To the people who physically studied sound design in school

[cron]

I did a Sonic Arts degree which was multidisciplinary rather than purely sound design focused, but one thing that sticks in my mind is that you're exposed to a lot of 'philosophies' of sound. We were encouraged to read Barthes and Derrida as much as Roads and Xenakis. I think the most valuable thing was coming away so many different ways of approaching and thinking about sound. It's well worth diving into the heady theoretical realm as well as the practical, because it can be a great source of unusual ideas and ways to execute them, right up to inspiring complete new workflows.

[himalaya]

is there a sound design school?

never heard of one.

MSc in Sound Design @ Edinburgh Uni:
https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgradu ... view&id=51

Sure there are plenty of others.

im not sure if thats what the OP meant tho, i got the impression he was talking about sound design as in preset making for synths... not sound design in the larger/cinematic sense...

“Preset making for synths” is exactly what I teach at one particular University. It’s a module on the MA Audio Engineering/production course.

[emess]

[...]but synth sound design once you know how to make a bass, is having ideas about making that bass in to many different bass sounds.
theres no real secret beyond ideas!

Makes total sense. No point in learning stuff if you don't know what to do with that knowledge afterwards.

where do you actually feel you are weak/failing?
other than taking time to practice, deconstructing others patches, working out over time what each tweak will do to a sound, and being able to decide which tweaks to make.
like anything, it takes time and effort to get to a point where it's almost automatic.

I'm pretty bad at learning in a linear fashion, that's why I have a hard time sticking to programs. What I do enjoy is to dig for gold nuggets and play around with new ideas. That's kind of why I just decided to join this community

[emess]

For the stuff related to just using software products to tweak, custom and tailor sounds for use with DAWs, its more of a personal journey.

A great resource I used is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160403115 ... ecrets.htm

Thanks for sharing man. I actually did come across a PDF version of SOS's entire Synth Secrets series which seemed like an incredible vault of information, but having each article as a web page is super handy.

[emess]

I did a Sonic Arts degree which was multidisciplinary rather than purely sound design focused, but one thing that sticks in my mind is that you're exposed to a lot of 'philosophies' of sound. We were encouraged to read Barthes and Derrida as much as Roads and Xenakis. I think the most valuable thing was coming away so many different ways of approaching and thinking about sound. It's well worth diving into the heady theoretical realm as well as the practical, because it can be a great source of unusual ideas and ways to execute them, right up to inspiring complete new workflows.

That's what I'm talking about! Thanks for your input. Was there any particular book or philosophy that ended up influencing you more than the others?

[resynthesis]

When I worked at York there was a lot of sound design stuff taught in the music dept. Maybe if Oli Larkin looks in here he could tell you a bit about it (he worked in the music dept).

[cron]

I did a Sonic Arts degree which was multidisciplinary rather than purely sound design focused, but one thing that sticks in my mind is that you're exposed to a lot of 'philosophies' of sound. We were encouraged to read Barthes and Derrida as much as Roads and Xenakis. I think the most valuable thing was coming away so many different ways of approaching and thinking about sound. It's well worth diving into the heady theoretical realm as well as the practical, because it can be a great source of unusual ideas and ways to execute them, right up to inspiring complete new workflows.

That's what I'm talking about! Thanks for your input. Was there any particular book or philosophy that ended up influencing you more than the others?

Microsound by Curtis Roads had a huge influence on the things I was doing at the time. It's nominally a book about granular synthesis, but it also encourages you to think about time scales in a different way: from the infinitely long to the infinitely short and everything in between, considering all of equal importance. It inspired a non-real time, audio editing heavy workflow. I was making this stuff I called 'twitch ambient' where I'd interrupt long drones with little flurries of attention grabbing edits and try to have something going on in every time scale. This single-source (I was quite into that too) track from is the only surviving example. The opening is a bit embarrassing in retrospect, but I'm still pleased with the rest. https://soundcloud.com/charityqueen/sev ... nd-effects

Roads latest book Composing Electronic Music is a bit more comprehensive and has a lot of jumping off points. It's very much geared toward acousmatic music, but you can apply the ideas pretty much anywhere.

[emess]

Microsound by Curtis Roads had a huge influence on the things I was doing at the time. It's nominally a book about granular synthesis, but it also encourages you to think about time scales in a different way: from the infinitely long to the infinitely short and everything in between, considering all of equal importance. It inspired a non-real time, audio editing heavy workflow. I was making this stuff I called 'twitch ambient' where I'd interrupt long drones with little flurries of attention grabbing edits and try to have something going on in every time scale. This single-source (I was quite into that too) track from is the only surviving example. The opening is a bit embarrassing in retrospect, but I'm still pleased with the rest. https://soundcloud.com/charityqueen/sev ... nd-effects

Roads latest book Composing Electronic Music is a bit more comprehensive and has a lot of jumping off points. It's very much geared toward acousmatic music, but you can apply the ideas pretty much anywhere.

