How do the two processes, composing and sound designing, complement each other?
Are they even two separate processes? For instance, when you sit down to work, do you approach the session as a “sound design” or “composition” session depending on your mood? Or do you just let the session flow? I look at both processes differently for different applications. When I work on sound design projects, it could be scoring sounds to a video game where I go in and create a palette of sounds that are design to be triggered by the user. These could be switches, buttons, selection sounds, loading, weaponry, Foley FX. It literally is thousands of small pieces that will be used in a specific environment or interface. So in that situation the process of sound design is only to have the sounds work in a single shot instance, and they should be unique to work on their own. In scoring to TV/Film I use sound design much differently. I term this as being what I call “musical” or “narrative” sound design. Where the sounds almost tell a story and work on a linear time line matched up with
