The New Sound Ideas Blog
This is the perfect space for sound ideas.

January 2023

We are delighted to introduce Randy Thom, a prolific and well-respected Director of Sound Design, Supervising Sound Designer and Re-Recording Mixer as the guest blogger for Sound Ideas. Randy is one of the best in the field with Oscar, Emmy and Grammy nominations to his credit; as well as receiving C.A.S. Career Achievement and MPSE Career Achievement awards. You can learn more about Randy here: https://www.skysound.com/people/randy-thom/

Using Layers to Make One Sound

Randy Thom Guest Author

Using Layers to Make One Sound
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I’m working on a project now that needs a certain kind of creature voice. It’s an animated film, and this particular creature character should sound variously grumpy, fierce, funny, and endearing. That’s a huge performance range. It isn’t a “language,” just animal sounds, but has to feel a bit like a language. The voice needs lots of character, but it also must sound like an animal. Most animals don’t have a wide character range. Big challenge!
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Characteristics like funny, endearing, and even grumpy are vocal qualities we normally associate with smooth “tonal” sounds: coos, whimpers, hums, etc. But they often don’t sound “animalistic.” The animal part usually comes from rough, glottal sounds with a big “noise” (complex, uncorrelated waveforms) component.

Layering: Getting the best of both worlds: tonal and noise.
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So how to get the best of worlds, the tonal parts and the noise parts, and make it seem like one thing? Layering. But simply finding a tonal vocal from a puppy (or a person trying to sound like a puppy), and a rough and raspy vocal from a cheetah, then playing them at the same time will rarely work. It will usually sound like two voices, not one. This is where some sound manicuring comes in.

Begin the experimenting by simply playing various raspy and tonal vocals at the same time. Line them up on adjacent tracks in ProTools or some other program, and just play them. It’s very likely that if you have twenty combinations like that, at least one or two will play together perfectly, at least momentarily, and that will give you ideas about how to make additional successful combinations.

Getting more meticulous and methodical about it:

Try starting the tonal and the raspy elements at exactly the same time, and/or ending them at exactly the same time.

Try fading either one in, or fading either one out, so that there is a gradual transition.

Having “attack” moments in both sounds will often be the main thing that makes them feel like two separate sounds rather than one unified sound.
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Try modulating the tonal element in a “granular” (bumpy) way that feels similar to the bumpiness happening in the raspy element. You can to this with a tremolo plug-in, or by doing lots of rapid volume graph manipulation.

None of this is quick, and quite a bit of your success will depend on accidents you didn’t anticipate, but that’s true of all art.
 
And this approach can be used when creating all kinds of sounds with combined elements: explosions, vehicle bys, laser blasts, wind, etc.
 
Have fun experimenting!

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How To Continue To Beat Your A.I. Competitor

Randy Thom Guest Author

Continue to Beat Your A.I. Competitor

A.I. is not going away, and it will improve at doing sound. I think eventually it will be better at it than any human. That’s the bad news for all us humans who want to make a living in the long run as sound designers, sound editors, sound mixers.

The good news for us is that for at least a while, A.I. will continue to be crappy to mediocre at it, for two reasons. We can exploit those two deficiencies, and beat A.I, for now, using it as a tool whenever it suits us.

The sound jobs where the bosses don’t really care at all about the quality of sound in their projects will quickly fall to A.I. But the jobs where the bosses do care, at least a little, are defensible positions for us for some years to come if we remember and get better at these two things:

Transcend the obvious to tell the story...

First, it doesn’t “know” yet how to transcend the obvious. By “obvious,” I mean what we used to call “see a dog, hear a dog,” meaning that if there is a dog on the screen, and you’re the sound editor, put some dog sounds in. A great sound editor/designer finds ways to go beyond what is minimally required in order to tell a more interesting story.

If the dog happens to turn its head, create a sound to motivate that turn. A.I. isn’t currently smart enough to do that. Or use a vocal sound for the dog that isn’t actually a dog, but close. It’ll be plausible as a dog, but it will also have an exotic, unexpected feel that draws the listener in. Maybe it’s a fox vocalization, a wolf, or a hyena breath.

We humans love little question marks hanging in the air, because we’re all about making up stories with the limited info we have at hand, or ear.

