The Secrets to Creative Sound Design

Creating the soundscape for The New York Times, ‘The Truth Is Worth It: Fearlessness’ was one of the most creatively challenging and exciting projects I've undertaken in a long time. The task was to evoke the sense of anticipation and risks that this one particular journalist took, yet provoke an essence of the journey arc, without relying heavily on visual cues. The project required a delicate balance between authenticity and imaginative enhancement.

One of the main challenges was to capture the nuanced sounds of all the various environments the story takes us through, from hotel room interviews to war-torn cities and everything in between. I wanted the sound design to be as raw, gritty and as true to life as possible. This helped me create a feeling of unrest within the sound design which leads to a sense of anxiousness and danger. I spent months meticulously layering and editing all the various soundscapes, giving them all their own sonic identity.

A particularly interesting aspect of the film is the typing that flows throughout the piece. I remember spending hours recording various keyboards to find the perfect tone. We wanted it to sound robust and clean – nothing too modern or old. It was important that it had a clear, linear voice throughout to help you follow the text and narrative. 

This project pushed my creativity to new heights, blending real-world recordings with imaginative elements to craft a soundscape that transports listeners into the world of a field journalist.

For creative sound design, there’s my recent work for the BBC and its Paris 2024 Olympics film - ‘Welcome to the City of Love’. Working alongside the BBC Creative team and Nexus Studios director FX Goby, we utilised storytelling, sound effects and audio design to craft an emotive soundscape for this beautifully animated film. The sound design reflects an Olympic athlete’s ‘love’ of their sport and the ‘hurt’ they go through in order to achieve greatness. 

The audio mix needed to reflect and punctuate the theme and story beats. Strains, groans, explosive hits and visceral movements of our athletes gives the film a distinctive power and energy. We then combined this with warmer, more delicate sound design moments to portray feelings of beauty and love. In creating a lightness in the sound palette for the ‘love scenes’, we could then juxtapose this with the dynamic and impactful sounds of the sporting events. The sound design and imagery combine beautifully with an emotive, orchestral re-arrangement of Edith Piaf’s ‘Hymne à l’amour’ by composer Rebekah Fitch, expertly produced by the team at SIREN. All mixed and crafted to create an exciting and colourful film worthy of celebrating the Paris 2024 Olympics. 

For this project, which follows US Olympian Katie Grimes as she takes to the water, sound was key. So much so that directing collective King She (Radha Ganti and Robert Lopuski) made sure to invite the sound design team from Concret Form to get involved early, and brought them along to the shoot.

"One of our great tools in approaching work as filmmakers is sound,” says King She. “We knew that we were trying to create a uniquely sensory experience with the Powerade campaign. The challenge was: how do we convey what our elite athletes experience, but through the medium of sound? They’re training at a consistency and frequency much higher than that of a normal athlete.” 

“We couldn’t imagine finding those sounds in a library of pre-recorded stuff. So we spoke with the agency early on and recommended that our sound designer, Raph, start during prep to create a palette of sounds for our films. And then we would bring him on set to attend the shoot and capture the live recording of location sounds that could compliment his palette and allow for further exploration.

“Fortunately the agency was completely on board with these proposals. And we got brilliant results as a consequence.”

According to Raphaël Ajuelos, sound designer at Concret Form, this made all the difference. 

“Although I don’t usually start this early before the shoot, we crafted custom sound textures that the team listened to while scouting and that the editor had from day one, allowing the sound to help shape the edit,” he says. “Then we flew to set. I was able to bring in Nathan from my team as the production sound mixer. We focused on capturing specific, evocative sounds from the set that we knew would be useful in post. So we barely used any SFX library which made the mix more authentic.”

“We also recorded the talent delivering a line underwater, using a hydrophone, an underwater mic used by biologists to monitor marine life. In a traditional project, it’d have been recorded above water with a standard mic, and then altered in post to simulate an underwater effect.

