Your Sound Design Questions Answered

    I haven't been writing much lately as I've been busy with sound design, band, day jobs, etc.  However, I did write a little something during some rehearsal downtime.  It started out as something like "letters to a young sound designer" but I thought it might be interesting to those who don't really know what I mean when I say sound designer.
    A sound designer finds, creates, or otherwise wrangles sound effects and music together for a performance, and makes sure those sounds are played at the right time for the right length of time and at the right volume.  Beyond that, the definition get's sticky.  In a larger theater you might have a music director, a composer, a sound designer, a sound technician, and a sound board operator.  In smaller "store front" theaters, a sound designer might (frequently) have to do all the above jobs.  Sound Design doesn't require a standardized technical knowledge, just enough proficiency to justify getting paid for it.  The vague job requirements and varying job description will lead to a lot of ass busting to learn to do something you have no previous experience doing or (more likely) lead to a lot of embarrassing moments where you have to tell a director that either his expectations are unreasonable or totally reasonable but he hired the wrong guy, so, sorry about that.
    What the job always requires is the ability to think and learn quickly, to be articulate and specific about a very abstract and temporal phenomenon in more or less plain language, and of course, the ability to be creative in a collaborative setting, all of which require trial and error.
    If I could offer some on the job advice to anyone starting out in Sound Design, it would go something like this:

Equipment matters more than you ever want it to.  This pretty much runs against every bit of punk ethos left in me but it's unavoidable.  The purpose of a sound design is to help transport the audience into the world of the play, either the physical (diegetic) world or the emotional/psychological (non-diegetic) world, and to do that, you don't want a shitty lofi system coloring and distorting that sound unless the play is in a shitty lofi world.  Those plays sadly don't exist.  Learn what equipment is meant to do, what it can do, and what it will never do. 

Yes you can do it, but do you have time?  The quicker you learn this lesson, the better.  It's always tempting to say yes to complex and time consuming design choices during the beginning stages of a production when you have weeks to get everything done.  But when you run out of time and fall short of your grand promises, you're going to look like a lazy flake.  On that note, be organized, save everything twice and create more than one draft for each big moment.

You can say no to the director, and you definitely should learn when and how, which is never in front of actors and extremely delicately.  Also, never use the word "no."

Music is universal, musical tastes aren't.  This is without a doubt the most frustrating aspect of the job. 

Listen to hip hop.  Reason 1, hip hop producers largely use the same tools as you.  Reason 2, hip hop producers (and sample based musicians in general) tend to think of what a sound as a mutable material, they listen for what it can be rather than what it is.  Being able to make completely new music out of say, two or three records requires a clever ear and deft technical proficiency, both of which are paramount to sound design.  Reason 3, nothing sounds better after being stuck inside a theater all fucking day.

Be a geek, or at least be comfortable being called a geek.  You're working in theater after all. 
If you think you're too cool for the job, you're right, so don't do it.

Have a personal creative outlet, realize that this job is not that.  Remember that scene in Charlie Brown Christmas where Lucy asks Schroeder to play Jingle Bells over and over again until he frustrated plunks it out note by note?  It's gonna be like that sometimes.

Think about how the sound feels.  If the design is good, no one will be paying attention to it but they'll be subtly affected by it.  One director said it best, "With gunshots, it's not about how real they sound, it's about the emotional impact of the shot."

Unlike other design elements (staging, scenic, lighting), when you make a mistake it will be big and obvious and it will piss people off.  Don't take it personally.

Always shroud your techniques in secrecy.  So you spent a whole week figuring out how to power a remote speaker in the back of the house so that marching band effect can sound like it's slowly coming closer and filling the space?  No one fucking cares.  Not to say it wasn't a good choice, but no one is going to pat you on the back for an effect that could have been adequately accomplished by clever fading and panning.  But when a director wants something to sound like it's underwater and all you do is put a tremolo and reverb on it (which takes 15 seconds) and she looks at you like your a wizard, just let her be mystified.  

Have a huge collection of music, listen to it all the time.  Always good to have jazz, classical, and ambient on hand (anything "moody" or textural and or rhythmic, without words). 

Have the cast send you their favorite party jams and play them during preshow warmups.  You will be their hero forever.

Pitch in to help someone else when you have some downtime.  Again, everyone will love you.

Avoid Tom Waits, run, fly, flee.  Delete it from your hard drive.  When directors mention his name (trust me, this happens with staggering frequency) feign ignorance and change the subject.

At the end of the day, realize that you're working behind the scenes and there's not a lot of credit or awards being handed out.  Sometimes the only way to tell you've done a good job is when no one complains and you get asked to do it again.

White/Light @ MCA=Totally Sick

Everywhere that I work is cooler than everywhere that you work.  Don't believe me?
Do you wanna see John McEntire, Steve Shelley or Lucky Dragons play at the MCA?  Of course you do. I could not be more chuffed.

Take off those clothes, you're one of them.

    I'm excited to see that the Nitsuh Abebe has his own column over at p4k.  I've been following his excellent and always thoughtful blog, A Grammar for a couple weeks now so I'm excited to see  his missives in a more well trafficked site. (Although, are p4k columns really read that often?)  On his first outing he compares Lady Gaga and Joanna Newsome while taking on the neurotic self conscious politics of cool in the indiesphere.  Definitely worth a read if you even remotely care about any of the above topics.  I'm still very interested in this debate about the politics of who we find clever or innovative and who we find trite or escapist, but it's personally losing it's relevancy in my day to day life.  Maybe my circles have changed but it's not often I find myself in a place where I'm actually embarassed to admit my fondness for something because of hip politics.  Interning at Thrill Jockey certainly presents those moments, but the mocking tone there is more like dudes at a bar talking about basketball players than some deleted scene from High Fidelity.

