Sound Design at Edinburgh Napier University

Category: Audio Perception

  • Getting Closer: Watson Wu on Field Recording, Curiosity, and the Search for Authentic Sound

    Watson Wu

    What makes a great field recording?

    Many aspiring sound designers assume the answer begins with equipment. Better microphones, more expensive recorders, larger collections of accessories, or the latest recording technologies all seem like obvious places to start. Watson Wu has spent decades recording race cars, helicopters, weapons, sports crowds, military vehicles, steam trains, wilderness ambiences, and countless other sound sources for games, film, and television. Yet throughout his guest lecture at Edinburgh Napier University, he repeatedly returned to a very different conclusion. Great recordings rarely emerge from equipment alone. More often, they emerge from access, preparation, curiosity, and a willingness to get closer to the source than most people are prepared to go.

    Wu’s own journey into field recording began almost accidentally. Having studied music and worked extensively with recording equipment, he was asked by a client whether he could also provide sound effects for a project. The results proved successful enough to encourage him to continue. Looking back, what is striking is how quickly his attention shifted away from commercially available sound libraries and towards the sounds themselves. Existing libraries could certainly provide useful material, though they rarely offered complete creative control. If a designer records a skateboard personally, they can decide exactly where the microphone should be placed, which aspects of the sound should be emphasised, and which should be excluded. Rather than accepting someone else’s interpretation of an event, they can create their own. Recording therefore becomes more than acquisition. It becomes a way of understanding sound.

    That desire for direct engagement appears throughout Wu’s career. Again and again, he described situations in which recording personally provided opportunities that would have been impossible through library material alone. A Ferrari owner can be asked to accelerate, brake, idle, or corner in specific ways. A helicopter pilot can perform particular manoeuvres. A stadium crowd can be approached from multiple positions and perspectives. Rather than documenting a sound, the recordist begins exploring it. Questions emerge. What does the source sound like from the front? What changes when the microphone moves closer? Which details become audible when recording from inside rather than outside? The process becomes investigative. Recording is no longer merely collecting sounds. It becomes a way of learning how sounds behave.

    Perhaps surprisingly, this emphasis on source recording has also shaped Wu’s attitude towards technology. Early in his career, he assumed that only the most expensive microphones could produce professional results. Like many newcomers, he viewed prestigious manufacturers as essential components of successful recording practice. Experience gradually challenged this assumption. Expensive microphones certainly have their place, though many recording situations depend far more upon positioning, environment, and technique than upon cost alone. A moderately priced microphone placed correctly will often outperform a far more expensive microphone placed badly. Recording a gunshot, a racing vehicle, or a helicopter frequently requires practical decisions about durability, placement, weather resistance, and safety. In some situations, the most valuable microphone is not the most expensive one. It is the one that survives the session.

    This pragmatic attitude runs throughout Wu’s work. Rather than searching for a single perfect microphone, he has assembled a collection of tools suited to different purposes. Shotgun microphones provide focus and directionality. Ambisonic microphones capture complete acoustic environments. Lavalier microphones can be hidden inside vehicles and machinery. Dynamic microphones tolerate extreme sound pressure levels. Each offers a different perspective on the same event. Rather than asking which microphone is best, Wu encourages a different question: what exactly are you trying to hear?

    That question becomes particularly important when considering the different forms that field recording can take. Throughout the lecture, Wu repeatedly distinguished between focused recordings, environmental recordings, and combinations of both. A shotgun microphone pointed at a specific source allows unwanted sounds to be rejected. An ambisonic microphone captures the entire acoustic environment surrounding it. Many of the most useful recordings involve collecting both simultaneously. A racing vehicle, for example, may be recorded with a fixed stereo setup capturing the overall pass-by while another microphone actively follows the vehicle as it moves. Together, these perspectives provide far greater creative flexibility than either recording alone. The objective is not simply to obtain a sound. The objective is to gather options.

    This philosophy of collecting more than is immediately required appeared repeatedly throughout the lecture. If a client requests four recordings, Wu aims to deliver eight. If access is granted to a vehicle, he looks for every useful perspective that can be captured while the opportunity exists. The reasoning is practical. Recording opportunities are fragile. Weather changes. Locations become unavailable. Machines break down. Owners move away. Access disappears. A steam train hired for a day may never be available again. A military vehicle may only be accessible under tightly controlled conditions. A helicopter flight involves substantial planning, expense, and coordination. Throughout the lecture, Wu repeatedly encouraged students to think beyond the immediate request. Record the obvious sound, certainly, though record the unexpected sound as well. Capture the startup, the shutdown, the rattles, the controls, the mechanical details, and the surrounding environment. Future projects often benefit from recordings that initially appeared irrelevant. One of the advantages of personal recording is that it allows designers to build libraries that grow richer with every session.

    Several stories from the lecture illustrated this mindset particularly well. One involved the recording of a Huey helicopter, the distinctive aircraft familiar from countless war films and television programmes. For Wu, this represented a long-held ambition. Capturing the sound successfully required far more than simply arriving with a recorder. Multiple lavalier microphones were mounted inside the aircraft. Additional protection was added to cope with extreme airflow. Recorders were secured carefully to the airframe. Ground-based ambisonic and mid-side recording systems captured external perspectives. Wind protection had to be considered constantly. Safety procedures had to be followed. Every aspect of the session involved planning, experimentation, and adaptation. Yet what emerges most strongly from the story is not the equipment but the preparation. The quality of the recording depended upon decisions made long before the helicopter ever left the ground.

    A similarly revealing example involved the recording of a historic steam train. Rather than arriving, capturing a handful of pass-bys, and leaving, Wu approached the session as a rare opportunity to document an entire acoustic ecosystem. Exterior perspectives were recorded alongside onboard perspectives. Mechanical details were captured alongside broader environmental sounds. The objective was not simply to obtain a steam train recording. The objective was to understand how the train sounded from as many perspectives as possible. Such sessions reveal an important distinction between collecting sounds and collecting experiences. A library may contain a steam train. Spending a day with a steam train reveals how the machine breathes, rattles, resonates, and interacts with the world around it. Those observations often prove just as valuable as the recordings themselves.

