Sound design - specific tools and methods to design the sound

Assuming that sound design could be understood as making design with sound, the sound design discipline needs to develop specific tools and methods to deal with that specific matter of design, that is sound.

From this point of view, one crucial point could address the issue of sketching sounds with the help of efficient representations or media. Then, through collaborative research projects or industrial applied works, we (the Ircam STMS Lab Sound Perception & Design group) have been trying to develop, for several years, tools and environments to implement sonic sketching paradigms. One of them, a sound lexicon called Speak, was initially developed – and is still a work in-progress – to allow the definition of semantic portrait on the basis of basic sonic properties, their definition and their illustrations with mastered sound examples.

This tool was precisely used in a 2-year industrial collaboration within the wine industry to support a collaborative sound design approach in order to interpret and translate oenoogical characters into sonic properties, and in fine in oder design an augmented experience of wine tasting.

This long term collaboraiton was also the opportunity to instantiate a singular artistic/scientific articulation by embedding a composer, Roque Rivas, at the very beginning of the project and give him all the necessary and possible means to realise an informed sound design piece related to wine typologies and features. The talk will globally present this applied research, its conceptual and operational tooling and its main musical outcomes.