My last post here was in July. In keeping with the theme, you could say I was hibernating, but that’s not really true. Life, work, projects, recording: all these things fought for my time and unfortunately what suffered was the amount I had left for a volunteer position I loved as a contributing editor here at designingsound.org. Unlike our wild mammalian sisters and … [Read more...]
The Audio Mentoring Project: An Interview with Ariel Gross and Adriane Kuzminski
For those not familiar with the Audio Mentoring Project, or AMP, it was started just a year ago as a means to pair up veterans in the audio industry with people with less experience to help provide mentoring services and a symbiotic relationship of mutual learning and respect. I recently talked with Ariel Gross, the founder and executive director, and Adriane Kuzminski, one of … [Read more...]
Making a Career Out of Audio
I was exceptionally lucky to have stumbled/lied my way into a dream job designing sound for video games twenty years ago, and am even more fortunate to have somehow made a career out of it. Sometimes people ask me how I’ve managed to stay afloat in this tumultuous industry having braved numerous crunches, layoffs, studio shutdowns, moral dilemmas, and crises of confidence. When … [Read more...]
Reevaluating the Practice of Testing Prospective Candidates
Eureka moments are often steeped in excitement and wonder. They are the great discoveries and innovations of the ages. Others are a slap on the forehead, a "why didn't I think of this sooner?" moment. This particular Eureka moment I'm about to share is of the latter variety and came about three paragraphs into an email I was writing. The monologue from my brain to myself went … [Read more...]
Humane Interface Design for Synthesis
This is a guest post by Randy Jones, founder of Madrona Labs a Seattle-based company making hardware and software for computer music. You can reach him @MadronaLabs. Human-centered design is so mainstream now that it is synonymous with good design. This is as true in the making of sound creation and processing tools as in any technology. The concepts of usability, … [Read more...]
Music through Culture: An Interview with Brian D’Oliveira
Brian D'Oliveira is a composer based in Montreal, Canada, and the founder & Creative Director of La Hacienda Creative, where they focus on creating unique, bespoke music and sounds for the video-game industry, as well as for film, TV and the manufacturing sector. Some of his credits include Papo y Yo, Tearaway, Resident Evil Biohazard and Little Big Planet 3. … [Read more...]
Mapping Sound to Color
For this month’s topic of Spectrum, I decided to take the word literally, as applied to color, and consider its relationship to sound. The impetus for this decision was a conversation I had with a co-worker, the late sound designer Stillwind Borenstein, about thirteen years ago. He explained an interest that, since both sound and color can be expressed or measured in frequency, … [Read more...]