    One of the more thought-provoking moments in the lecture concerned realism. Beginners often assume that accurate recording should be the ultimate goal. Professional practice is frequently more complicated. A racing car recorded exactly as it sounds may not feel sufficiently exciting inside a game. A weapon may require enhancement. An engine may need additional weight and aggression. Distortion, saturation, and other forms of processing are often introduced deliberately. Wu’s point was not that realism is unimportant. Rather, realism and believability are not always the same thing. The audience’s memory of an event may differ considerably from the event itself. Sound designers frequently work within that gap, creating experiences that feel authentic even when they depart from strict documentary accuracy. The objective is often emotional truth rather than literal accuracy.

    This willingness to adapt appears throughout Wu’s approach to problem-solving. Some of the lecture’s most memorable stories involved situations that failed to unfold as planned. During one recording session involving historic artillery, environmental conditions introduced an unexpected complication. Peacocks repeatedly vocalised at exactly the wrong moment, intruding into recordings that had required considerable effort to arrange. The story generated laughter, though it also illustrated an important reality of field recording. The world rarely cooperates completely. Animals, weather, traffic, aircraft, and countless other factors have a habit of appearing precisely when silence is required. Successful field recordists learn to work with uncertainty rather than imagining it can be eliminated entirely.

    What is perhaps most striking across all these examples is the extent to which recording depends upon people. Throughout the lecture, Wu repeatedly emphasised the importance of trust, professionalism, and respect. Vehicle owners are not simply providing sound sources. They are sharing something valuable. Pilots are not merely operating machinery. They are helping create recordings. Mechanics, assistants, safety personnel, and operators all contribute to the final outcome. Access depends upon relationships. Relationships depend upon how people are treated.

    This human dimension emerged repeatedly throughout the lecture. When discussing vehicle recording sessions, Wu described asking owners to tell him if a vehicle needs a break. During military recording sessions, he relies on guidance from experienced personnel regarding safe practice. Mechanics advise on microphone placement around engines and exhaust systems. Aircraft operators explain how equipment can be secured safely. Again and again, the quality of the recording depends upon collaboration rather than individual expertise alone.

    Such observations help explain why Wu devoted considerable attention to assistants and colleagues. Technical ability matters enormously, though professional success often depends just as much upon reliability, patience, and kindness. One assistant was praised for consistently anticipating what needed to be done before being asked. Equipment was packed away efficiently. Problems were solved calmly. Tasks were completed without drama. Such qualities may appear unrelated to sound design, though Wu clearly regards them as fundamental. People prefer working with those who make difficult jobs easier. Careers are often built as much through trust as through talent.

    Learning itself occupies a similarly important position within his philosophy. Throughout the lecture, Wu repeatedly described himself as a lifelong learner. New recording technologies are welcomed. New microphones are tested. New techniques are explored. Even after decades of professional work, he continues searching for improved approaches. The emergence of 32-bit float recording technology provided one example. Although enthusiastic about its possibilities, he discussed both its advantages and its limitations. Increased dynamic range solves certain problems, though it does not eliminate the need for careful microphone placement, thoughtful listening, or critical judgement. Technology changes. Core recording principles remain remarkably consistent.

    Listening, in fact, may be the most important skill of all. Wu frequently described removing one side of his headphones while recording in order to compare the microphone feed with the surrounding environment. The goal is not merely to record sounds. The goal is to understand what the microphones are actually capturing relative to lived experience. A recording may appear technically impressive while still failing to communicate what made the original event interesting. Conversely, unusual microphone positions or unconventional techniques sometimes reveal aspects of a sound that would otherwise remain hidden.

    This curiosity about sound extends well beyond the vehicles and weapons for which Wu is perhaps best known. Some of the lecture’s most engaging stories involved wilderness ambiences, rain, wind, and environmental soundscapes. While working on the television series The Underground Railroad, he travelled deep into remote areas of Florida in search of locations free from contemporary noise pollution. During a separate project in Iceland, he spent long periods experimenting with wind recordings around the Arctic Henge, exploring how subtle changes in microphone orientation transformed the resulting sound. Such examples reveal a practitioner who remains fascinated by listening itself. The technology matters. The environments matter. Yet underlying everything is a persistent curiosity about how the world sounds.

    Looking back across the lecture, what emerges most clearly is a conception of field recording rooted in curiosity. Microphones matter. Recorders matter. Ambisonics, 32-bit float recording, microphone placement, and technical expertise all matter. Yet none of these things create opportunities by themselves. Opportunities emerge through relationships, preparation, persistence, and a willingness to go where interesting sounds can be found. A helicopter recording begins with access to a helicopter. A vehicle recording begins with the trust of its owner. A remote ambience recording begins with a journey into an environment where that ambience still exists.

    Perhaps this is why Wu’s stories remain so memorable. They are never really stories about equipment. They are stories about people, places, and experiences. A helicopter with microphones attached to its frame. A steam train hired for an entire day. A military vehicle crossing rough terrain. A crowd erupting during a decisive sporting moment. Wind moving through an Icelandic landscape. Each recording represents a moment that had to be sought out deliberately.

    For aspiring sound designers, that may be the most valuable lesson of all. The next remarkable sound is unlikely to appear by accident inside a studio. It is probably waiting somewhere beyond the microphone case, attached to a person, a place, or an experience that has not yet been encountered.

    The challenge is getting close enough to hear it.

  • Why Game Sound Is Never Finished: Mariana Botero on Systems, Possibility, and Interactive Audio

    Mariana Botero

    What does a sound designer actually create?

    For much of the history of recorded media, the answer has seemed relatively straightforward. A sound designer creates sounds. Those sounds are edited, arranged, mixed, and eventually delivered to an audience in a finished form. Whether working in film, television, radio, or theatre, the result remains largely fixed. Every audience member encounters the same sequence of events in the same order. A soundtrack may be replayed thousands of times, though the sounds themselves do not change. Sound design, in this traditional sense, is largely concerned with creating and refining artefacts. The work may be extraordinarily complex, though the outcome is ultimately stable. Once completed, the audience receives the experience that the creators intended.

