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Sunday Sound Thought 47 – Breaking Our Own Expectations

November 20, 2016 by Shaun Farley

As the year continues, many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span…

This morning I met a woman whose voice did match what I expected. When looking at her…her physical presence, the way she carried herself…my mind unconsciously slotted in “deep husky voice.” Of course, I didn’t realize my mind had already made that association until she spoke; a soft “girlish” voice (think tween/early teen female). It was when she said, “Good morning,” that my brain told me, “That’s not what I expected.” My immediate follow thought was, “Huh. I made an assumption about what she would sound like without even realizing it.”

This got me thinking about some of the work I was doing this past week, cutting wild/looped breaths over a handful of characters to fill out some sounds that weren’t captured in production. When you get familiar with a character and their voice, you expect a certain timbre from  even the unvoiced elements they produce; in this case, exhales. You know what sounds right and what doesn’t for them, but it led to another train of thought centering around the idea of how much our own expectations affect the way we edit and design sound.

So for the rest of the day, I’m going to be ruminating on two questions that I think everyone should ask themselves once in a while.

“When was the last time a real world sound didn’t match my expectations for the object it emanates from?”

“When was the last time I consciously chose to cut a sound in opposition to what my gut told me it should be?”

Filed Under: featured Tagged With: aesthetics, assumptions, counterpoint, design approach, expectations, sound, sound design, subconscious, sunday sound thought

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