Music Video Lesson: A New Kind of Music: What Is Sound Design?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin today with a new kind of music, what is sound design? Now, of course, I know many of you are pianists and you might have clicked on this thinking, maybe I'll give this a chance, but it's definitely worth your while because I'm going to show you today something you're already familiar with but you may not even realize the depth with which this type of music or sound is so involved in your lives all the time.

First, a little bit of historical background.

Obviously, instruments have been around for hundreds of years and the development of the symphony orchestra really culminated in the late 19th century. So what else could be possible? Well, into the 20th century, we had in the 1940s a man by the name of Pierre Schaeffer, he was a Frenchman who came up with what is labeled today music concret.

And what he would do is he would first he used turntables, which is interesting because the use of turntables by disc jockeys who actually create whole new soundscapes is a whole other area of exploration. What he did is he took sounds and manipulated them and used tape recorders to gather sounds and mold them into compositions. And that was really the infancy of what we're discussing today.

Naturally, music synthesizers entered into the equation soon after. It was in the late 1950s that RCA had their music synthesizer. I remember growing up my father had a record of the RCA music synthesizer. You can probably find it on YouTube with all kinds of squeaks and weird sounds. And at the end of it, they had their attempt at creating a little jazz combo and I was very taken with it. I thought it was really cool as a kid.

And of course, it was Robert Moog, the Moog synthesizer in the 1960s that really caught attention.

And it was Wendy Carlos's incredibly famous album Switched on Bach, which many of you may know, where she took the works of Bach from Two Part Inventions to Brandenburg Concertos later on and orchestrated them.

And keep in mind that the Moog synthesizer was a monophonic instrument. It could only play one note at a time. So she painstakingly with tape recorded at half speed to be able to get everything perfect and overdubbed all the parts to create different timbres and created the works of Bach, which work amazingly well in no small part because Bach wrote all his keyboard music, the exception of his organ music, for just simply clavier, keyboard. He didn't specify what keyboard. So it's a great candidate for that sort of treatment.

But let's talk about film for a minute because where sound design is most prevalent is as a backdrop for video and film. And if you go back in time to the infancy of music for film, it's a silent film. And of course, you remember that it was usually the ragtime type of music and following the action. If there was something tense, it would be something like that. And then otherwise it would follow the action. And that was a really fun thing. It's all about a lost art. Very few people do that kind of improvisation to silent films. Michael Mortilla in Los Angeles, if you ever catch one of his or look up some of his films that he has realized those improvised parts to old silent films, it's a real treasure.

So going forward in time, film music started to become almost like sound design, even though it was still using traditional instruments. For example, Bernard Herrmann, a fantastic film composer.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. There's a scene in there that I don't want to be a spoiler alert. I'm not going to spoil it for you. If for some change you have not seen the film Psycho, you've got to see it. It's a fabulous motion picture. And there's one scene that is particularly terrifying.

And the music is really something that doesn't sound like music, but it's so effective. And as soon as I play this, any of you who see the film will know exactly what scene this is.

It's done with high piercing strings and it is so incredibly effective. And unlike the symphonic scores that are so prevalent in so many, you know, John Williams, these lush scores, which were also popular in the 1930s and beyond.

And there's other countless examples of this, you know, Jaws, for example, even before any melodies come in. That's another John Williams score, but the...

That's all you have to hear. And the tension that produces is pretty unbelievable. But with sound design, listen to the tensions that can be created with this kind of backdrop. And it's something that you don't even realize so much of the time. Something very simple can be in a subtle way creating and shifting a mood where you don't even realize what's going on, but you feel it. So the question is, is sound design music? And it absolutely can be because as you can imagine, there is emotion associated with this. And if you want to check out some, my son David Estrin, he's got some examples of it. You can check out in the description. If you want to delve deeper into this, he does all kinds of music, traditional music as well. But I thought you'd get a kick out of this. And this is a great conversation to get going. What is your opinion of sound design, electronic music, music concret, the whole bowl of wax, film music, and different directions it goes, whether it's symphonic or more experimental in nature. Love to hear from you here at VilingPianos.com, your online piano store. Thanks again. I'm Robert Estrin.

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