    Games operate according to a different logic. During her guest lecture at Edinburgh Napier University, Mariana Botero, Sound Designer at Criterion Games, repeatedly returned to a challenge that sits at the centre of interactive audio. Players are unpredictable. They may rush through environments that designers expected them to explore carefully. They may spend an hour in a location intended for a few minutes of gameplay. They may repeat actions endlessly, ignore carefully placed cues, or discover solutions that nobody anticipated. A sound designer may spend weeks refining a particular moment, only for players to experience it in a completely unexpected way. This unpredictability creates a fundamental difference between games and most other forms of media. Film sound designers can assume a degree of control over audience experience. A scene unfolds at a predetermined pace. Music enters at a precise moment. Dialogue arrives exactly when it is needed. Sound and image progress together through a carefully authored sequence. Games surrender much of that control. Designers can establish possibilities, though they cannot determine exactly how those possibilities will be experienced. Every player creates a slightly different path through the material.

    Botero illustrated this distinction through a deceptively simple analogy. Traditional sound design can resemble baking a cake. Once the ingredients have been combined and baked, they become a finished object. Individual components can no longer be separated. The audience receives the completed result exactly as intended. Interactive audio often works differently. The ingredients remain available. They can be rearranged, adjusted, recombined, and reshaped while the experience is unfolding. What players hear depends not only on what the designer created but also on what they choose to do. A player who rushes through an environment may hear one version of the experience. Another who explores every corner may encounter something quite different. Neither experience is incorrect. Both emerge from the same underlying system. At first glance, this may appear to be a technical distinction, though throughout the lecture it became clear that something more significant is taking place. Interactive audio challenges assumptions that have shaped sound practice for decades. Rather than creating a finished soundtrack, game audio designers increasingly create systems capable of generating many possible soundtracks. The question is no longer simply what a sound should be. The question becomes how a sound should behave.

    Implementation sits at the heart of this shift. Students often encounter implementation through software platforms such as Wwise and Unity, where attention naturally gravitates towards events, switches, parameters, states, and scripting. Botero encouraged a broader perspective. These tools are not merely technical requirements added after the creative work has been completed. They are part of the creative process itself. They provide mechanisms through which sound can respond to player actions, environmental conditions, narrative developments, and changing game states. Once audio becomes interactive, implementation ceases to be a final stage of production. It becomes one of the primary ways in which experiences are designed. Many of Botero’s examples reflected this movement from sounds to systems. Consider something as apparently mundane as footsteps. Few sounds occur more frequently in games. A footstep that appears a handful of times in a film may occur thousands of times during a single play session. What initially feels satisfying can quickly become repetitive. Players generate these sounds through their own behaviour, meaning designers cannot simply assume that repetition will remain unnoticed. Botero discussed several implementation strategies designed to address this issue. Different recordings can be selected randomly. Pitch and volume may vary subtly between repetitions. Heel and toe impacts can be separated and recombined dynamically. A relatively small collection of recordings suddenly produces a far wider range of perceived outcomes. Yet what makes these techniques interesting is not their technical sophistication. Their significance lies in how they reveal a different philosophy of authorship. Rather than crafting every individual event directly, designers create rules governing how events are generated. They design the behaviour of the system rather than the precise form of every outcome.

    Her observations about footsteps led naturally into a broader discussion about attention. Not every sound deserves equal prominence throughout an experience. Early in a game, clearly audible footsteps may help players understand movement and control. Later, those same sounds can begin to dominate the soundscape unnecessarily. As players become familiar with core mechanics, environmental details often become more valuable. A distant owl, subtle weather activity, a passing vehicle, or an unexpected environmental cue may contribute more to a sense of place than another clearly articulated footstep. This may seem like a relatively small design decision, though it reveals an important principle running throughout the lecture. Sound design is not simply about creating sounds. It is about shaping attention. Designers are constantly deciding what players should notice, what they should ignore, and how their awareness should be directed through an experience. Interactive audio therefore becomes inseparable from broader questions of perception.

    Several examples from Botero’s work on Star Wars Battlefront II illustrated this relationship particularly clearly. One challenge involved creating a convincing sensation of speed during space combat. Space provides surprisingly few visual reference points. Without roads, buildings, or passing landscapes, players can struggle to judge how fast they are moving. From a purely visual perspective, extraordinary speeds can sometimes feel unexpectedly slow. Audio therefore assumes a more active role. Changes in acceleration, orientation, proximity, and manoeuvring can all be reinforced through sound, encouraging players to feel faster than they actually are. Importantly, the objective is not deception. The objective is alignment between what players see, what they hear, and what they believe they are experiencing. Sound helps bridge the gap between game mechanics and player perception. A related challenge emerged around spatial awareness. Players navigating complex three-dimensional environments often need information that visual displays cannot always communicate efficiently. Botero described examples where reflections, pass-bys, and environmental responses helped players understand their relationship to surrounding structures. Those sounds functioned as navigational aids as much as sound effects. Players may never consciously notice them, though their absence would make environments feel less intelligible. Such examples reveal another important aspect of interactive audio. Sound is not simply representing the world. It is helping players interpret the world. A successful design often communicates information, directs attention, reinforces emotion, and supports decision-making simultaneously. The most effective implementation frequently becomes invisible. Players simply feel that the game responds naturally to their actions.

    The same principles appeared again in Botero’s discussion of interactive music. Traditional composition assumes a relatively stable structure. A beginning leads towards a middle before eventually reaching an ending. Although composers may create complex and highly sophisticated works, they generally retain control over the order in which events occur. Games rarely provide such certainty. Players may linger in one location, interrupt events unexpectedly, revisit spaces repeatedly, or trigger narrative developments in unusual orders. Music must therefore accommodate possibilities that cannot be fully predicted in advance. Rather than composing a single linear sequence, designers often create collections of musical elements capable of being reorganised dynamically while preserving coherence. Botero compared the process to building with Lego bricks. Individual pieces remain consistent, though their arrangement changes according to context. Introductory passages, transitions, loops, and endings can be connected in different ways while still feeling musically coherent. Once again, the designer is not creating a single outcome. The designer is creating a framework capable of supporting many outcomes. What matters is not only the material itself but also the relationships that determine how that material behaves under changing circumstances.