Finding/making sounds that have an oblique relationship to the action in a film/video is almost always a good strategy anyway. A roaring engine can often be plausibly enhanced by a roaring animal or a roaring wind. Wind for a mysterious place will take on more character and be more mysterious if it contains human whispers. A wild, out of control, screeching rocket can be enhanced by chalk squeaking on a blackboard, as I did for the film The Right Stuff.

Only a clever user of A.I. will know to use these kinds of quirky prompts. Be that clever user.


Second, the most important and most difficult part of our job is not using gear to generate and manipulate sounds. It’s using our ears, eyes, minds, and mouths to communicate with our bosses and colleagues. A.I. isn’t smart enough yet to do that either. You can give it a prompt, but it’s not sophisticated enough to ask you a question about the prompt, or to read between the lines of the prompt, or understand your particular prompt quirks.

You are not likely to truly please a director with your work until you know that person at least a bit. The social, interpersonal skill set isn’t taught in sound schools, and it sure isn’t programmed into A.I. that’s doing sound… yet.


So, don’t use the obvious sound, unless you know your boss wants you to use the obvious sound. And train your ears to listen even better to the speakers that matter most: the
speakers otherwise known as your bosses and colleagues.

I will dive deeper into beating A.I. at the creativity game in new articles soon.

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Curating Accidents and Mistakes

Randy Thom Guest Author

Curating Accidents and Mistakes

As sound designers and mixers we struggle to get some level of control; control of our working situations and our tools. The funny thing is, sometimes not precisely controlling the tools we work with can lead to the most interesting results. Often an imprecise tool is exactly what we need. Like this one.

Tools of the Trade?

I’ve been doing more and more landscape painting over the last decade or so when I’m not working on movies. I’m not a great painter, but I’ve learned lots of things about it by diving in and giving myself permission to make lots of mistakes, then doing my best to figure out what each mistake can teach me.

What we can learn from impressionist artists...

This is part of a painting by Paul Cezanne. If you want to appreciate the beauty of a painting it’s rarely a good idea to look at it extremely closely, but that’s what I suggest you do with this one. It’s basically all “mistakes” and “accidents,” but Cezanne curated each one very, very carefully. If you zoom in far enough so that any of these individual apples fills the screen, you wouldn’t even guess you were looking at an apple. It’s just a seemingly random bunch of shapes and colors. But the overall result when you look at the whole thing from a distance is a stylized, beautiful, and compelling Impressionist masterpiece.

So, what’s the lesson here for sound?

I believe it’s best to think of sound design as more of an impressionist art form than one focused on realism. The goal should not be to try to reproduce reality. It should be to offer a twist on reality that expresses a set of emotions helpful to the overall storytelling.

Employing the most precise tools and using them in the most controlled way in every moment isn’t the best way to find those useful twists. Learning how to curate your mistakes and accidents is a better approach.

When I’m working on the sound for a shot of trees blowing in the wind, I never start by adding a sound for each limb moving, one at a time. I find a recording of wind-blown trees, and arbitrarily lay that up to the picture. There will almost always be at least one or two moments where something in the sound speaks to the visuals in a way I could not have matched by cutting each limb separately. Conversely, there will always be visual elements that aren’t covered by the general tree sound. I then try a similar approach, putting another, slightly more focused sound in rough sync with the moment I need to cover. Very often another piece of magic happens, and a sound I wouldn’t have thought to look for will express exactly what I need to express about that moment.

I’ve used this approach with the waves in Cast Away, the bicycle disintegrating in Forrest Gump, Elastigirl stretching in The Incredibles, and the bathroom plumbing going crazy in the Super Mario Bros. Movie.

​A rough brush, applied quickly, then carefully edited. It works!

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Avoiding Spectral Logjams

Randy Thom Guest Author

Avoiding Spectral Logjams

Having designed, edited, and mixed the sound for hundreds of action sequences, I can testify that the biggest problem to overcome is usually having too much sound.

The “too much sound” comes in several forms. The most basic one is simply having too many simultaneous, individual sounds competing for attention. We sound designers tend to be afraid of having produced too few sounds for a given sequence, and in trying to allay that fear, we produce too many.

The classic mistake is to throw several mediocre sounds at a given moment in the hope that when they play together some kind of magic will happen to turn the moment into something better than mediocre. It rarely does, and you wind up with a bunch of average sounds masking each other into noise. The solution is to have fewer sounds and better sounds. That’s where creativity is necessary, as opposed to throwing a ton of gunk at the canvas and praying the mixer will somehow make it beautiful. Yep. I’ve been guilty too.

"Too much sound" is something more specific than too many sounds...

But another form of “too much sound” is something more specific than too many sounds, it’s too much sound in a given spectrum. In my experience, the part of the audio spectrum between about 200Hz and 800Hz is usually not the problem. The two problem areas tend to be below 200Hz and above 1K, especially above 3K.

For some reason we often conclude that low frequencies and high frequencies are where most of the drama is in sound effects, that those parts of the spectrum are the ones that get people’s attention. So, we pile it on in those areas in action sequences: constant booming bass that feels like low-passed pink noise and constant highs that basically feel like unrelenting, uncorrelated white noise. It’s not dramatic, dynamic, or even coherent. It’s just damn loud.

My recommendation for how to avoid this common, nasty situation that doesn’t sound good and will usually get you into trouble with Directors (or whoever is creatively in charge) is to not only reduce the number of simultaneous sounds, and to come up with individual sounds that have more natural intrinsic drama, but also to listen carefully for unnecessary sonic competition in particular frequency ranges.

Certain sounds will have something stellar going on in the highest frequency bands. Showcase that sound by filtering or eq’ing down the high frequencies in any other simultaneous sound that could mask the star of the moment. Same for the low end. The subwoofer can shine, but not if you neutralize it by sending three, six, eight sounds to it simultaneously.

​Lots of this happens in the mix, of course, but my advice is to save the mixer some time by preparing sounds so that when all the faders are initially put up; the mixer isn’t confronted with a wall of blasting meaninglessness.

Good Luck!

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Sound Design and AI

Randy Thom Guest Author

Sound Design and Artificial Intelligence

As I write this in late April of 2024, artificial intelligence has not had a significant impact on sound effects design for film, video, or games. But I specify the date because I expect the situation to change in the not-too-distant future. A.I. is already being used in various kinds of voice and music work, with varying degrees of success.

The most promising use of a.i. for sound effects that I know of has been done by a company called ElevenLabs. https://elevenlabs.io/ai-sound-effects-for-sora But their process is not available yet. They say they have about 11,000 people on their waiting list.

ElevenLabs have posted a demonstration in which they claim to have generated sound effects for a series of videos produced by Open A.I.’s “Sora” program, which creates moving images from a text input. The quality of the sound design in the ElevenLabs Sora demo is mediocre at best in my opinion, but the fact that they can do it at all is impressive.

Legal and Ethical questions...

As with all forms of A.I., there are lots of legal and ethical questions that need to be addressed. One of the foremost has to do with compensating the individual people and companies who produced the material used to train the a.i. Another major issue is the number of human jobs that will be eliminated if and when, most likely when, A.I. does begin to make a serious impact on sound design work.

To be honest, if I could make A.I. go away, I would. But it won’t go away. It will inevitably get more and more sophisticated, eliminating more human jobs in the process. My advice to people who have a career or want a career in sound design is to learn everything you can about A.I. for sound. That will put you in the best position to use it, instead of being replaced by it.

The jobs on projects at the low end of the budget scale will be the first lost to A.I. That’s a shame, because it’s those projects where people new to the industry usually get their foot in the door. The high-end, high-profile projects will be the last to adopt A.I. sound design because they can afford the added value they get from human creative involvement.

The creative level of the sound work in the existing Sora videos is what I would call “see a dog, hear a dog.” Obvious and not very interesting interpretations. You can outdo the current and near-term future level of A.I. sound design by going beyond the obvious.

If you are seeing a truck traveling down a road, don’t settle for finding or making an audio recording of that kind of truck. Make the truck a character by using non-obvious elements in addition to the obvious ones, and by finding ways to add believable dynamics to the sound that will contribute to the story by tweaking the imagination of the audience.

That level of sound design creativity won’t be in A.I.’s repertoire anytime soon.
 
 
Sound Ideas and A.I

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