“As a sound designer, you don’t go on set every day to start thinking about the sound design. So very grateful for this experience which was a bit unusual but in the best possible way.”

Coca-Cola “Masterpiece” was a concept that brought classic works of art to life.  Visually, it maintained the bespoke style of each artist, so it was important that the sound reflect that as well.  Each piece of art needed to have its own sonic signature that felt both believable, and interesting.  Connecting it all together was the bottle itself, which also needed to have its own signature sound transforming from piece to piece.

We decided the only way to approach this was to build the sound palate from scratch.  Rather than just cutting from libraries, we recorded a tremendous amount of new sounds inspired by the pieces.  

The Cubist, for example, couldn’t just be wet paint, that would be too expected.  It needed to have weight and substance.  This ended up being a combination of mechanical devices, toy actuation, rolling dumbbells, rubber stretching, velcro, cardboard movements, and of course some wet surfaces.  All of this was manipulated and edited tightly to feel connected to the motion, giving nuance and character to The Cubist.

The Coca-Cola bottle also required a lot of recording, but it needed to have its own voice.  There had to be an element of magic to it, so we recorded and processed a lot of metallic chimes and glass to give it a signature sparkle to its transformations.

Many times it’s the small details in sound that make the biggest impact.

Squeak E. Clean Studios provided music supervision, an original score, sound design, and the final mix on this super cool HYBE x Geffen collaboration; a short film that served as the bold premier for the new K-Pop girl group Dream Academy. The objective was twofold: enhance the Dream Academy’s still-forming aesthetic, while serving labels Hybe and Geffen’s grand plans for the group’s forthcoming global domination.

Says Nungary: "When I'm working on an ambitious project such as this, I prefer to approach the final mix and sound design like I would a painting: using techniques like blending and hard lines to create a sonic landscape that not only pairs well with the brilliant filmmaking (in this case from visionary Andrew Thomas Huang), but also to help to elevate the film’s visual narrative. It was really fun to challenge myself to create an all-encompassing sonic experience that could seamlessly weave all elements together in a creative way, while also keeping the film moving and pulsing. I wanted to use specific sound design and mix techniques to constantly pull the viewer in and out of a sort of ethereal music video experience."

He adds: "One of my favourite aspects of being a sound designer and mixer is playing with the music track in tandem with the SFX elements. Whether it's using specific music stems and treating them instead as sound design elements, or pitch-matching tonal effects to sound more melodic, I love getting everything to blend and weave harmoniously together."

The end result (with over 1.8 million views and counting) is a seamless cocktail of hyper-contemporary music, dream-like sound design, and a final mix that hums with warmth.

Working on Swatch was a whirlwind. It was realistically my first BIG sound design piece that I had been involved with, and when I say BIG, it was BIG. There was so much going on throughout it. I was getting transported to an alternate reality where circles became squares, and all in different time periods. With multiple music tracks, it was all consuming. The whole spot travelled on and on – the flow of it made it so enjoyable to work on.

The quality of the picture set the bar high, it needed the audio to match it.  Everything needed a sound, and it pushed me into thinking with such minute detail, even down to a quick shot of a dog – all its footsteps are placed in there.

I was going through one wormhole and into another reality, it was so much fun. A proper audio 'journey'.  I was allowed to 'let loose' and play around, twisting sounds until it worked. I loved getting a little silly and adding in tiny Easter eggs sounds! Something I hadn’t really done before but which made my work so much more meaningful was thinking about little bits to hide (and reveal) in there.

Looking back, it was a learning curve to work on and one that I will never forget. It has really helped propel me in the right (audio) direction!

Unimatic x Hodinkee: H Series Limited Edition Collection

A recent job that tested my creativity was ‘Stream Wise’ for Sky, directed by Jon Hollis. With a lynchian style brief, the spot also had an amazing music track, composed by Jon. I set about creating a recognisable yet unnerving atmosphere of a typical flat, with multiple occupants illegally streaming TV across their devices.

