Music and Sound: An Optimistic and Efficient Future with Nick Olsouzidis

Nick Olsouzidis landed his first job in Soho, London some 13 years ago and worked through the ranks to become a senior sound designer at Big Buoy.

While there, he helped establish a strong sound and music department, mixing and composing for global campaigns for clients such as British Gas, adidas, Nike, Rolls Royce, Lexus, Red Bull, Sephora, L’Oréal, Argos, Tesco and NatWest.

In 2024 he went freelance and worked for various established sound studios in and around Soho, helping to craft campaigns for some of the most recognised ad agencies in the industry.

A year later, he has now joined Nomad, where he’s found his new creative home. It’s a great culture fit for Nick – he’s working alongside some of the best talent in town.

LBB> When you’re working on a new brief or project, what’s your typical starting point? How do you break it down and how do you like to generate your ideas or response?

Nick> It all starts from having conversations with the creatives and/or the director. Naturally, you get a feel of what is important to them, what is a priority, what isn't and so on. If you know me, you know I do talk a lot (ha!), but this is the time to listen. If you are lucky, all parties leave those initial discussions with a deeper understanding of what the next steps should be to get us closer to making every job sound as good as it possibly can. The earlier these conversations start, the better.

Short form work (advertising, I guess) has different workflows than feature films and short films, and sound design has different workflows than composing music. Every step of the way I ask myself, ’is this the logical thing to do next?’. Not only creatively, but also in terms of workflow, time management and hitting important deadlines.

LBB> Music and sound are in some ways the most collaborative and interactive forms of creativity - what are your thoughts on this? Do you prefer to work solo or with a gang - and what are some of your most memorable professional collaborations?

Nick> Nothing makes me happier than sitting alone for hours in a dimly-lit, windowless room and then emerging two days later without ever having slept, asking important questions like ’where am I?’ and ‘what am I doing with my life?’.

Joking aside, sound and music is by its nature a very collaborative job. I am lucky at Nomad to have film editors/VFX/grading and of course, producers, all under one roof. Clients that do their full post with us can move from room to room and ‘be there’ where needed. I have many lovely memories working ‘together’ with people to make the finish line, be it with other engineers and colleagues, or with clients staying late through the night in the studio with me.

LBB> What’s the most satisfying part of your job and why?

Nick> Well, it depends. Every stage of the work can have incredibly satisfying moments.

If I was to pick one, it would be the moment after I have spent hours and hours trying to work on something and make it great, and then the first comments from creatives come in and I read that everybody ‘loves it’ and is ‘on board’.

Of course, there will always be feedback, tweaks, changes, and yet more changes, but when the first feedback comes in and it's super positive, you know that ’you got this’ and you get that reassuring feeling that everything will be OK.

In a philosophical sense, this is all we ever seek – safety. The feeling that we are safe physically, emotionally, professionally, and creatively.

LBB> As the advertising industry changes, how do you think the role of music and sound is changing with it?

Nick> God knows it's changing, and it's changing fast.

I am by no means ever the optimist and all that, but in this instance, I have to say I am very optimistic for sound and music in the long term. Commercially speaking, recorded music and ‘post sound’ has already seen the worst. I will spare our readers a full analysis of how recorded music got decimated with the likes of Spotify and how the budgets for sound in post have dwindled. However, the appetite for great work that engages people will never go away. It will be a bumpy road, but I am positive once the AI craze calms down a bit, people will realise that if you want to keep the quality of work above a certain threshold (as high as the threshold is now, anyway), you will struggle tremendously to make it more efficient and more competitive in price than what it already is.

In many instances, a single composer writes, produces, mixes and masters all their work with incredible results. A single sound designer often records foley, does the necessary ADR, tracklays SFX and mixes the entire job on their own.

Of course, you still get teams of people involved when the scale of the work demands it, but producing music and sound for advertising has become an incredibly efficient process. New technologies like plugins that use AI, or in fact, any more advanced platform than what we currently have, will no doubt give us better, faster tools to do our jobs. Companies will be able to produce more ads, agencies will adjust and reassess their offerings, and music and sound people will be here ready to go. Bring it on, can't wait.

