Sound In Colour: Stray Outside the Lines

I’m often asked, “What is sound design?” and just as often, my go-to response is a bland explanation about door knocks and footsteps, or if I am feeling spicy, Ben Burtt and Star Wars. This is usually met with the glazing over of eyes, or one of the standard token questions, like; “Do you record podcasts?”

Keen to be a better human, I was forced to ask myself the question, “What is sound design to me?” and, I was pleasantly surprised by the answer.

Sound design is visual.

Not because we prominently work to a picture edit, although that is part of it. It's more the filling-in of visual holes, or spaces, with sound. As a sound designer, I like to think of a picture edit much like an untouched page in a colouring book. We are given sleek, clear boundaries, lines that create spaces we need to fill, and, much like colouring, we can stay within these lines, neatly supplying the edit with exactly what it seems to be asking of us. We can match the exact car engine to the one screaming across our screen from left to right, or build the internal workings of that little robot with only real-world samples, so it feels organic and grounded. We could do that, and that would be fine.

We could also do something different. Again, much like colouring, we could go down the water colour route, thinning the sounds we use to lighten the mood of the pictures. Or we could ignore the lines altogether, distorting our mix, applying reverbs and processing to achieve a moody, dream-like quality. We can even make it sound black and white! You can see where I am going with this. The possibilities are vast, and when sound design is visualised this way, it makes you realise it can be, and is, an artform.

So, if you’re in the industry and ever get asked the question “What is sound design?”, feel free to steal this notion, or asks yourself what is it to you. Let’s be more than just door knocks and footsteps.