Riding the waves 🏄♀️
Daily sound design prompts
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When I was a kid, I used to play piano — badly and reluctantly, but still: I could pick my way through the first few bars of Coldplay’s Clocks if I needed to. My mum would gently encourage me to sit down and practise every day, whether I wanted to or not.
Since writing about developing my creative practice late last year, I’ve been trying to take that approach to sound design (albeit with a lot less moaning at my long-suffering mother). It’s an area of audio production that I want to get better at — both technical ability and a creative approach to rendering ideas and scenes in sound.
What I’ve found is most helpful is trying not to get too caught up on where the scene or sketch might end up, what eventual purpose it’s going to serve, but just to make a quick thing, use a plug-in, layer some samples — every day. Creative prompts have been really useful in getting things flowing.
So here are 10 simple sound design prompts to try:
Pick a scene from your favourite book and sound design it.
Make a montage from voice memos friends have sent you.
Dig into archival tape and make a sound experiment (here’s an NPR guide to finding archival audio).
Find a YouTube clip - maybe a music video, maybe a commercial - mute it, and come up with your own soundtrack.
Make your own escapist soundscapes – desert, beach, city - and imagine how the sounds would change as you moved through the landscape.
Sound design a verse by a poet you like (a couple of my faves at the minute are Ocean Vuong and Hera Lindsay Bird).
Create an underwater scene.
Use a random word generator to come up with eight words, using those as the search terms for samples in Freesound or Soundly. Then make a soundscape using those eight layers.
Sound design a season. Spring in the city? Winter in the mountains?
Sound design a scene full of suspense – what effects would load it with tension?
As an example, I kinda combined prompts 2 and 6 to come up with this:
Happy making!
These are beautiful prompts!