Above & Beyond: Re-examining the role and responsibilities of the future sound designer with the experts at Audity
At the beginning of this year, we kicked off our Above & Beyond talks with Max Björverud, who has used sound as a way to explore the intersections between tech and design. We recently revisited the role of sound within the field of design when we were joined by Rainer Hirt and Martin Schiessler from audity | Brand & UX Sound Company, a company that blends sound expertise with design thinking to create meaningful brand and UX sounds. Through a discussion that was equal parts entertaining and insightful, the guys at Audity gave us a deeper look into the past, present, and future roles that sound plays in our daily lives.
Sound is something so innately tied with being human that it’s a lot like breathing. In other words, we tend to tune in and out the sounds around us the same way we tend not to actively pay attention to every inhale and exhale we take. Sound possesses the power to make life richer and easier, but only when the right sound is used at the right time and place. If deeply cultural practices and behaviors are built upon sound (or the absence of it in the case of deaf culture), then the field of sound design requires expertise far beyond simply being able to hear. This is where sound specialists like the folks at Audity come into play.
Our discussion with experts like Rainer and Martin brought forth a new appreciation and awareness for the importance of sound design. Highlighted below are some of their thoughts on interesting fields within sound design as well as some predictions on how they might develop over the next few years.
🚗 Science Fiction of the past influences the sounds of the present
Like with many creatives (including our own CTO!), Rainer finds inspiration in science fiction. He showed us how science fiction has been influencing sound design for decades by comparing the sound of flying cars from the 1982 film “Blade Runner” to that of electric vehicles of today. In addition to being more environmentally friendly, electric engines are also less noisy than combustion engines, which can have positive effects like decreasing noise pollution caused by traffic. But, totally silent vehicles can be deadly to both drivers and pedestrians who cannot hear them coming. Consequently, the UN introduced regulations in 2016 so that all-electric vehicles would have to come with Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems (AVAS), an artificial noise created when driving between 0–20 km/h to alert those nearby of the vehicle’s presence.
While one wouldn’t immediately think “Blade Runner” when they hear contemporary AVAS sounds, when played back to back, the similarities are undeniable. Check them out for yourself!
💻 AI will be an established studio partner/tool
AI is changing how we work across every industry, and sound design is no exception. If trained neural networks are able to compose, arrange, and produce music and sound effects today, what does that mean for the future? Rainer shared a few of his predictions including:
- Over 50% of stock music will be generated by AI within the next few years
- 80% of commercial music will be generated by AI within the next decade (the exception being music that is tied specifically to the image of an artist)
- The generation of children who have grown up interacting with assistants like Google Home, Alexa, and Siri will cause a paradigm shift in how we deal with voice search
- Some UI sounds will become obsolete
Rainer’s predictions suggest that AI is already well on its way to cementing itself as an established studio partner and tool for sound designers. If AI is making the music and sounds we hear in our everyday lives, the question then becomes what happens to the role of the sound designer? Ever-prepared, Rainer had a prediction for that lined up as well. He believes that sound designers’ roles will shift away from production and more toward ideation, strategy, consulting, and evaluation. In other words, humans will be responsible for giving direction and purpose to the sounds that AI generates for us.
🎧 The social responsibilities of the sound designer of tomorrow
With AI doing most of the heavy lifting as far as actual sound production, the “new” shifted role of the sound designer will also include more socio-cultural responsibilities. One of Rainer’s predictions is that cities will be quieter but not less noisy, meaning that there will be a comparable amount of noise, but the qualities of that noise will change. This means sound designers have an opportunity to use sound to remedy current issues like noise pollution in large urban areas, which can have detrimental effects on inhabitants like decreased hearing, stress, and hypertension.
With less effort needed on producing sound, sound designers can give more attention to the quality of a sound as well as how that isolated sound works together with an urban environment’s sound ecology. Rainer also pointed out that part of this responsibility would also include having the courage for silence for situations where the absence of sound was, in fact, the best sound choice a designer could make.
Although we work with sound in many of our own projects at Above, our discussion with the guys at Audity served as a reminder of how important sound is to our design toolkit. We tend to think about innovation in terms of full, complete products, but hearing Rainer’s predictions made it clear that innovation can (and should) happen within subfields of design, like sound. Moreover, the inspiration for those innovations can come from the most unlikely of sources, like a 40-year-old sci-fi movie or a computer that can’t actually “hear” the sounds it’s producing. Regardless of whoever is inspiring and creating the sounds of today, it’s clear that our responsibility as designers is to shape what we want the future to sound like.
Above & Beyond events are held internally for the Above team. The learnings and take-aways are written by Renee Semko Gonzalez and edited by myself. I can only hope that this article (and every other article we share) offers you as many ideas and inspiration as it has our team.
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