Who can wear the "sound designer" title?

This is an age old debate, and it's not specific to our industry - but a recent question on Social Sound Design by Jay Jennings kind of re-spawned the debate.  "What makes you think you're a sound designer?"  or as it's implied, "what have you done that gives you the right to take that title within the industry?"

In lieu of just answering in short form there I felt like I'd take the opportunity to go more in-depth with my own perspective.

Initially, my thought is that discussions about titles are discussions about language.  The fundamental questions behind the question is: what are you trying to communicate with your title, and to whom, and for what purpose?

To preface this: in my opinion the title of "sound designer" has kind of devolved into a similar place as the title of "graphic designer" or really any adjective + "designer" 

The best of the best take those titles, and a whole legion of hacks take those titles as well.  Its why reels and credits have become so important.

Just because someone designed something doesn't make that person a designer, but the fact will remain that the person did design that one thing.  If that person designs lots of things, at some point that person will move across the broad grey area that separates novices from masters.  Many people will take the title of designer after the first thing they designed though, not after they've truly created their first masterpiece.

All this dilution reduces the level of meaning that the title itself holds.  There are no pre-qualifications or trade guilds that police who gets to use the title of "sound designer" and who cannot.  This is not a title like "doctor" - or even "nurse" for that matter.  There are no standards, there is no board that can strip you of your title, and just printing the title on your business card or email sig or resume won't get you very far.

So with that said, my perception of the basic skillet a quality sound designer would have includes things like:

• field recording - including mic technique, signal flow, monitoring, etc
• data management and metadata fundamentals
• sync sound editorial
• creative manipulation of sounds with eq, compression, delays and distortion
• creativity in manipulating dynamic range
• creative use of synthesis
• a developed personal aesthetic
• the ability to communicate and defend creative decisions
• the ability to accomodate the creative vision of others

It's a tall list, and none of the things on it are easy or could be learned entirely in a year.

Of course not everyone that prints "sound designer" on their card can do all of those things well, and some of the things that really bring a person to the next level of sound design are not on that list.

I'll also note here, that generally titles can be pretty confining. They set up boundaries that imply both things that we do and things that we don't do.   My current business card implies zero about my ability to produce and edit copy, shoot video and timelapses, program websites, do public speaking, etc.

It also only peripherally implies things about my ability to cast, record and edit voices, mix for broadcast, and other more directly audio related things.

Its assumed that the titles we give use to describe ourselves are shorthand, but it's also assumed that it's shorthand for the most important thing that we do within the context of our jobs. 
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So with that in mind lets get back to the underlying language questions about the title, and what my opinion of the answers should be.

First off: what am I trying to communicate with a title?

Going back to the "doctor" comparison, in the US, the title of M.D. means that you spent years in an accredited college attaining your bachelor's degree, and in school you learned anatomy, biology, chemistry, and other fundamentals of medicine.  You then went to med school and spent even more years learning the craft.  Once you've performed to the standards set by those institutions, you then enter into a medical residency program where you essentially act as an apprentice under other practicing and experienced doctors.  Once that process is complete you've applied for and acquired a license to practice in your state. All of this is implied with the M.D. title and the purpose of this title is to communicate these qualifications to the world in a standardized and uniform way.

I think that in the case of "sound designer" I'm not really trying to communicate a very specific skillset, and I'm certainly not going to be able to communicate any specific level of experience. 
I think that all I can realistically hope to communicate to a stranger with the title of "sound designer" is that I work in audio, that I do some sound editorial, and that I think that I'm being creative when I work.  To assume any more than that from the title would lead one to some misjudgements about people pretty quickly given how many people do take up the title these days.


Secondly: to whom am I communicating?

Generally speaking, professionals of any kind are utilizing their titles to communicate with everyone they come into contact in a professional context.  This includes clients and prospective clients, peers, vendors, management, etc. 

Given the wide array of people that I'm communicating with here, I really just have to try and lay a basic groundwork with the limited number of words I have available to use in a title.  My email sig and business card are not the place to get into a detailed analysis of what I can and can not do.

Thirdly: why am I trying to communicate this with my title?

Medical doctors utilize their titles to shorthand all of the credentials listed in the previous question.  This leads their clients to give them a baseline assumption of credibility that they can diagnose and cure many physical illnesses that they may be approached with.  The standardization of the titles in the medical profession has gone a long way towards improving the art and science of medicine.

Sound is not nearly as noble or dangerous a profession, and as such those types of standards aren't really as in demand.  The question of why designers of any kind utilize titles at all is kind of interesting. 

