Meditations on Sound Design -- Assignment 1B response

Sound design is difficult for me to process.

When I edit sound, art feels like accident. Perhaps it is because I view editing as a visual task. I see the bars of video and sound on the timeline clicking into place like a puzzle. I see the files unwinding frame by frame like a film strip. I see color, I see rhythm and I see time. It is not so with sound.

I can quantify loudness. I can see waveforms and levels -- where sound is and where sound is not -- but I cannot see its texture, tone or timbre. For those I must listen, and my sense of hearing is not nearly as discerning as my sense of sight. I cannot visualize (auralize?) sound before it is created. I have less sound-intuition, if you will.

When I edit sound I do not have an idea that I make into a reality. When I edit sound I place sound on the timeline and I listen, then I add another sound and I listen once more. And so on. Perhaps this means I have no sense for sound. Perhaps this means that sound editing, for me, is true experimentation – free from gaining ideas and preconceptions of taste.

That isn’t to say that I am not discerning about what I hear once I do hear it, of course.  

Over the course of project 1B I learned some things about what I like in sound and what I do not. Some of it was obvious, some of it was not.

I learned that sometimes the least complex sound design is the most satisfying.

I learned that “realistic” soundscapes – unlike realistic images – chase feeling rather than resolution. When I hear sound in my everyday life I am not hearing everything around me at once but rather I am hearing a few things very closely.

I also learned that it is very difficult to describe to someone through words what you see in a sound, or how to arrange a sound in editing. In this way, to collaborate on sound is challenging.

I still enjoy sound, perhaps now a bit more than I did before. I still have a strange relationship with sound too. Sound is a distraction, sound is a formless mud which slips through my fingers as I grab for it. But sound is alright by me.