    This way of thinking extends beyond music. One particularly revealing example discussed during the lecture involved a student project built around a time-slowing mechanic. In a traditional medium, slowing time might simply involve applying predetermined processing at specific moments. Within an interactive environment, however, the relationship becomes dynamic. Real-time parameter controls allowed player actions to influence audio behaviour directly. As gameplay changed, the soundscape changed alongside it. The mechanic was not merely accompanied by sound. The mechanic became part of the sound design process itself. Audio no longer functioned as a layer added on top of gameplay. It became woven into the behaviour of the system. Examples such as these help explain why programming increasingly occupies an important place within contemporary game audio. Throughout the lecture, Botero described learning through experimentation, tutorials, practical projects, and professional experience. Programming was presented not as a replacement for creative thinking but as a means of expanding creative possibilities. The more deeply designers understand systems, the more effectively they can connect audio to player experience. Technical knowledge becomes valuable not for its own sake but for the opportunities it creates.

    One of the more interesting consequences of this shift is that game audio designers increasingly resemble system designers as much as traditional sound designers. Much of the language surrounding audio production still reflects assumptions inherited from film, television, and music. We often speak about creating sounds, mixing sounds, or arranging sounds. Botero’s examples repeatedly pointed towards a broader form of practice. Designers create relationships between sounds, player actions, environmental conditions, and game states. Their work involves determining how sounds respond, adapt, and evolve rather than simply deciding what those sounds should be. The resulting experience emerges through interaction between the player and the system. In this sense, implementation is not something that happens after sound design. Implementation is increasingly part of sound design itself.

    This spirit of exploration appeared throughout Botero’s account of her own development. Long before working professionally in games, she was already engaging deeply with sound through recording, listening, and experimentation. Growing up in Colombia, she developed a fascination with environmental sound that later evolved into a broader interest in audio design. Looking back across the lecture, one of the most striking aspects of her career trajectory is how consistently curiosity appears as a driving force. New tools, new techniques, and new technologies repeatedly emerge, though progress often begins with a simple willingness to investigate how things work. Throughout her account there was little sense of a fixed pathway into game audio. Instead, learning appeared as an ongoing process of exploration in which technical knowledge, creative practice, and experimentation continually informed one another.

    That same curiosity remains visible within professional practice. One of the most memorable examples came from Criterion’s “Sound Design Thursdays”. Team members temporarily step away from production work and undertake creative challenges built around unusual constraints. Designers exchange recordings, limit themselves to small collections of source material, or pass sounds between colleagues with each person applying a single transformation before handing them on. The outcomes can be surprising, humorous, and occasionally absurd. A camel recording may gradually evolve into something resembling a bird. Familiar sounds acquire entirely new identities. Yet beneath the humour lies a serious lesson about creativity. Unexpected results often emerge when designers deliberately create conditions that encourage experimentation. Limitations become opportunities. Constraints become creative tools. In many respects, these exercises mirror the philosophy underlying interactive audio itself. Both involve constructing systems, establishing rules, and allowing surprising outcomes to emerge from interactions between different elements. Neither depends upon complete control. Both depend upon creating environments in which interesting possibilities can arise.

    Looking back across the lecture, what emerges most clearly is a view of sound design that extends well beyond the creation of individual sounds. Footsteps, adaptive music, spatial cues, implementation systems, real-time parameters, and creative experiments all point towards the same conclusion. Interactive audio requires designers to think in terms of relationships rather than isolated assets. Sounds gain meaning through how they respond to players, environments, and changing circumstances. The challenge is no longer simply to create a soundtrack. The challenge is to create a framework capable of supporting many different soundtracks.

    Perhaps this is what makes game audio such a distinctive area of contemporary sound practice. Film sound designers craft experiences that audiences receive. Game sound designers craft possibilities that audiences help create. Every play session unfolds differently. Every player encounters a slightly different combination of events. Every interaction generates new relationships between sounds, systems, and behaviours. The sounds matter. What matters just as much are the rules that determine what those sounds might become.

    In game audio, the work is never truly finished. It simply waits for the player to decide what happens next.

  • Designed Serendipity: Andy Martin on Creativity, Listening, and the Art of Surprise

    Andy Martin

    What does creativity sound like?

    For Andy Martin, Senior Sound Designer at Sucker Punch Productions, the answer is unlikely to be found in a carefully documented workflow or a rigid production methodology. Throughout his guest lecture at Edinburgh Napier University, Martin repeatedly returned to a very different idea. The most interesting sounds often emerge when designers deliberately place themselves in situations where they can be surprised.

    Martin refers to this philosophy as “designed serendipity”, a concept he credits largely to his mentor Randy Thom. The phrase initially appears contradictory. Serendipity implies chance, accident, and unexpected discovery. Design suggests planning and intention. Yet Martin’s career demonstrates how these ideas can work together. Creativity, in this view, is not about waiting for inspiration to appear. It is about constructing conditions in which unexpected discoveries become more likely. The designer cannot control what will be found, though they can shape the circumstances that make finding it possible.

    This perspective challenges many popular assumptions about creative work. Students often imagine that successful practitioners possess a hidden method, a reliable sequence of steps capable of transforming ordinary material into extraordinary results. Martin openly questioned this way of thinking. Asked about his workflow, he admitted that he does not really have one. Certainly, there are habits that reappear from project to project, though he remains wary of turning them into rules. Every game presents different creative challenges. Every project requires different forms of thinking. More importantly, repeating the same process too faithfully risks producing the same results. Creativity depends upon remaining open to possibilities that lie beyond familiar routines.

    The origins of this philosophy can be traced back to Martin’s time at Skywalker Sound, where he worked alongside Randy Thom. Looking back, he describes the experience as one of the most important periods of his professional development. Yet the lessons he absorbed were not primarily technical. What fascinated him was Thom’s approach to listening and organisation. Rather than treating sounds simply as recordings of physical events, Thom often approached them through their emotional qualities. His personal library contained sounds catalogued not only according to source, but also according to feeling. Recordings could be associated with loneliness, tension, aggression, calmness, mystery, or wonder. The objective was not to identify what a sound was. The objective was to understand what a sound might do.