In my case, I use my title in context with my coworkers.  I'm generally the sound design guy, another guy is the lead composer, the boss does mixing and biz dev, and the new guy is still in the process of defining his niche within that dynamic.  This is not to say that I'm the only one that can do sound design in the shop (I'm not) nor is it to say that I can't do things like mixing and biz dev (I can). 

I think it also gives another level of insight into what I can do when I'm working with clients outside of the context of design.  If all I've done for this client is cut voices and they grab my card where it says "sound designer," they may think of me when its time to make cool noises near the end of the project.

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In the end, we're not defined by the titles we assume because titles are confining.  They're a shorthand, a means to an end, and we use them despite the fact that we're always learning new things, doing different things, and evloving our perspectives.

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for more thoughts on this, check out the second half of ep 56 on lets make mistakes, where  Mike and Katy struggle with the same issue in the web design world.  I don't think they came to any real conclusions there, but if nothing else it shows that audio people aren't the only ones who struggle with the whole title thing.  :)

a short love letter to Mike Monteiro

My phone is constantly loaded up with podcasts done by people I enjoy listening to.  Many of them are audio related, some are not.  But some of them fall in between, and the Lets Make Mistakes podcast on the Mule Radio Syndicate is one of those. 

First a little background - LMM is hosted by Mike Monteiro and Katie Gillum of Mule Designs.  Mule Designs builds websites, but they podcast about design which is what interests me.

Mike is one of my favorite types of internet people.  He's intelligent, opinionated, a little eccentric and not entirely full of himself.  Matt Gemmell and John Gruber also tend to fall into that category.

With that said Mike is more on the eccentric opinionated side of that scale, which is why I love his stuff so much.  He also gives excellent advice to audio guys about the business and process of design just about every time he opens his mouth.  My first exposure to him was this video (which is NSFW if your job frowns upon frequent cursing)


so there's that.  The podcast actually doesn't have that much cursing and it rambles a bit more than a formal presentation like the video above would, but its very worth it nonetheless.

The episode that inspired this blog post was a recent one called "Another Stupid RFP process" There's just so much gold in there that it's difficult to do justice with a quick blurb, but I'll try:

An RFP is a Request For Proposal and is typical of agency workflow.  In it, multiple vendors will make a pitch to work on a specific job at the same time, and the committee needing the work done tends to decide who gets the job based on a number of metrics the derive from the pitches that are made.

It's also an awful awful process, and Mike and Katie just do a masterful job of taking down the entire RFP mentality.  In the audio world RFPs are common to music composition (even if they aren't labeled as such), and so many musicians make their livings writing and pitching music for free to committees on corporate boards.  Its also a dynamic that comes into play when pitching one's self as a sound designer for a project.

In the podcast, Mike illustrates that a good working relationship requires both give and take, not just give - and when you enter into a relationship where you'll be making emotional decisions you have to be able to figure out if you can work together. 

"it's more important to have people who can work together than it is to have like the smartest people possible" - Mike

"at my most pessimistic I think all of that stuff is an elaborate trap to make sure that nobody can be blamed if the project goes wrong" - Mike

"There's a huge difference to the relationship you end up having with a group of people, or even just the conversations you have when you're being called a 'vendor' and when you're being a design studio" - Katie

"There's something about the process that makes it seem more like picking a commodity than on creating a relationship" - Katie

"A 'vendor' is somebody who sells you things, and its the things that have the value.  A 'partner' is somebody who works with you, and its the working together that has the value" - Mike

"If you show up at an initial presentation with comps of what you're going to do for that company's site you are an idiot.  You are an idiot.  And you should be laughed at and you should be thrown out of the building and you should never get to call yourself a designer again, because what you're doing is making shit up out of your head and putting it in front of a client irresponsibly and passing that off as design work.   You have no idea what they're trying to solve, you have no idea what their internal mechanics are, you have no idea where they're trying to go in the next two, three years.  And yet somehow you've pulled a solution out of your ass.  And then you have the balls to take it into a presentation and present this as 'this is how we think, this is what we think you should do'" - Mike

"I think 'let me tell you how we approach design, ' and you can actually say 'let me tell you how we'd approach your problem'" - Katie

"This is a goddamn endemic with designers.  They are afraid to do the thing they know is right...I'll be sitting with a designer and going over some work and it looks dead.  It looks like they don't know what they're doing.  They're pushing their food around their plate. There's no joy in it, they're not trying things.  And at some point they'll say something to the tune of 'well if I were doing this my way...' and I'll just say nothing and let that silence hang like a Mike Daisey apology interview, and eventually they'll realize what they just said, and they'll get back to work." - Mike

"It's a really sad form of self-censorship, and it kills designers because they do crap work, and its also incredibly unfair to people who hired you to do this work because they hired you to do the best work that you possibly can, and instead you think they could think of." - Mike

anyway, I could transcribe the whole episode or you could just take my advice and listen to the podcast.  Also, don't follow @Mike_FTW on twitter, its a little too erratic.

