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fingaudioart · 7 years ago

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Making Complex Sound Design that Isn’t a Mess

I think there's something many radio producers are reluctant to admit: we humans are, at heart, visual creatures. It is far easier to navigate our world without sound than it is without sight.

But I’ll go a step further, and say that without sight, it’s also harder to hear.

Let me explain.

I think anyone who has produced an audio story of any kind has had the experience where you go to record something in the field, and while you knew there was some noise, you could hear what the subject was saying and figured it was fine. However, when you later copied it into your computer and listened to it, you instantly realized it was terrible. The difference is that while you were recording, your eyes were telling your brain what sounds to focus on, and once that visual information was gone, everything became a mess. It's kind of like listening to two conversations at once.

Here's the lesson here: When you are producing audio, you need to really limit the amount of information (i.e., sounds) in the piece so the listener can easily discern what is important.

But sound design is the opposite of that. It's adding sounds to enhance the experience. So the question becomes, how can you add sounds to a piece to enhance it, without it becoming a jumbled mess?

The following is an approach that I use, and I think it’s served me well. It’s not hard and fast rules, and it’s not hard to come with example of pieces that violate it, but it’s a good way to begin wrapping your head around complicated sound design. Also, just to be clear, we’re just going to focus on foley-type sounds. Music/swells/stings are for a different essay.

Three Types of Sounds

First, let’s spend some time analyzing how our brains use and interact with sound in our everyday lives. Not all sounds are the same, and I put them into three categories.

For the first category of sound, I’m going to borrow a term from Walter Murch, “Encoded Sounds.” These are sounds that our brains decode into direct information. The most common form is language: we hear words, which our brains turn into facts and statements. Other sounds do this as well, such as a phone ring, a knock at the door, a kitchen timer beeping.

Most of your audio drama will be composed of Encoded Sounds.

On the opposite end is “Ambience”. In our day to day lives, we are rarely aware of the ambience around us. In fact, if you stop reading this right now and start paying attention to the sounds around you, you will almost definitely notice some sound you hadn’t noticed before, like a trash truck outside or the dishwasher running. We do tend to notice ambiences, however, when they change, like the air conditioner clicking on, or when you turn off your computer.

I like to think that this kind of sound is your brain’s way of reaching out into the distance. This is the part of your subconscious that is listening for on-coming cars as you walk down the street. It’s listening for the tiger in the woods, or the deer coming up the valley. Along these lines, ambiences are a great way to build out the world of your piece. These tell the audience what is happening twenty feet away (or more) from the action.

In between these two are the hardest sounds to work with in an audio drama, what I call “Half-Encoded Sounds.” These are sounds that aren’t distinctive enough to carry complete information. An example of this is if someone puts a box on a table, and we hear the thud. That sound is not an especially distinctive sound, so if you don’t actually see the box as it’s placed on the table--more pointedly, if you aren’t given the information that a box is being put on a table--that thud is hard to understand. Half-Encodes don’t recede into the distance like Ambiences do. Add too many of these into your piece, and they’ll turn your project into a noisy mess.

It’s also worth point out, you can turn a Half-Encode into a Fully Encoded Sound by naming it inside the piece:

[Metallic creak.]

“What was that nosie?”

“That suit of armor just moved!”

Now every time the audience hears that metallic creak, they’ll understand that the armor is moving.

But Half-Encodes do have a power all their own, though. These sounds can give the world of your story a physical dimension. The thud of a box being put on a table can tell us lots of information: Is the box heavy? Do the contents rattle? What’s the table made of?

If there’s a character bush-wacking through the jungle, the sound of snapping twigs not only conveys how thick the jungle is, but it suggests the feeling of the branches on your hands and arms. If a character falls to the ground, the sound of their hands sliding on asphalt makes you imagine the pain. When done right, these almost sounds tickle your spine.

One More Concept

Before we get to how to integrate these different kinds of sounds, let talk about “Story” vs “Aesthetics.” At it’s simplest, “Story” is what’s happening, and the aesthetics are how you dress it up.

A good analogy is in photography...imagine your typical tourist photo of Half Dome in Yosemite. It’s not a great photo, but Half Dome is impressive anyway, and moment or two of study can make you long to be there. Now, when Ansel Adams took a photo of Half Dome, he used aesthetics to make it so your heart aches the moment you see it. You can also imagine a photo with the same aesthetics of Ansel Adams, but of a bunch of stick in the woods--this can be good. But it’s not the same as when the photo has Half Dome in it, and most people will prefer the plain photo of Half Dome to the pretty photo of nothing.