    This distinction may appear subtle, though it reveals a fundamentally different way of thinking about audio. Conventional cataloguing systems encourage designers to search for sounds according to source categories. A door slam is stored alongside other door slams. A dog bark sits among other dog barks. Thom’s approach encouraged a different question. What emotional qualities does this sound possess? What might happen if it were combined with something unexpected? A sound recorded in one context could become something entirely different in another. A bird call might contribute to a creature vocalisation. A machine hum might become atmospheric tension. The process begins not with certainty, but with curiosity.

    For Martin, this lesson became foundational. Creativity ceased to be a matter of finding the correct answer and became an exercise in constructing opportunities for discovery. Throughout the lecture, he repeatedly returned to the importance of experimentation. Some of the most successful sounds emerge from combinations that nobody could have predicted at the outset. The designer’s task is not necessarily to know where the process will end. The designer’s task is to remain attentive enough to recognise valuable discoveries when they occur.

    Curiosity therefore becomes more than a personality trait. It becomes a professional practice. Martin encouraged students to seek out unfamiliar experiences, explore unexpected places, and deliberately disrupt habitual routines. One piece of advice that particularly resonated with him was deceptively simple. If you walk the same route every day, occasionally take a different street. If there is a shop you have passed a hundred times without entering, go inside and see what is there. The purpose is not efficiency. The purpose is exposure. Creative people often benefit from encountering situations they did not expect. Novel experiences generate new observations, new questions, and new possibilities for connection.

    Listening occupies a particularly important place within this philosophy. During the development of Infamous: Second Son, Martin became fascinated by a deceptively simple question: what makes Seattle sound like Seattle? At first glance, the answer appears straightforward. Record traffic, crowds, construction activity, public transport, and environmental ambience. Yet Martin quickly discovered that acoustic identity operates at a much more detailed level. Cities possess distinctive sonic signatures that emerge from countless small elements working together. Particular bird species occupy particular environments. Certain sounds appear more frequently at specific times of day. Weather influences behaviour. Geography influences acoustics. Local infrastructure contributes characteristic textures. Many of these details pass unnoticed by casual listeners, though collectively they contribute to a powerful sense of place.

    Birds became especially important. Martin described spending significant time listening to and recording bird activity, paying close attention to how different calls contributed to the atmosphere of specific environments. A city heard at dawn feels different from the same city heard in the afternoon. Seasonal changes alter acoustic behaviour. Even subtle variations in bird populations can influence how a place is perceived. Most players may never consciously identify these details while exploring a virtual environment, though they contribute to an overall impression that the world feels convincing. Authenticity often emerges not from a single spectacular detail but from the accumulation of many small observations.

    What matters, however, is not strict realism. Throughout the lecture, Martin repeatedly emphasised what he referred to as “the feels”. A sound does not necessarily need to reproduce reality perfectly. It needs to produce an emotional response that feels appropriate to the experience being created. Sound design therefore occupies an interesting position between documentation and interpretation. The goal is not simply to record reality. The goal is to understand which aspects of reality contribute most effectively to a desired emotional experience. A city can feel alive, lonely, welcoming, dangerous, or mysterious depending upon how listeners are encouraged to interpret what they hear.

    This emphasis on interpretation helps explain Martin’s enthusiasm for recording. Like many professional sound designers, he regularly uses commercial sound libraries. Yet he repeatedly stressed the value of gathering material personally. Recording is not simply a way of collecting assets. It is a way of discovering possibilities. The act of listening often becomes just as important as the recordings themselves.

    One of the most memorable examples emerged from his work on Infamous: Second Son. One of the game’s superpowers involved manipulating video and television signals, creating an unusual design challenge. How does a fictional power based upon digital transmission actually sound? Rather than beginning with familiar science-fiction conventions, Martin started exploring the electromagnetic world hidden within everyday electronic devices. This led him towards one of his favourite recording tools: a telephone pickup microphone designed to capture electromagnetic activity rather than airborne sound.

    The results reveal a hidden acoustic world that most people never realise exists. Televisions emit fluctuating tones. Computer monitors generate complex electronic textures. Power supplies buzz, pulse, and whine. Fluorescent lights produce unexpected patterns of activity. Arcade machines reveal layers of sonic behaviour completely absent from ordinary listening. Through the telephone pickup microphone, familiar objects become strange again. The recordings frequently bear little resemblance to the devices that produced them. Ordinary electronics become sources of futuristic energy, abstract textures, and unusual sonic gestures.

    More importantly, these recordings illustrate Martin’s broader philosophy. Creativity often emerges when attention is directed towards places that others overlook. The sounds themselves are valuable, though the deeper lesson concerns perspective. A designer who remains curious about the world continually discovers new material. Inspiration rarely appears as a mysterious force descending from nowhere. More often, it emerges from paying close attention to phenomena that already exist around us.

    Play occupies an equally important role within this process. Martin repeatedly described sound design as an activity that retains a fundamentally playful character even within highly professional production environments. His studio contains a constantly evolving collection of objects, materials, and devices that may one day prove useful. Springs, wires, bottles, sheets of metal, broken electronics, improvised resonators, and unusual recording tools coexist alongside more conventional equipment. Some objects are kept for specific projects. Others remain simply because they are interesting. The distinction between experimentation and work often becomes difficult to identify.

    This attitude reflects a deeper commitment to exploration. Play creates opportunities for accidental discoveries. A sound recorded for one purpose may become useful elsewhere. An object collected years earlier may suddenly solve a completely unrelated problem. Maintaining an environment that encourages experimentation therefore becomes part of the creative process itself. Rather than waiting for inspiration to arrive, Martin actively cultivates situations in which surprising ideas can emerge.

