thought about what from music most tells us about the concept of 'before."