In this analogy, your story is Half Dome. It should be impressive on its own, you should go into production thinking “I can only screw this up.” Your sound design is the aesthetics, and it’s going to take your awesome story and amplify the affect. And while I never say “always” with anything artistic...your story is always the most important part.

Or put another way: Don’t let your sound design fuck up Half-Dome.

Putting It Together

This is going to sound more mathematical than it actually is. But here’ goes.

Step one, build the story using only Encoded Sounds. Your dialog, your narration, and any storytelling-sound effects are how you tell the story, so do a pass using only these elements. This isn’t to say you are plowing through as if there won’t be any sound design...go ahead and leave empty spaces where you anticipate having pauses, pockets of ambience or sound effects, or music swells. But let the performances and story have a moment to stand on its own. Build your Half Dome.

Next, add the Ambiences. Ambiences can add so much to a story with comparatively little work, and a good ambience can replace a lot of detailed foley work. But it’s also important actively work your ambiences. Remember how ambiences are generally ignored, except when they change? So change them up. Make different rooms sound different, even if logically they’d probably sound the same. The goal here is to set your story inside a larger physical world, both by adding detail and by using ambience to add more places.

Last come the Half-Encodes. The goal is to communicate the things that are hard to put into words, and if you’re playing to the strengths of audio, most of the Half-Encodes are going to be sounds that work on our sense of touch. But regardless of which sense you invoke, make sure every sound conveys a feeling or texture.

Half-Encodes need to be used judiciously and deliberately, or they will compete with the story. Don’t feel the need to be literal with your sound design...we don’t need to hear every door squeak on its hinges or every footstep in the house, because we aren’t aiming for literal realism here.

The good news is that a well-chosen Half-Encode can happen alongside the story information without competing. The same way an underscore can play under dialog without creating confusion, well-done sound design can enhance a scene without interrupting it.

To recap: First tell the story, next fill out the world, and then activate the senses.

If only it was always so straightforward.

Fighting Against Footsteps

Let’s do a quick case study on one of the trickiest sounds to use: footsteps.

It has been scientifically proven that footsteps suck in audiodramas. First, the standard pre-recorded footstep from a sound effects library doesn’t actually sound like a normal footstep--it has two click per step, when most of the time in real life we only hear one, and they are recorded in a way that makes them sound really close to the listener--but even so, they are percussive and cut through the mix, and are generally distracting as hell.

To put it into the terms of the essay, they are Encoded Sounds that probably don’t forward the story, and can muddy the information that does forward the story.

So if you have a scene where a character is walking and talking, how do you deal with the footsteps?

The first option I’d suggest is seeing if you can lose them entirely. Again, we aren’t aiming to be literal here, and we are rarely aware of the sounds of footsteps in real life. So get rid of them, if you can.

But let’s say you ditch the footsteps, and now the scene feels dead. Another approach to try to replace the literal sound of the steps with another, softer sound that isn’t as distracting. Maybe you can use the movement of clothing, or a backpack bouncing slightly. Those two sounds are Half-Encodes that can find a magical sweet spot...the audience won’t know exactly what they are hearing, but they understand them enough not to worry about it. As an added bonus, they are very tactile sounds. It may now even be possible to add back in the footsteps, now that the rustling clothes has taken the edge off of them...but you probably won’t need to.

This would be an example of sound design that works almost like an underscore--it’s enhances without interrupting or confusing.

Avoid Scenes in Sonically Boring Places

It’s also worth pointing out: If you’re the one writing the script, you have the ability to find a better setting than a hallway. Put them in a park. In stadium. “Homecoming” put their characters on a ferris wheel during one scene, and I assume the location was largely chosen because it would sound cool.

But if the characters need to walk and talk, and it needs to be in a loud hallway, and one of them needs to be wearing heels...craft the scene so the walking is part of the drama. So have one character catch up to the other. They stop to talk, and one gets mad mad and walks away. The other one chases. You get the idea. Make those footsteps no longer just a sound to fill in the realism, but a device to communicate the drama.

One More Thought

More than almost any other storytelling form, audio drama is a battle for clarity. We’re omitting our most powerful sense, and it’s so hard, it’s not uncommon to get cheesy lines like “Are you point a gun at me?” (No, he’s just happy to see you.)

But that void of information can make audio drama unexpectedly powerful. The audience will bring their own visuals, which they will probably like better than what you had in mind, anyway. Plus, the narrator sounds like they are talking to you, to you personally, and you feel like you are friends with them. And the ability to talk to their sense of touch is so intimate. Two things audio drama does really well: Torture and sex...situations that are so intense, people are nervous about doing them (myself included).

I think a key ingredient in almost any art form is in implying, and audio drama has it by default. If you do it right, a couple of decisions can build entire worlds.

#audiodrama #sound design #audio drama #podcast

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