Sound Design: "Sensory Overload"

I stumbled across this animated short from the "Interacting with Autism" project through Robert Krulwich's blog on the NPR website. In it, we follow a boy on his journey through a nondescript urban landscape made unexpectedly nightmarish by his (and thus our) inability to filter and prioritize the sounds around him.

Sensory Overload (Interacting with Autism Project) from Miguel Jiron on Vimeo.

While I find the visual style compelling, the brilliance (and in fact the focus) of this work is the soundtrack. There is no music- just pure diegetic audio that's been mixed, mashed, and manipulated to overwhelm the listener in a way that might approximate the experience of a person living with autism. Sound designer Katie Gately did an amazing job sculpting a whirlwind of sonic energy from the sounds that we city dwellers are surrounded by, and the success of her effort really sets this apart from the pack.

Sound Design Hero: Diego Stocco

In an era when musicians (electronic and otherwise) have literally thousands of high-quality digital instruments at their disposal, each with tens-to-thousands of immediately accessible preset patches, it's become frighteningly easy to ignore the once crucial art of conceptualizing and executing a "sound idea" from scratch. I've been as guilty as anyone of relying on soft-synth presets as a kicking-off point for my instrument designs, which is why I find the work of artists like Diego Stocco so inspiring.

Here's a glimpse into Diego's process for fabricating the sound of a fairly abstract DTS logo spot:



Beyond his obvious technical proficiency, I'm most impressed by the way he's able to conceptualize the final aural result, then construct the sonic components of that result piece-by-piece. I'd love to know how solid his ideas were pre-recording: did he have a firm idea of what he wanted from the beginning and stick to it, or did his ideas evolve in the process?

Mr. Stocco also works on less-abstract (but no less compelling) sound pieces, including music for soundtracks. Here's a short piece showing the construction and recording of his "Experibass":



Sound design has become a larger and more important part of my compositional process as I've become a more experienced producer, and it's incredibly exciting for me to learn about how others are using non-traditional (or perhaps more-traditional-but-since-forgotten?) sound sources and recording techniques to create truly original music.

For a start on more about Diego Stocco, check out his YouTube channel and his Bandcamp page.