feature / faculty / artcenter-extension / artcenter-at-night
July 31, 2018
By Solvej Schou
Turn Up the Volume
Sound Design for Media teaches how to craft sound
If you could sculpt and shape the soundtrack of your life, what would it sound like? A hip-hop anthem, a rock song, an R&B melody or pounding electronic dance beats? What about all the blips, noises and sonic textures in between?
Designers, artists and filmmakers who learn sound design add more value to their work
Brian Wallace
ArtCenter at Night’s Sound Design for Media course is a great fit for anybody interested in immersing themselves in and learning the listening, recording, editing and mixing tools and techniques used worldwide by sound designers.
“Designers, artists and filmmakers who learn sound design add more value to their work, from movies to video games, which are 50 percent sound,” says Los Angeles-based musician and studio producer Brian Wallace (aka Dubrobot), who teaches the course.
From his early days working with West Coast ska punk band Sublime to his 2017 reggae dub album Prepare the Claw and mastering reggae band The Expanders’ chart-topping album Old Time Something Come Back Again, Wallace has had a long career producing for film and artists at Burbank’s Majestic Sound Studios.
Over the length of the course, students in Sound Design for Media collaborate on several micro-projects, including crafting sound for animation, video games, interactive media, short films and music. They learn how to field record ambient sounds with contact microphones at Southern California sites such as the abandoned old zoo in L.A.’s Griffith Park. And they gain expertise using the digital audio workstation (DAW) software REAPER to record, edit and mix audio.
“It’s so much fun to take an unrecognizable sound and design it, shine a light on it and grow it. It’s like a sound garden,” Wallace says. “Breathing life into a project by making the sound better is amazing.”