    It's hard to really spot a time or place in my life where I ever really felt threatened by other people's tastes.  High School had it's moments, but the cool-indie-rock-kid crowd was small and pretty self consciously not very hip and most of them were my friends and bandmates.  I felt the war for what's cool was always being fought online or in New York or some other place where I had no voice.  Even if I really cared (and I did) about the micro trends of New York, it was  so beyond my control or influence, a world that only meant something because I decided it did.  And in small ways it still does, but the ground level arguments about what's hot and what's not never seemed to be as crucial or as mean spirited as they did online.  Actually watching people get riled up and pissy with each other over personal tastes is not usually all that fun or productive.  As much as I like a good spirited debate, once someone get's smug or self important or just plain condescending, I'm usually out.  And living in a place as fractured and contentious as Chicago, I feel like it's more beneficial to be open minded and curious than to have an entrenched viewpoint.  If there's something dilettantish about that, I don't see why that's a particular problem, what's a scene without enough people who are willing or naive enough to try to walk in as many circles as they can?  As long as your interest is genuine, what do you have to worry about?
    I'm not saying this just because I want everyone to be friendly and pat each other on the back.  No, if anything we need to expect more from performers than to just pick a sound and stick to it.  If bands want to narrow their focus and dig deep into a sound (The Walkmen) that's totally credible, enjoyable and rewarding.  But bands who tap into more material, who are taking more risks and seeking out different ways of making music are essential to "the fringe" or whatever you want to call it.  This is why very good bands who make very enjoyable and impressive albums (Surfer Blood, Real Estate, Smith Westerns) can ultimately be a letdown when compared to their influences.  They don't seem to mean much?  I'm on the fence here.  Not every band should straddle themselves with the expectations of recreating music or being utter visionaries and I'm willing to look for originality and fresh ideas from bands who don't tout themselves as THE NEXT THING.  But I agree with Abebe, if you're going to wear your tastes as a merit badge of adventurousness, then I don't see the point in mocking bands for their misadventures. 
    If that makes a lick of sense.  There's also a refreshing Liars interview up and it's good to hear these guys in in top form once again.  A HL review is in the pipeline.

  

Perfecting Sound Forever

   So I just finished reading a fantastic little piece of nonfiction called Perfecting Sound Forever and I highly recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in recorded sound.  Greg Milner follows the history of recorded sound and the contentious debates that continue to surround it.  On the way he touches on critical theory, psychoacoustics, war profiteering, music criticism, media theory, a little bit of Adorno, and some old fashioned fanboy gushing (Pavement get's mentioned a couple times).  I think this book is actually every one of my geeky interests rolled up into one single serving.  Milner is not so secretly an analog enthusiast but he's quick to point out the wild eyed doomsdaying and magical thinking endemic to certain analog purists.  

    One of the most important things I've taken away from the book is the idea that the trajectory of musical technology was not preordained.  There has always been a push towards high fidelity, having the purest representation of a sonic event, as well as a push for innovation, for creating new sounds with new technology.  It's a classic example of a tool built for observation having irrevocable effects on what it observes.  It's also always been a contentious subject, every new technology having it's utopian boosters and dystopian naysayers.  This ongoing battle hit a fever pitch with the advent of CDs.  What's most depressing about the CD chapter of the book isn't that so many people thought digital audio sounded terrible (a lot of people still feel this way) but that it was spurred by an industry desire for a format change.  Neither artists/producers nor consumers were clamoring for a better format, and many of them thought it was a useless ploy.  I always assumed that analog purism was something that came later, an old guy nostalgia but also a punk rock fuck you to a once very expensive medium.  I didn't realize that digital audio was a contentious subject from day one.  Also, the technical standards of CDs (bit depth, sampling rate) were sort of rushed into use.  That is, CDs could have been more hi-def given a couple more months in development.  And of course the greatest irony of all, that digitizing music would eventually be the industry's undoing.

    This got me thinking about the current Tape/Vinyl revivalism.  I'll admit that the most annoying trait about format fetishism is the built in nostalgia.  You kinda wanna shake these people and scream "Get with it, things change, stop trying to escape into the past.  The future is..."  you get the point.  But, there's actually a foward looking element in all this nostalgia.  Becuase you don't have to listen to records and you don't have to put them out, doing either is a conscious act, a rebellion against the norm.  It can seem like a pointless rebellion but it's not just empty posturing.  It's also not an anti-social behavior.  It creates spaces of cultural exchange where there are alternatives to the convenient and disposable (or just fickle) nature of pop culture.  Although it smacks of a fad, I think it really stems from a desire for community, the very same same desire that fuels webforums and blogs.  

    The debate for me isn't just about sound quality.  Yes, I think records sound more musical and therefore better.  But it's also about having the artifact, the fetish object.  Yes, it's conspicuous consumption, no it's not very "green," it's more expensive/not free (This debate could go in circles though.  How much energy does it take to make an Ipod?  How much did that Ipod cost?  Who get's that money?).  But I buy a record, the band makes some money, the label that put out their album makes some money, the record store makes some money, I get something permanent and usually desirable in exchange.  It seems so quaint doesn't it?  Consumerism that doesn't feel like consumerism.

    Far be it from me to say this is the only way to listen or to be actively engaged with music.  But it is effective and actually quite rewarding.  And it's thriving, which is something the industry as a whole is certainly not doing.  Polemics aside, it's a continually interesting phenomenon, especially as it consistently confounds so many people who try to shrug it off.