Awesome track. I love how you exploited the stereo field and built tension from very few elements blended with effects. Plus the granular textures are super gratifying to listen to. I checked the Kindle version of Curtis Roads' latest book and it seems like a great read, thanks for the recommendation

[vurt]

well thanks for that
i didn't know roads had done a new book
micro sound was a good if intense read, often still refer back to sections

[telecode]

Thanks for the Curtis Roads info. I did not read it yet.

Everyone, feel free to add any more such academic type resources you can think of. Be it computer music, or synth music related. I am trying to compile a list.

[fmr]

An old book that I read and found very good, by the guy who started all this: Pierre Shaeffer. I have the original in French, but the link points to an English translation: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520294 ... al-objects

[Shabdahbriah]

Designing Sound (The MIT Press) Hardcover – August 20, 2010
by Andy Farnell

Sound Synthesis and Sampling, Third Edition (Music Technology) 3rd Edition
by Martin Russ

Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music 1st Edition
by Joanna Demers

[cron]

well thanks for that
i didn't know roads had done a new book
micro sound was a good if intense read, often still refer back to sections

Composing Electronic Music is much more accessible throughout. Huge parts of Microsound were dedicated to algorithms and code and the like IIRC (my copy is mouldering in a friend's loft along with most of my uni-era books), and there's not really any of that in Composing Electronic Music. It's very much about aesthetics and practice. It expands a lot on the chapters and discussions I found most useful in Microsound.

Thanks for the Curtis Roads info. I did not read it yet.

Everyone, feel free to add any more such academic type resources you can think of. Be it computer music, or synth music related. I am trying to compile a list.

Trevor Wishart's On Sonic Art is a great read, but quite difficult to find these days. The appendices and sound examples mostly describe processes available in Composer's Desktop Project which recently went freeware, but the book itself is more about aesthetics.

Michel Chion's Audio-Vision (still in print at sensible prices!) is dedicated to sound in film, but is an absolutely cracking read with lots of relevant ideas for musicians. Chion is also a composer so naturally this sensibility bleeds into his approach. I haven't read Schaeffer's Treatise on Musical Objects suggested earlier which is pretty poor form for me given that it's arguably the ur-text, but Chion dives into one of Schaeffer's ideas in the Treatise about modes of listening and their applications which I found very interesting/helpful.

Stockhausen's How Time Passes is a short essay from the time he was obsessed with serialising (as in serialism) everything, and his approach in which he considered time and pitch to be the same thing happening on different time scales provides great food for thought beyond his goal of finding a unified means of serialising them. Roads and later writers greatly expanded these ideas when granular synthesis made it easy to play with the pitch/rhythm boundary that lives between around 10 and 30 Hz.

[resynthesis]

+1 for Trevor Wishart. It is available as an ebook but it's at the usual (daft) CRC / Routledge price of about £70!

[BONES]

There are certainly sound design programs out there, though these are usually part of film programs, where you would get, for instance, an MFA in film production with an emphasis on sound design.

I'm not sure whether that's the kind of sound design the OP is interested in specifically, but those programs definitely exist.

Yeah, that's a very different kind of sound design to what people here think of when they hear the term. There's even an Oscar for it, I think.

Hey gents. I merely assumed that if you were to study sound engineering or music production at school, there would be classes on synthesis and sound design. I never meant to say a whole program oriented toward that one topic.

Believe it or not, "sound design" is a relatively recent invention. For decades people just made patches for their synths because it was basically impossible to share patches, you got what came with your instrument and anything you changed you saved in your instrument and that's where it stayed. Nobody thought of it as a specialist skill or even anything worth separating from the rest of the process. It's really only since soft synths started to sport their own preset browsers, so you could actually work with hundreds of presets, that it's become a thing in its own right. That's why I find it impossible to take someone who thinks of himself as a sound designer seriously. It's a made-up job and that's how I will always see it. That people are stupid enough to pay for banks of patches continues to bemuse me.

synth sound design once you know how to make a bass, is having ideas about making that bass in to many different bass sounds.
theres no real secret beyond ideas!

This, which is why I have made it bold. It's not science, it's art. You have to go with the flow, do what feels right. Don't make it technical, beyond basic knowledge of how synthesisers work and how the instrument you are programming works.