    Questions of creativity ultimately led Martin towards a broader discussion about the nature of sound design itself. One of the most thought-provoking moments in the lecture emerged when he distinguished between sound effects design and sound design. The difference may initially appear semantic, though it reveals an important shift in emphasis. Sound effects design concerns the creation of individual sounds. Sound design concerns the shaping of experience. A sound effect may be technically impressive, though successful sound design depends upon how sounds influence perception, attention, and interpretation.

    This distinction becomes especially important within interactive media. Players do not simply observe events. They participate within them. Sound therefore contributes not only to atmosphere but also to understanding. Audio can communicate danger, reward exploration, reinforce character identity, or guide attention towards important information. Decisions about timing, context, implementation, and interaction become just as significant as the sounds themselves. Technical skill remains essential, though it ultimately serves a broader creative objective.

    Martin’s discussion of feedback reinforced this perspective. Throughout development, he regularly seeks responses from people outside the immediate audio team. Interestingly, he rarely focuses on technical details during these conversations. Rather than asking whether a sound is realistic or well produced, he prefers to understand how people feel. Does a sequence feel exciting? Does a character feel powerful? Does an environment feel believable? Such questions reveal far more about the success of a design than detailed discussions of frequency content or signal processing. Emotional responses often provide the clearest indication of whether creative intentions have been achieved.

    Looking back across the lecture, what emerges most clearly is a conception of creativity rooted in curiosity. Martin’s stories ranged from bird recording and urban listening to electromagnetic microphones and emotional cataloguing systems. Yet beneath these diverse examples lies a remarkably consistent philosophy. Creative practice depends upon remaining receptive to possibilities that have not yet been imagined. New ideas often emerge from unexpected encounters, unusual observations, and playful experiments rather than from rigid adherence to predetermined plans.

    Perhaps this is why the concept of designed serendipity feels so compelling. Creativity is frequently described as a search for answers. Martin presents something closer to a search for opportunities. The role of the designer is not simply to know what to do next. It is to create circumstances in which new possibilities can reveal themselves.

    A different route through the city. A strange sound hidden inside a fluorescent light. A bird call heard at the right moment. A forgotten object waiting on a studio shelf.

    Sometimes the most valuable discoveries are not the ones we set out to find.

  • Designing Fear: Matt Yocum on Horror, Tension, and the Psychology of Sound

    Matt Yocum

    What is the fastest way to make a horror film stop being scary?

    Matt Yocum’s answer was immediate: mute it.

    At first, the response feels almost too simple. Horror cinema is often discussed in terms of monsters, visual effects, darkness, violence, or shock. Yet remove the soundtrack and something fundamental changes. The creature remains on screen. The corridor remains dark. The threat still exists. What disappears is much of the tension. Anticipation begins to weaken. The feeling that something terrible might be about to happen gradually fades away. For Yocum, whose career has included sound design work across film and television, this observation reveals something important about the role of sound in horror. Sound design is not simply about creating interesting sounds. It is about shaping emotion. Throughout his guest lecture at Edinburgh Napier University, whether discussing creature design, immersive audio, audience psychology, or jump scares, a remarkably consistent idea emerged. Horror is not primarily about making audiences hear frightening things. It is about making them feel uncertain about what might happen next.

    That distinction helps explain why some of the most effective moments in horror involve remarkably little happening at all. A character walks slowly down a hallway. A door stands slightly ajar. An empty room appears entirely ordinary. Nothing overtly threatening is visible, yet audiences become increasingly uncomfortable. According to Yocum, much of horror operates through tension and release. Viewers are encouraged to anticipate an event before that event actually arrives, and sound plays a central role in constructing that anticipation. Environmental detail begins to disappear. The soundtrack becomes quieter. Attention narrows. Audiences recognise the pattern immediately. Years of watching horror films have taught them that something is coming. A character approaches a door, the atmosphere tightens, and the audience braces itself for the inevitable scare. The door opens and nothing is there. Relief briefly returns, only for the real scare to arrive moments later when attention has already begun to relax. Horror repeatedly exploits this relationship between expectation and uncertainty. Audiences respond not only to what they hear, but also to what they believe they are about to hear.

    Silence therefore occupies a surprisingly important position within horror sound design. Although the genre is often associated with loud impacts and sudden shocks, Yocum argued that removing sound can be just as effective as adding it. As environmental information falls away, attention becomes focused on the sounds that remain. Breathing becomes more noticeable. Footsteps acquire greater significance. The creak of a floorboard suddenly feels loaded with meaning. None of these sounds are inherently frightening. Their significance emerges through context. A footstep heard in a crowded shopping centre communicates something very different from a footstep heard in an empty house late at night. Horror succeeds by manipulating those relationships, encouraging audiences to reinterpret ordinary sounds as signs of vulnerability, danger, or uncertainty. Rather than overwhelming viewers with information, effective sound design often achieves more through careful restraint. The audience begins searching for clues, assigning importance to small details, and constructing explanations from incomplete information. In many respects, horror is less concerned with frightening sounds than with the psychology of listening itself.

    Questions of interpretation also emerged throughout Yocum’s discussion of creature design. Audiences often imagine creature sound as a process of inventing something entirely new, though the reality is frequently more complicated. Effective creature design begins not with software, plug-ins, or signal processing, but with observation. How large is the creature? How does it move? Does it walk, crawl, slither, or fly? Does it possess lungs? How much does it weigh? What sort of anatomy produces its sounds? Such questions help ground fictional beings within believable worlds. Sound gives visual effects a sense of physical presence. A creature that appears enormous on screen can feel surprisingly weightless without appropriate sonic support. Movement, impacts, breathing, and vocalisation all contribute to the illusion that something genuinely occupies space. The task is not simply to create an unusual sound. It is to persuade audiences that a fictional entity belongs within the world they are experiencing.

