Sound Design
Sound design is the practice of creating and shaping sound purposefully for a given context.
Symbolic vs Expressive
Symbolic sound — sounds that carry agreed meaning: alarms, notifications, status tones. The meaning is learned. A beep means something happened.
Expressive sound — sounds that communicate through their own qualities: texture, rhythm, dynamics. The meaning is perceived. A sound that increases in pitch as you approach something communicates proximity through its own behavior.
Producing
Sound can be recorded and played back, or generated from scratch.
Sampling — playback of recorded sound. A sample can be triggered, looped, read from different positions, and altered in speed and pitch.
Additive synthesis — a tone built by summing sine waves, each partial with its own frequency and amplitude.
Subtractive synthesis — a rich source waveform shaped by removing frequencies with filters.
Processing
Shaping sound after it is produced.
Filtering — boosting or removing frequency ranges to change tone.
Reverb and delay — adding reflections and echoes to place a sound in a space.
Distortion — adding harmonics by overdriving the signal.
Modulation — varying a parameter over time with an oscillator, as in tremolo, vibrato, or chorus.
Explore
- Learning Synths — interactive introduction to synthesis and sound parameters
Related
Linked from
- Foley ArtFoley is the reproduction of everyday sound effects added to film, video, and other media in post-production.
- Furniture MusicMusique d'ameublement (furniture music) is a term coined by French composer Erik Satie in 1917 for music composed to be actively ignored.
- MappingMapping is the design decision of how one parameter space connects to another — how an input drives an output.
- PsychoacousticsPsychoacoustics is the study of how humans perceive sound — the relationship between the physical properties of a sound wave and the subjective experience of hearing it.
- SoundSound is a mechanical wave — a vibration that propagates through a medium (air, water, solid matter) as a series of compressions and rarefactions.
- GlossaryKey technical and conceptual terms used in this course.
- Ableton LiveAbleton Live is a digital audio workstation (DAW).
- MaxMax is a visual programming environment for music, audio, and multimedia, developed by Cycling '74.
- PlugdataPlugdata is a free, open source visual programming environment based on Pure Data (Pd).
- Week 6Lecture + Design Workshop2 Jun