Invisible to the streamers, thousands of pixels begin to emerge from the TV, assembling into 'digital criminals'. This was a really fun challenge, creating a sonic identity for these sinister, shadow-like presences swarming throughout the room. I used granular synthesis and mixture of digital noise, telemetry and almost unrecognisable human vocalisations as a base for the criminals. I then made them further undulate in pitch and speed, to match the movements of the pixels as they interact with the occupants’ devices.

 

G . F Smith heritage paper company approached us to produce a unique sound in response to each of the 55 colours in the ‘G . F Smith Colorplan’. These sounds became a soundscape to score an immersive installation entitled ‘Portal’. 

 

Our challenge was transposing each of the 55 colours into original sounds, knowing they would be experienced as part of a multi-channel and multi-sensory immersive paper installation. 

 

All of the instruments are recorded in G major, meaning that any combination of sounds would work harmoniously together. Diving deeper into our ongoing exploration of colour, form, and sound, we transformed the 55 sounds into an original and innovative soundscape that weaves through varying colour spectrums.

 

The ‘Portal’ installation is divided into structures built using multiple individual Colorplan paper boxes, with each structure featuring a different combination of Colorplan shades. Visitors were invited to immerse themselves in a harmony of sounds corresponding to the particular combination of shades within each structure. Through this synaesthetic approach, we challenged the idea that colour can only be experienced visually.

 

These sounds have since been formed into five tracks and pressed to vinyl. You can listen to the Portal album here.

Sound design is often an underappreciated yet essential element in advertising, capable of transforming a narrative and elevating a project beyond the ordinary. In one of my recent projects, the brief was to bring the sound of Germany to life in an ad celebrating the release of the host nation’s Euro kit. This was not just about capturing familiar sounds, but about creating an immersive auditory experience that would resonate emotionally with the audience. 

To achieve this, I conducted extensive research into various atmospheres and took to the field, recording  sounds from specific locations across Germany. The real challenge lay in crafting a seamless mix, as the ad transitioned between dramatically different environments – from the quiet of a library to the roaring energy of a packed stadium. It was crucial to convey the distinct sizes and scales of these spaces while maintaining a consistent emotional energy throughout. 

The project also involved integrating full music stems of a remixed version of the iconic ‘Major Tom’  track by Peter Schilling. The task was to weave this piece into different scenes, moving from the  packed crowd singing in the stadium to a distinctly German techno beat, all while keeping the  transitions smooth and engaging. This project truly tested my creativity, pushing me to explore new  techniques and approaches in sound design. 

The secret to creative sound design lies in following your instincts and crafting great sounds. Sound design is an underappreciated yet vital element in advertising, often overshadowed by visuals, voiceover, and music. The term ‘sound design’ is often used loosely in post-production, but a skilled sound designer with expertise in sound effects and foley can elevate a project.

One example is a spot I worked on for the NFL called ‘Take it to the House’. The challenge was to evoke emotion as viewers followed a young boy across the US to the Super Bowl. We knew this would be the opening Super Bowl spot, featuring Ray Charles’ ‘What I’d Say’. We aimed to immerse viewers in each location with geographically specific backgrounds and grounded the experience by recording the people in each scene. The sound design included sweeteners that enhanced the music’s energy and movement.

This project pushed the boundaries of a traditional commercial, ending with the hero transitioning into the live Super Bowl event. Our innovative approach showcased the immense potential of sound design, and we were fortunate enough to win an Emmy for our work.

Sound design helps to amplify and enhance a great ad’s creative. For action or comedy, sound design should be as loud and wild as the shots and ideas. Or, for ads that emphasise drama and stillness--as in the “Silence is Powerful” ad I sound designed for Kia--sound design is almost all you audibly get to move the ad forward and tell a compelling story. The Kia ads have no voiceover or music; the commercial consisted solely of visuals and sound design. The sound design had to captivate the viewer, share all the right information and story beats, and carve the emotional arc of the ad. Sometimes sound design can seem too subtle to notice while having an enormous impact. The subconscious role of sound design greatly enhances any ad’s story and its character.