    One of the most memorable moments in the lecture emerged when a student described creating a creature vocalisation from the sound of a restaurant toilet flush. Rather than dismissing the idea, Yocum praised the approach. Organic source material, he argued, often provides richer creative possibilities than excessive processing. A toilet flush already contains qualities that resemble breathing, resonance, and vocalisation. More importantly, it originates in the physical world. Throughout the lecture, Yocum repeatedly returned to the value of starting with interesting source material rather than attempting to manufacture complexity through endless layers of effects. This preference led naturally into a broader discussion about creative confidence. Early in his career, he admitted that he often attempted to solve design problems through increasingly complex layering and processing. Over time, he recognised a common trap. Designers frequently add more and more material when they become uncertain about their choices. One piece of advice from veteran sound designer Erik Aadahl remained particularly influential: the less confident you are, the more likely you are to throw the kitchen sink at a design. The observation is humorous, though it points towards a deeper truth about creative practice. Effective sound design is rarely an exercise in accumulation. It is an exercise in decision-making. Success depends less upon how many sounds can be added and more upon understanding which sounds genuinely belong.

    A story later in the lecture illustrated this principle perfectly. Working on a film involving a supernatural creature, Yocum spent weeks developing vocalisations based upon detailed descriptions provided by the filmmakers. Numerous versions were presented. None satisfied the directors. More versions followed. Still nothing. Eventually, after countless iterations and experiments, the sound that made it into the final film turned out to be a heavily processed recording of his French bulldog. The story generated laughter, though it also revealed something important about professional practice. Sound design is rarely a straightforward process of technical problem-solving. It often depends upon experimentation, intuition, collaboration, and a willingness to recognise successful ideas when they emerge from unexpected places. Behind the technology, the software, and the increasingly sophisticated production tools lies a creative discipline that remains deeply dependent upon listening, judgement, and imagination.

    Questions of attention remained central throughout the lecture, particularly when Yocum turned towards immersive audio formats such as Dolby Atmos. Discussions of Atmos often focus upon technology. Additional speakers create opportunities for sounds to move around an audience, above them, and through three-dimensional space. Yet one of the more interesting aspects of Yocum’s discussion was the extent to which he resisted treating the technology itself as the primary attraction. Additional channels do not automatically create better storytelling. A sound placed behind the audience is not effective simply because it appears behind them. It becomes effective when its position contributes to the emotional experience of the scene. This principle feels especially relevant to horror. Audiences are often more frightened by sounds they cannot see than by threats directly in front of them. A creak somewhere behind a listener immediately encourages questions. What caused it? How far away is it? Is it moving closer? A sound overhead may suggest a presence occupying unseen space. Rain surrounding a house can make isolation feel more tangible. In each case, the sound itself matters less than the uncertainty it creates. Atmos therefore becomes a storytelling tool rather than a technological showcase. The objective is not to demonstrate that sounds can move around a room. The objective is to shape how audiences imagine the world beyond the frame.

    Many of Yocum’s examples returned to this relationship between hearing and imagination. Horror repeatedly exploits the simple observation that listeners can hear far more than they can see. Sound extends perception beyond the limits of the image. A camera may reveal only a small portion of a location, though audio can suggest activity elsewhere. Something may be moving in another room. A distant voice may imply an unseen presence. A sound above a ceiling can transform an ordinary environment into a potentially threatening one. Once audiences begin constructing explanations for sounds that lack visible sources, imagination becomes an active participant in the storytelling process. Classic horror cinema frequently depends upon this principle. Yocum pointed to Alien as a particularly influential example. Although the creature has become one of the most recognisable monsters in film history, much of its effectiveness emerges from how rarely audiences see it clearly. Sound plays a crucial role in sustaining that uncertainty. The audience hears evidence of the creature’s presence long before receiving a complete visual understanding of what it is. Strange noises, movement within confined spaces, and subtle indications of activity allow imagination to fill gaps that images deliberately leave unresolved. The result is often more effective than direct revelation. Once a threat becomes fully visible, it also becomes more understandable. Horror frequently derives its strength from resisting that certainty.

    A similar logic appeared in Yocum’s discussion of possessed objects and haunted spaces. One example involved whispers gradually drawing a child towards a crack in a wall. Physically, very little is happening. The wall remains a wall. The room remains a room. Yet sound transforms the situation. The whispers encourage audiences to assign significance to something that would otherwise appear entirely ordinary. An inanimate object begins to feel charged with possibility. Attention becomes focused upon a location that images alone could never make equally compelling. Sound therefore contributes not only to atmosphere but also to narrative meaning. It guides audiences towards particular interpretations of what they are seeing.

    What emerged repeatedly throughout these examples was the importance of expectation. Horror does not simply frighten audiences through sudden surprises. It first teaches them how to anticipate those surprises. Once viewers recognise familiar patterns, filmmakers can begin manipulating them. Yocum highlighted Barbarian as a particularly interesting contemporary example. The film repeatedly establishes situations that appear to be moving towards conventional horror outcomes before abruptly changing direction. Audiences believe they understand what will happen next. The film then exploits that confidence. Sound design plays a central role in this process. Expectations must first be established before they can be disrupted. A soundtrack may encourage viewers to anticipate danger in one place while the real threat emerges somewhere else entirely.

    Taken together, these examples reveal a consistent philosophy running throughout Yocum’s lecture. Sound design is not simply concerned with what audiences hear. It is concerned with where they direct their attention, what they expect to happen next, and how they interpret incomplete information. Atmos, creature design, silence, environmental detail, and possessed objects may appear to involve very different techniques, though they frequently pursue the same objective. They encourage audiences to imagine worlds extending beyond what is immediately visible. Horror thrives within that gap between perception and certainty. The less certain audiences become about what lies beyond the frame, the more actively they participate in constructing the experience themselves.

    Looking back across the lecture, what emerges most clearly is a conception of sound design that extends far beyond the creation of individual sounds. Discussions of horror often focus upon monsters, jump scares, disturbing imagery, or technical effects, yet Yocum repeatedly returned to something more fundamental. Sound design is ultimately concerned with emotion. Every creative decision, from the selection of source material to the placement of a sound within an immersive environment, contributes to how audiences experience a story. This perspective helps explain why so many of the lecture’s examples appeared to revolve around expectation rather than spectacle. Silence becomes valuable not simply because it removes sound, but because it changes how listeners interpret what remains. Creature design succeeds not through complexity alone, but through an understanding of physiology, movement, and character. Atmos becomes meaningful when it directs attention towards spaces that audiences cannot see. Even the most effective jump scares depend less upon the scare itself than upon the tension that precedes it. Across each of these examples, sound functions as a way of shaping perception and guiding interpretation.