-enjoy!

Kickstarter Pt 7 - Final Numbers and Thoughts

Well I'm finally at the end of this kickstarter road.  I've put a fair amount of energy into recapping the whole process, so hopefully someone out there has learned enough to inform a decision one way or the other on the process.

I initially set a $325 goal and I ended up raising $1725 before expenses from the backers of the project, which was a massive success.  I attribute that to three factors:

1. Newness - not a lot of sound effects library kickstarters out there, and I think the community was really working out its viability as a platform and wanted to participate.  This effect could wear off in the future.
2. Subject matter - not everyone has access to antique streetcars, and limited access to subjects tends to increase their value in the marketplace.  If I had decided to record car bys I probably wouldn't have met my funding goal.
3. Exclusivity - the only way to get the library was to back the kickstarter, so some people who may have otherwise waited for a specific project instead had a strong incentive to go ahead and back now for fear of missing out and needing the sounds later.

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Overall, expenses were as follows:

Kickstarter $83 (this ended up being slightly less than 5%)

Amazon $76.64 (ditto) 

Trolley car rentals $350 (increased because I chartered 2 cars instead of 1)

Equipment rentals $300 (increased because I wanted more coverage)

motorman tip $40

misc supplies $50

total expenses - $899.64

net profit $1725 - 899.64 = $825.36

Hours:  I'll bet that I can easily find 80 hours of work involved in the whole process when you include project setup and research, prepro and scoutiting, recording and editing, and back end administration.  

Good thing I love this stuff.

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As you can see by the profit/hours ratio it would be pretty difficult to make a middle class living doing nothing but kickstarters even if they were all wildly successful - which is no guarantee.  The main reasons for this are the high percentages that KS and Amazon take coupled with the user liability for all expenses. 

There's also the very strange social effect of that huge number up there on the home page of the project showing the world exactly how much has been pledged.  I found that everyone remotely interested had an opinion on how much was raised, and once I significantly passed my goal everyone around me was looking for ways to spend the money.  I also imagine that my project's backers felt a bit of extra ownership of that number once it reached so far above its goal, which is partly why I chartered the extra streetcar and did the extra recording and editing.

Most businesses are not this open with their books, which illustrates something very important - Kickstarter is not a business model, it's a vehicle for getting projects done.  I couldn't have gotten both of those streetcars chartered without the help of the Kickstarter platform and my backers, and in the end that was my primary goal.  The extra money was secondary to the primary goal of getting those cars recorded.  

In that respect the kickstarter platform came through in spades.  

Kickstarter gave me a clean look, handled all media hosting, handled all payment transactions, and made communication with current and prospective backers incredibly easy and professional looking.  

The customer support and interface were both very good and at the end of the day all of the money showed up in my account, which is not to be taken for granted.  

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So when should you and when should you not do a kickstarter?

In my opinion, you should seriously consider a kickstarter if your project meets the following criteria:

• It genuinely requires funds to get off the ground
• As outlined above, doing kickstarters purely for the money is kind of paddling upstream.  Use KS as a tool when money isn't the goal, but getting a project done is.
• It's something that others would genuinely want to back and receive rewards from.
• Doing KS projects for items that are either ubiquitous or useless is not setting yourself up for success.  Have something specific and make sure its interesting and useful to the community at large.
• It's been vetted, cleared and is ready to go.
• Don't launch a KS project for something that you're not positive that you can deliver on.  It would be the worst thing in the world to launch a KS, meet your goal, and then have to explain to your backers that you didn't have access to that cool sounding thing after all.
• It's something that you're willing to invest extra hours in to administer
• Doing a kickstarter requires a heavier investment in time than just the recording and editing that come with traditional sound effects projects.  Setting up the initial pitch, maintaining the project site, doing updates and corresponding with backers all take time.

If you already own an SFX site and have access to cheaper money than the 10% KS and Amazon charge then you may have a hard time justifying a KS financially.  If you don't, but have a one-off project that others may have interest in though, I'd highly recommend it.

thanks for reading.