The Nothing (a) product launch was a delicate blend of custom music and carefully chosen sound design. What made the project so interesting for us was not only did the sound design need to accurately sync with key visual moments, but we had to sensitively select genre-specific SFX to align authentically with the music. James Brown-style vocal yells, self-oscillating synth lasers, tape delay echos, and of course, the squishy/ASMR squelchy frogs. 

To maximise the effect of the snappy visual edit with its pushing-pulling moments, we treated our full mix as a whole, using plugins on the mix bus to stretch and morph the audio. With unusual reverbs changing our sense of space, or tweaking delay times to create warping tails, and leaning into some full-on mangling with multi-effects like Devious Machines ‘Infiltrator 2’, we tried to complement and heighten the visual impact of the ad. 

We love how bold (and borderline-obnoxious) this advert ended up being. We had so much creative freedom with the music and sound, wanting to match the attitude of Nothing as a challenger brand. It has since been one of Nothing's best performing adverts, with the community response and feedback speaking for itself.

 

This project offered the unique opportunity to create entirely uninhibited, and to explore a predominantly surrealist sonic landscape. The soft, playful, ombré visual world created by the director and DP left a beautiful pocket of space for me to weave in and out of the box of a typical spot by oscillating between heavily effected and dry elements, even including the VO. 

I approached this by employing foley that was reminiscent of nature, trying to evoke the feeling of remembering playful moments. I supplemented this with more surreal synthesised effects to reinforce the feelings of remembrance and playfulness. While of course prioritising the intelligibility of the VO, the spot allowed for the malleability of every element – the music, the VO and the sound design. Because of this malleability, creating a cohesive yet experimental sonic pillar felt very much like solving a puzzle, rather than creating something from nothing: it was about finding the pieces that fit together to properly tell the story sonically. 

For the Eggs Farmers of Canada ‘Play by Play’ campaign, we were tasked with bringing the drama and excitement of sports to the joyful activity of cooking eggs. In 15 seconds, we were challenged with marrying the cinematic visuals of being inside a kitchen with audio that makes you feel as if you were a spectator and an athlete at a sporting event. 

We accomplished this by paralleling hyper-real sound design of authentic soundscapes from various sporting events/broadcasts with the actions and sounds of cooking eggs. Every sound effect had to have well-thought intent, placement and balance to tell the story effectively. For example, in ‘Whisk Whisk Whisk’,  we incorporated the banging of oar locks, their mounts creaking under stress, and the churning of water as we travel with the fork through each stroke in a mixing bowl. To give weight to the turning of an oven dial, we used the sound of chop thudding against a boat and added the spray of water as a knife scrapes across the cutting board, sending ingredients into a waiting omelette. Layered within was also a coxswain barking orders while being careful not to use any discernible language. Not all of these may be noticed consciously, but we believe it’s these subtle details that give sound design that little bit of extra depth and shows clients how much we care about telling their story.

‘Bangarra’, directed by Chloe De Brito, was a particularly special yet challenging piece to work on. The music was such a key part of this that it was crucial to not distract from it with heavy-handed sound design. Instead, I was tasked with making a sound bed that was almost indistinguishable from the score, which helped to emphasise the two worlds we are in. It’s so easy as a sound designer to go all out and jam pack a spot with sounds – it takes a lot of restraint to really pull back what you’re doing and carefully select what you’ll hear and when. 

