A coherent sound piece that describes an event, has an overall theme or something to portray the visual image as realistically as possible to engage the listener.
A soundscape is not music, although it can have musical qualities, but more of a sound collage.
Recently, I am impressed by Eraserhead (1977) whose sound designer is Alan Splet. It is a great example of atmospheric sound design. It's worth spending time with some good recordings playing with stretching, pitch-shifting, pitch-bending, reverse, adding effects in reverse, eq, reverb and worldizing before reaching for more exotic effects. It doesn't take much to make a sound completely unidentifiable.
What should I think before making a sound design?
How would you build the soundtrack?
Background to foreground?
Foreground to background?
Low frequencies to High frequencies?
When would you consider surrounds?
Would you spend more time on a featured
story element, like a specific sword the character uses, and leave the
ambiences for last? What would you do on a tight schedule? What would you do if
you had all the time you wanted?
Do you prefer to create a sub-library and
create a series of effects for a character before spotting them to picture?
How I would approach it, & what I would prioritise, totally depends on the story, context, characters, point of view, mood, meaning, directors intent, the picture cut, pacing, drama... and the story..
Things like foley, movement, ambiences etc are relatively straight forward. The most difficult sounds are the subjective ones
The intention of the sound design
I think the most important intention is to create subconscious emotional conditions at the listener. I am considering about some tricks to generate cheerfully, sadly, intimately, threateningly, tightly...emotions?
1. Silence is one of the most under-utilized tools in the sound designer's repertoire to manipulate the audience.
2. Panning stuff (often with the help of spatial FX) is very useful, more so in the 5.1 environment.
A great example: (in this case ambient kids laughing/playing about) and swirled them around the room, swelling/morphing into noise at the climax - mentally unstable adult with a child-like brain was about to murder someone. Juxtaposition or contrasting sounds works sometimes.
3. Two really simple things that I think do a huge difference is the sudden volume raising in a tense moment to increase the public reaction to the scene and slowing down noises and raise it's volume slowly to create expectations.
4. Counter-point/contrast
What about surprise? (sound conveying emotions)
Surprise, while a legitimate emotion, seems like a reaction to a major change in state, context, other emotions, or expectations.
Timelapse Audio Recording
Felix
Reference:
http://sound.stackexchange.com/
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