Voice assistants, podcasts, music for films, commercials and promo videos on TV and YouTube – all this is done by sound designers, which you did not even hear about yesterday.
Tomorrow, high-quality sound design will become a decisive advantage for brands in marketing and promo. We tell who is doing this, how the work is built.
Sound is the new video
Since most B2B and B2C companies use pretty much the same branding tools, they get less as a result of their efforts. To get an edge on this playing field, there is one powerful branding tool that is commonly overlooked and underestimated by most marketers: sound. Obviously, buying the best laptop for music production will not make you a top artist; instead, let’s take a look at the sound design industry and identify the most important skills for a music production professional.
Sound design
Sound design is a technology that creates sound that is efficient and works. For cinema, advertising, interfaces – for all products created by the market and needed by the consumer.
In the face of increasing competition, sound branding is beginning to receive more and more attention. So, 3 years ago, Mastercard introduced a sound corporate identity to emphasize brand identity and recognition.
Already at the time of this release, 27% of US households used smart speakers. By the end of 2022, according to PRNewswire.com, 55% of the world’s households will be using smart speakers, which means making regular purchases with the help of sound – and influenced by sound.
Facebook has had a sound kit since 2015. You will recognize the Netflix splash screen even if you don’t see it, but you will hear it, and the five notes of the Intel logo are familiar even to diehard AMD fans. The SMS notification on your smartphone is different from the Telegram message – and we all remember it on a subconscious level.
Good sound is an integral part of any video, whether it’s an ad, a movie, or a video game. Because the sensations are enhanced by the sound.
If you are watching action, you should be covered like cold water with different sounds so that the picture on the screen matches your feelings. In the gaming industry, sound is doubly important: people play for several hours at a time, so you need to create an atmosphere that will promote efficient passage and immersion in the game world.
Who and how creates branded audio
The sound design process usually involves the manipulation of previously composed or recorded sound, i.e. the creation of music and sound effects. In some cases, the job involves compositing a sound recording to create a specific tone or effect.
Improving or changing sounds is a key part of this process and the sound designer does this with synthesizers, samplers and sound plug-ins, he mixes the sounds with a digital audio workstation.
In some projects, everything can be assembled from libraries with minimal layering and synthesis. In more serious projects, everything should be original. That is, all content needs to be recorded, synthesized and created unique sounds that have not been used anywhere before.
For example, games need unique content, and people who have been in the gaming industry for a long time will easily recognize commonly used libraries. Of course, they cannot be used, or minimal use is allowed for secondary layers.
The same is true in music production. On TV, you can often hear loops taken from Splice (a cloud-based music production and collaboration platform that includes a sample library) in its purest form. For a great artist, this is not comme il faut. Any cool artist tries to make unique content that he has in the song.
In general, the following is important for a sound designer:
- daw knowledge
- work with layering
- live recording and work with recorders
- mixing-mastering
- knowledge of Fmod and Wwise + Unity and Unreal Engine – for the gaming industry