The key to this piece was blending the ancestral history our protagonist is drawn to, and then moments of present. The mix had to stay cohesive while still being able to emphasise these two distinct worlds. An amazing composer, Arrowbird, wrote an absolutely incredible score and provided stems which gave me the freedom to work in little moments of score in their opposing environment, to hint at what is to come and pull the viewer into the emotion. I used a lot of panning automation on swirls, whooshes and some of the music stems to create this sort of whirlpool effect, like the viewer is getting sucked into the worlds.

For the launch of its ‘fastest’ bib shorts yet, ASSOS tasked Bolder Creative with creating a sequence transforming its rider into the ultimate speed machine. Before even seeing a rough edit of the film, we provided Bolder with a number of sounds from our modular synth to be used during the editing process. This helped create a cohesive aesthetic between visuals and audio from the very start of the post production process. The key challenge was to portray a combination of raw power while maintaining a sense of comfort and effortlessness.

We turned a selection of our modular synth sounds into an intense electronic drum patch, creating a bespoke drum track to show the rapid, hypnotic power of the rider. Other modular sounds were synced to the fast-paced edit, matching the striking visuals. Layering choir recordings into the soundtrack provided a human element to mirror the combination of CGI and live action used in the film. Immersive sound design completed the piece, using foley and designed cloth sounds to enhance the macro level intro of fibres and fabrics, before growing into a hypnotic, intriguing flow of power and comfort.

I tend to take a very layered musical approach to sound design, which was particularly useful in my collaboration with sound designer Ben Swarbrick and music director Lowell Sostomi for the recent Kids Help Phone campaign.

With the sparsely rearranged yet instantly recognisable music of Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’ juxtaposed over the emotional imagery created by the team at McCann Canada, our intent with sound design was to invoke emotion more so than simply support the visuals in a prescriptive, diegetic way.

Subtle, almost subliminal metaphor was a key tool for us across the spot. For example, whale song layered beneath the underwater soundscape of the swimmer cutting through the water, and breeching spray from a blowhole as the swimmer emerges. Elsewhere, a sharp crack of thunder as a young gymnast falls, rumbling in the distance as a doctor delivers the devastating prognosis.

Though blurred behind abstract layers, these sounds work to trigger a subconscious reaction, much like a melody or chord progression in a piece of music conjures a visceral feeling without consideration of why or how. The challenge of supporting the beautifully constructed picture and iconic music with cohesion and poignancy made for a particularly interesting project in support of a very important organisation.

'Piece of Me' was a special project with a sensitive subject, requiring a unique approach to sound design. The project is a music video intertwined with a short film, and balancing the soundtrack with the story was crucial.  Even without the music, the sound design creates a complete film experience. From ambiences (school, traffic, etc.), foley (footsteps, clothing, etc.), sound effects (phone sounds, bicycles, etc.) to the original sound of the film set.

We also experimented with enhancing specific scenes through sound. For instance, in the swimming pool scene, we added an explosion to the underwater impact, transitioning slowly into silence to create a vacuum effect. At the film's climax, we used 'offscreen' car horns to heighten the emotion and tension on the bridge. 

Additionally, we had the actors re-record certain lines and breaths in the studio, subtly blending them with other sound layers to bring the characters closer to the audience, making the story more immersive. The final result is a unique film where viewers are drawn into Sarah’s world by both MEAU’s song and the sounds of the world in which it takes place.

The ‘Number 1 Dad Podcast’ was unlike others we took on. We were tasked almost two years ago with creating a narrative podcast that felt like watching a highly produced documentary, but without the visuals. As sound designers, we are so used to drawing from visual cues to dictate our design, but because we didn't have any visuals to work with, immersing ourselves in this dramatic scene was so important. We drew from a lot of interviews that the host, Gary, had done over the years, and at the top of episode five as Gary is recounting the story of the US marshals raiding his home, we really wanted to put the listener in the scene. We found ourselves working somewhat with our eyes closed and imagining every possible sound that could stick with a 10-year-old kid as they saw their house being torn apart. This, with some really poignant scoring, really drove home a serious moment in an otherwise comedic project.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash