What is sound design?

"Today's media are enormously diverse and almost all of them are related to music or sounds. Whether movies, video games, radio plays or commercials - without music, sounds and sound effects they are hardly imaginable. Composers and sound designers ensure that all the media we encounter every day do not appear mute and ineffective. Most of the work on music and sound is done in the studio, usually in the post-production of a project. Time pressure and late nights are sometimes a part of it."

What are the differences between designing sounds and composing music?

"In recent years, these areas have come very close together. Sound design is now much more than just the creation of everyday noises and, like music, often contributes to the emotional development of a moment. In turn, modern film and game music also has something of sound design due to the many new sounds, especially in the percussive and synthetic range, which often allows the two areas to merge. Compared to music, sound design could be seen more as a piecemeal process - the creation of individual noises, whereas music is more interconnected and has a common thread running through a movie or game. However, great sound designers can also be seen as composers who compose a large soundscape in which every detail has the right effect.

Contrary to the romantic notion that all composers still compose with pen and ink, the predominant tool is the computer. Today's sample libraries, DAWs and music programs offer many possibilities. The composer writes his music on the computer and lets the sample libraries bring it to life. A sound designer cuts and edits his sounds on the computer or creates them synthetically. But once you get tired of all the technology, it helps to just sit down at the piano with a pencil and a sheet of music and write music the old-fashioned way."

Jan-Helge Schnöbbes, Sound Designer & Composer