Sven Dens

Dave is doing a session on “Designing with Sound”.

In design, there’s good design and bad design. Dave tries to teach us what to pay attention to to make sure that when it comes to sound design, yours is good.

There are 5 basic elements of sound design:

• Voice Over
• Sound Effects
• NavSounds
• Ambience
• Music

There are 3 types of sounds in visual storytelling:

• On screen
• Off screen
• Non-Diegetic (outside of the story space) (like a person speaking in between frames in a movie, telling how the characters met, it’s not in relation to anything directly really, but still belongs to the movie)

There are 3 relationships sound can have to visuals:

• Sympathetic (hit a golf ball and hear a hitting sound, sound is in relation to what’s going on)
• Contrasting (violins in C minor with a picture of a person happily walking around (like in a horror movie))
• Emotive (the sound accompanying the image seems to have no direct relation to what you’re seeing, but it creates an ambience that can be accounted for once you get to know more about what you’ve just seen)

Try to maintain the following production order:

1. Music
2. Voice Over
3. Ambience
4. NavSounds
5. Sound Effects

How to work with sound?

When it concerns music:

• Go for mood vs. genre
• Use it to create a singular space
• It can make us focus on specific things
• It can convey abstract things
• It makes us feel

So in sound design, realise yourself that the above is what you can work with, and ask yourself where and how to use what.
He showed us some movie scenes, repeated a couple of times with different music on them. It’s really strange to discover how your mind differently interprets what you’re seeing if it’s fed other sounds to the pictures! Try it out for yourself, get some movie scene, turn off the sound, and play some music to go with it. Then, repeat what you’ve just done, but play some other music. And be surprised by your own brain.

Great session!