Sonic sketches 🐚
Developing your sound design practice
I’ve never been a particularly artistic person. I have a decent eye, but when it comes to translating that into some kind of creative practice – painting, ceramics, drawing, whatever – the vision sort of falls apart in my hands. (When friends think I’m being overly self-deprecating about this, I send them the “illustration” I made of a nude male model during a life drawing class for a friend’s hen party … I horribly disfigured the poor guy).
But over the last few years I’ve felt a creative spark when it comes to audio. It was like a light bulb being switched on: ohh, you can be artistic with sound. I can’t work with clay or pencils or paint brushes, but waveforms and samples and music and layering? That I can do.
As part of developing my sound design abilities and expanding my creative approach to audio, I gathered a few prompts and practices that I’d love to share with you here…
1) Mystery Box
Constellations is a community of listeners as well as a podcast. They also have the brilliant Mystery Box, “a weird world of eccentric experimentation and sonic tomfoolery” which invites short contributions.
2) Creative prompts
Taking my cue from creative writing prompts, I’ve started making little sound sketches based on various jumping-off points – there’s tons of writing prompts out there. Here’s a couple of festive examples for you:
You hear a large group of Christmas carolers down the street heading toward your house.
When the roads are covered in snow, the sound that can stand out the most is the sound of silence.
3) Technical prompts
Then there’s stuff to beef up your technical DAW/designing skills. Here are a couple of examples:
Make something sound underwater.
Make a sound exclusively with layers from freesound.org; use at least 10. Use a random word generator for the search terms.
4) Creative archive
This is one of the many little sparks of imagination that I picked up from the super-talented sound designer and multimedia artist Ariana Martinez. During a workshop, Ariana mentioned that they keep a record of visual imagery, photos - anything that catches their eye – the intention being that you never know where ideas for an audio piece might come from. I keep my own version as a photo album on my phone:
5) Audio Playground
Many of you are probably already familiar with Sarah Geiss’ fantastic Audio Playground, which sends audio assignments to your inbox. Plenty of jumping off points here for experimenting in sound.
Happy sonic sketching!
Workshops and events
🎄 Edit Mode: Story Editor Training for Narrative Audio is now open for applications, with an info session happening on 17 December. The intensive training and mentoring from Sound Path / AIR aims to diversify the audio industry’s editor pool.
🎄 The Above the Fray fellowship gives early-career radio journalists the opportunity to cover important but under-reported global stories for NPR. The deadline is 15 January.
🎄 PodPeople is hosting a free resume building and advice webinar for audio creators as part of its holiday event. Happening on 16 December.
Jobs
🎁 Audio Storytelling Curator ~ Tribeca Enterprises ~ New York
🎁 Executive Producer, Audio ~ Condé Nast ~ New York
🎁 Associate Producer (and others) ~ WBUR ~ Boston
🎁 Associate Producer ~ Kast Media ~ Remote with US team
🎁 Loads of roles! ~ Wonder Media Network ~ New York
🎁 Podcast Producer ~ NOVA Entertainment ~ Sydney, Australia
🎁 Podcast Content Director ~ Media Works ~ Auckland, NZ
🎁 Podcast Script Writer ~ Today I learned: Climate ~ Cambridge, MA or remote
What I’m listening to
🎧 Mother Tongue: absolutely stunning piece from Axel Kacoutié on BBC 4.
🎧 KCRW Radio Race: enjoyed digging into the pieces from this year’s Radio Race.
🎧 10 Things That Scare Me: I’m new to this pod; loved Hrishikesh Hirway’s ep.
Thanks for reading folks! If you enjoy the newsletter, I’d so appreciate you forwarding it to an audio-loving friend or colleague.