LBB> Who are your musical or audio heroes and why?

Nick> That's a tough question!

I grew up listening to Pink Floyd, The Doors, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and all that. Of course I was in a band, playing ‘hard rock’ with my friends, haha! Yes, people in Greece did listen to Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Megadeth etc., and then later on Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and all that – it wasn't just me. I have spent months and months where the only two albums I listened to were ‘Harvest’ by Neil Young and ‘Desire’ by Bob Dylan.

Then I discovered film music is ’a thing’, and for the last 10 years I’ve pretty much only listened to film composers. There are too many heroes to fit in an article: Ryuichi Sakamoto, Shigeru Umebayashi, James Horner, Carter Burwell, Jonny Greenwood, Johann Johannsson, Max Richter… All of them have made me cry just by listening to their music, as well as by making me realise I will, probably, never be as good as them.

LBB> And when it comes to your particular field, whether sound design or composing, are there any particular ideas or pioneers that you go back to frequently or who really influence your thinking about the work you do?

Nick> ‘Sculpting in Time’, by director Andrei Tarkovsky. I used to carry the book in my backpack everywhere I went when I first took a job as a runner in Soho, more than 10 years ago now. The master shares his thoughts about the art of filmmaking, his creative processes, and even discusses solutions he gave to creative and visual problems with specific examples from his films. It gives an incredible glimpse inside the mind of a genius.

It’s admittedly not very useful when your duties involve making tea and fetching lunch haha, but when it comes to sound or music for a picture, it has acted as a point of reference for any creative decision I’ve ever made since. I would highly recommend the book to anyone working in any audiovisual medium, in any capacity.

LBB> When you’re working on something that isn’t directly sound design or music (lets say going through client briefs or answering emails) - are you the sort of person who needs music and noise in the background or is that completely distracting to you? What are your thoughts on ‘background’ sound and music as you work?

Nick> I find it impossible to concentrate with any sort of music in the background when replying to emails or doing any type of ’admin’ work. I have honestly tried, and what happens is I end up focusing on the music and not what I am actually trying to do. I wish I was able to stay focused on the task while an orchestra pours their heart out on a Max Richter piece, but it's just impossible for me.

LBB> I guess the quality of the listening experience and the context that audiences listen to music/sound in has changed over the years. There’s the switch from analogue to digital and now we seem to be divided between bad-ass surround-sound immersive experiences and on-the-go, low quality sound (often the audio is competing with a million other distractions) - how does that factor into how you approach your work?

Nick> The analogue to digital transition happened and clearly digital won… However, as any sound designer/engineer can attest, the amount of even harmonics saturators, tube distortion, and tape emulation plugins in the market just exploded with a myriad of releases and amazing tools. It just goes to show how much we want to ‘add back in’ all that harmonic distortion, noise and saturation we tried so hard to get rid off.

Surround sound immersive experiences are coming to headphones, and soon the retail market will be full of amazing solutions on that front. Noise cancellation peaked, so immersive sound is the natural ‘next step’ in the evolution of casual music listening for the public, which has now adopted noise-cancelling headphones en masse. I don't want to get too technical here, but the technologies to make this happen have existed for many years. It's really all about optimising those technologies and finding ways to produce them at scale and at a reasonable cost.

The era where you pop your noise-cancelling headphones on, you then press a button and your headphones measure your personal ear canal anatomy and make adjustments to deliver immersive sound, all while you sit on a train for your morning commute, is here. It just hasn't been adopted yet by the general public because the big brands have not yet entered the market… but they will… they sure will. It will be a great new epoch for sound recording (surround recording techniques have also been around for decades, just not used that much), mixing and playing back music that anyone will be able to enjoy on the go.

LBB> On a typical day, what does your ‘listening diet’ look like?

Nick> Believe it or not, I don't listen to ’that much’ music on a daily basis. I will, of course, carefully listen to this or that soundtrack that my favourite composers have released, but the only thing that has been a constant on my daily listening diet for the last three to four years has been the podcast ‘Practical Stoicism’ by Tanner Campbell.

