Sound DESIGN

Design Story Series for HTC Blog

To start with, Andrew, what exactly is sound design?

Andrew Champlin: Sound design is the last line of defense in a multimedia environment like film, games or mobile. Everything else needs to have arrived, and then the sound brings the product to life. As a sound designer at HTC, my job is to create all of the necessary ringtones, notification and alarms, while paying attention to intrusivity, and then also make sure those sounds create a single sonic statement.

What do you mean by intrusivity?

Andrew: Intrusivity is one of the main metrics on how we measure the effectiveness of a sound. Whether or not it can translate above the room noise and the sound-saturated world that we live in. A sound that is intrusive interrupts your flow and tells you immediately what it’s associated with. It tells you something without you having to think about it, communicating to your lizard brain before you even reach into your pocket. Across our devices, that’s alarms notifications, ringtones. We also consider how these mesh with the sounds that third-party apps like Facebook and Hangouts make.

I see. But with the Themes project, we introduced the ability to customize these sounds. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Andrew: The idea was to create a series of sounds that were algorithmically generated from colors. I needed to come up with 30 blue sounds, 30 orange sounds, 30 yellow sounds and so on. Those were evocative in the context of the designs they would be paired with. You always have the customer in mind when you’re creating a sound, but you also want to bring your expertise to bear and your own artistic vision for what a yellow sound or a blue sound sounds like.

For example? For me, blue is evocative of the glow of a CRT monitor. It almost has a futuristic, cool, detached, German, Technicolor feel. I wanted to offer something beyond a surface-level analysis of what that color looks like. It’s sort of like synesthesia. What that color feels like.

Fascinating! So what’s yellow? I like yellow as a kind of indeterminate sound–it’s in the mid-range. It’s kind of peaky. It’s a little bit percussive, a lot like a thumb piano. That would be a yellow sound to me.

Like an mbira? Yeah, like any sort of auxiliary percussion that would be hammered or struck. A lot of it, to me, would be, “What mode or what scale is that thing playing?” A lot of those would be non-standard tunings. A lot of modern scales and Eastern scales and stuff like that.

What about purple? Purple was the synthetic. It was a different play on a synthetic sound. Purple was kind of like this old, modular, 70s glow to me.

How many individual sounds are included in Themes? The HTC-designed themes–like Numero and Tilt–each come with 3 sounds (ringtone, notification and alarm), so that was 30. And for the Theme Maker experience online–where you see the sounds based on color–there are 5 sounds generated from your color palette–there are 120 sounds to choose from. So in total, we created 150 sounds.

What kind of feedback have you seen from customers? A lot of the feedback is in Polish. I have Google-translated them to the best of my ability. The comment that stuck with me most was about a purple sound, and the guy gave it 5 out of 5 stars, saying it was perfect for Iran. It was a weird, low-key thing. It actually was sort of Canadian hip-hop inflected with no high-end kind of sounds. I don’t know if it spoke to a mode or a scale that they were more used to. I didn’t design it to be like a mainline pop crossover hit.

That was a milestone for me. I had created something not knowing the context that it would be put out in that resonated with, at the very least, one individual in this culture that I know nothing about. That was the best takeaway.

What is your favorite sound if you have one? My favorite is probably one of the first I made called Cerulean — one of those future blue sounds. I made it with just the built-in stuff on Mac. It’s very simple processing, but it ends up being pretty evocative.

Where do you hope to take sound for Themes in the future? I’d like to take the color concept even further. Find a way to synthesize the palette and the sounds with even more granularity, maybe use little games to make sound selection more dynamic.

Let’s talk about you on a personal level for a bit. Where did you grow up?  I was raised in Kansas, but grew up in Arkansas. Don’t pronounce the latter like the former, there’s actually laws on the books about that. Between those two places, my accent averaged out to a perfect neutral, which was great for high school debate. I played tenth chair flute out of twelve in symphonic band, which was perfect for me–we were all anti-competitive co-conspirators in the back half.

How did you become interested in sound design? One pivotal Christmas I received both a guitar and music production software. The guitar very quickly gathered dust, the music production software ended up generating five albums over the next year. I didn’t necessarily want to write conventional music. I started looking for university programs that were focused on synthesizer programming and sound design. There was one in Georgia, at the Savannah College of Art Design, part of the film school. That’s where I ended up studying.

How do you describe your job to friends who don’t know what you do? I started off saying commercial songwriter because people know what songwriters are. Then I started simplifying it to “I make ringtones,” which is kind of nonsensical to say that your only job is to do ringtones. When I get around to a high tech crowd I can usually say, “Sound designer,” and say, “like graphic designer but for sound,” and then they’ll pretty much get that.

A magic genie grants you one wish that will change your life forever, what is it? Never-ending soup pot. Just get the bottom of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs out of the way, get your hunger and thirst quenched, and then you can be as free to do whatever else you want.

Do you have any superpowers? I can drink any coffee, regardless of how bad it is. Actually, there’s a taxonomy of bad coffee that I have, like you get church hall coffee, that’s like super thin, super watery, it always comes in a Styrofoam cup. And then there’s like super light roasted Seattle espresso coffee, also very bad. If you put it in front of me, I’ll drink it, so that is what I widely consider my own personal superpower.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten? If you wanna go Andrew Zimmern I have to say chicken foot. I’ve mean obviously if I’ve eaten a chicken foot, chicken foot is probably the weirdest thing.

Sound, synesthesia, and sustenance. I think we’ve covered it all. Thanks so much Andrew!

Credits

Byline: Susan Burgess
Series Concept: Susan Burgess