Tanner reads through translations of text that has survived for over 4,000 years, ranging from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, and discusses the meanings and teachings of the ancient religion/philosophy of the Stoics. Some of his guests are titans of classical philosophy and renowned Stoic academics in particular.

People often think being ’Stoic’ is about being strong and resilient as you look pensive outside a window. Stiff upper lip and all that. This can't be further from the truth. Stoicism is all about living in accordance with nature, understanding that you simply have no idea when you are going to die, and making sure that you understand time spent on this planet is only well spent when you strive to develop a virtuous (moral) character. It all starts and ends there – the integrity and virtue of your character.

It’s a great podcast for a good gym workout, and a great conversation opener at parties (no, not really).

LBB> Do you have a collection of music/sounds and what shape does it take (are you a vinyl nerd, do you have hard drives full of random bird sounds, are you a hyper-organised spotify-er…)?

Nick> Vinyl nerd? No.

Hard drives full of sounds? Yes. Terabytes over terabytes of sounds. All the sounds. Give me all the sounds.

Hyper organised Spotify-er? Absolutely. I am obsessed with keeping my Spotify organised. Properly named playlists in properly sorted folders, categorised by medium and/or by composer name. (‘Cinema Soundtracks’, ‘TV Series Soundtracks’, ‘Video Game Soundtracks’, ‘Non-Programmatic Composers’, ‘Baroque’, ‘Classical’, ‘Romantic’, ‘Neo Classical’, and the lists go on… and on).

LBB> Outside of the music and sound world, what sort of art or topics really excite you and do you ever relate that back to music

Nick> It's photography for me. I bought my first DSLR when I was a first-year student with my first money from working at a hotel bar: Holiday Inn’s ’downstairs bar’ in Coventry, of all places. I am the person that always buys a book at the end of a photographic exhibition. You know the sort of books you never get to read or open, but you still buy every time, haha.

London really is the place to be for some of the best photographic exhibitions in the world. I have seen the best of the best: Dorothea Lang, Don McCullin, Sebastiao Salgado, and many, many more.

LBB> Let’s talk travel! It’s often cited as one of the most creatively inspiring things you can do - I’d love to know what are the most exciting or inspiring experiences you’ve had when it comes to sound and music on your travels?

Nick> Controversial opinion: I really don't like to travel. If it was up to me, I would never travel further than a 5 mile radius around my flat in Hornsey.

Fortunately for me, my girlfriend lives to travel. Every destination has sonic topographies of incredible interest to my ears. Street musicians in Cuba, forests and woodlands in Scotland, the Ruta De Los Volcanos volcanic trails in La Palma, San Sebastian's famous Jazz Festival, the sound of crashing waves and wind at Ireland's Cliffs of Moher, I am grateful to have experienced all of these incredible places and their unique sound and music, even if I was kicking and screaming on my way to the airport. As my girlfriend says, I should travel more.

LBB> As we age, our ears change physically and our tastes evolve too, and life changes mean we don’t get to engage in our passions in the same intensity as in our youth - how has your relationship with sound and music changed over the years?

Nick> This is true, and something I have noticed myself over the years. What I have observed is how differently I listen to music and how I approach sound now, compared to when I was younger. I would say I used to listen and ‘understand’ things entirely emotionally.

I like it, or I don't like it. It makes me sad, or it makes me happy. It's full of energy, or it's very slow and calm. Just binary and novice emotional responses which lacked the nuance that an experienced, ‘trained’ ear could give you.

Now I listen to music and sound far more analytically. I can recognise specific chord patterns and use of harmony in music that I love. I can describe the qualities and features of sound design that ‘works’ within a particular job I am working on. I guess growing older gives you the vocabulary and intellectual faculty to express what it is that you love, or what it is that ‘works’ about a certain piece of music, a sound, or an entire mix of sounds. I find this holds true in any particular context, be it casually listening to music or working on the sound design of a project.

Just about the only good thing I can think of that comes with getting older, ha!