    Many of the stories shared throughout the lecture pointed towards the same conclusion. A restaurant toilet flush can become the foundation for a creature vocalisation. Weeks of carefully crafted designs may ultimately give way to a recording of a French bulldog. A whisper can transform an ordinary wall into something unsettling. None of these outcomes emerge from technology alone. They emerge from a creative process built upon listening, experimentation, and a willingness to follow ideas wherever they lead. The tools may continue to evolve, though the underlying challenge remains remarkably consistent: understanding how audiences will respond to what they hear. Perhaps this is why horror provides such a revealing lens through which to understand sound design more broadly. The genre exposes processes that are often present in other forms of storytelling but are easier to overlook. Audiences are constantly interpreting sounds, assigning meanings to them, and using them to make sense of the worlds unfolding around them. Horror simply makes those processes more visible. A creak in a floorboard, a distant movement, or a barely audible breath can suddenly become the focus of intense attention. The sounds themselves may be entirely ordinary. What changes is the emotional framework through which they are experienced.

    Returning to Yocum’s opening observation, the fastest way to make a horror film less frightening may indeed be to mute it. Doing so removes far more than sound effects or atmospheric detail. It removes anticipation. It removes uncertainty. It removes many of the subtle cues that encourage audiences to imagine what might happen next. Horror depends upon those moments of expectation, and sound plays a central role in creating them.

    A hallway. A footstep. A whisper from another room. A door slowly opening.

    None of these things are especially frightening on their own.

    Yet in the hands of a skilled sound designer, they can make an entire audience hold its breath.

  • How Does Sound Change Meaning? Michael Begg on Context, Sound Art, and Listening

    Michael Begg

    A dog growling. A tram brake. A crowd. A gust of wind. None of these sounds are particularly remarkable on their own. Yet remove them from their original contexts, place them into new relationships, and they can become something entirely different. A crowd can become threatening. Machinery can sound ritualistic. Environmental recordings can acquire symbolic meanings. Familiar sounds can begin behaving in unfamiliar ways.

    Michael Begg’s guest lecture repeatedly returned to this possibility. Although the talk touched upon theatre, recording, installation, soundscape, listening, and sound art, a deeper question seemed to connect them all: how does sound change meaning when it is removed from one context and placed into another?

    As an Edinburgh Napier alumnus whose work spans sound design, sound art, theatre, installation, recording, and performance, Begg described a practice that resists easy categorisation. Throughout the lecture, sounds rarely remained fixed within the roles normally assigned to them. Recordings became artistic material. Environmental sounds became narrative devices. Ambiences acquired symbolic significance. Boundaries between documentation and invention, reality and fiction, atmosphere and storytelling repeatedly began to blur. Rather than treating these ambiguities as problems requiring resolution, Begg appeared to embrace them as opportunities for discovery.

    Conventional discussions of sound design often emphasise clarity. Sound helps audiences understand where they are, what they are looking at, and how events relate to one another. It can establish location, direct attention, reinforce emotion, and support narrative. Much of Begg’s work points towards a different possibility. Sound can also be used to create uncertainty. Rather than helping audiences settle into a stable interpretation of the world, it can encourage them to question relationships between sounds, places, memories, and meanings. Listening becomes less a process of receiving information and more a process of exploration.

    Underlying this approach is a simple observation. Sounds rarely possess fixed meanings of their own. A sound acquires significance through context. A growling dog heard in a park on a sunny afternoon communicates something different from the same growl heard through a wall in the middle of the night. A crowd may suggest celebration, protest, danger, belonging, anonymity, or threat depending upon where it is heard and what surrounds it. Even seemingly ordinary sounds become surprisingly unstable once they are removed from their expected environments. Meaning emerges not solely from individual sounds but from the relationships established between them.

    Beneath many of the lecture’s examples sat a recurring fascination with recording itself. Capturing a sound does more than preserve it. It removes it from the moment that produced it and makes it available for entirely new purposes. Once a sound has been recorded, it can be relocated, layered, manipulated, combined with other sounds, and assigned functions that its original source could never have anticipated. A recording ceases to be merely evidence that something happened. It becomes creative material in its own right.

    That perspective helps explain Begg’s interest in the early history of recording technologies. His discussion of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph was not simply a historical diversion. What appeared to fascinate him was the possibility that recording did not always imply playback. Sound could be captured without being heard again. Listening, memory, recording, and time were once connected in very different ways. Reflecting on those early technologies encourages a broader appreciation of how profoundly recording has reshaped human relationships with sound.

    For most of human history, sounds were inseparable from the moments that produced them. A voice existed only while somebody was speaking. A performance existed only while it was being performed. Once the event ended, the sound disappeared. Recording altered that relationship fundamentally. Sounds could survive their sources. Moments could return. Listeners could revisit events that no longer existed. This transformation changed more than preservation. It also altered memory itself. Human memory rarely reproduces experiences exactly. Memories fade, merge, distort, and become entangled with later experiences. A familiar place remembered from childhood often feels different when revisited years later. Recording introduced a different relationship with the past. A voice could remain unchanged long after the speaker had aged. A place could continue sounding as it once did despite having been physically transformed. A recording therefore occupies an unusual position between presence and absence. The original event has disappeared, yet traces of it remain available for repeated listening.

    Seen in this way, recordings are never simply sounds. They are fragments of moments that no longer exist. Once detached from their original contexts, however, those fragments become remarkably flexible. A recording may function as documentation, artistic material, environmental texture, historical evidence, memory, or narrative device. Meaning depends not only upon what the sound is but upon how it is encountered. The same recording may communicate entirely different things when placed into different environments and relationships.

    Place introduces another layer of complexity. Every environment possesses its own sonic identity. A railway station, a church, a forest, a city street, a factory floor, and a theatre foyer each encourage different expectations about what listeners are likely to hear. Sound designers often work by reinforcing those expectations, helping audiences orient themselves within a world. Much of Begg’s work appears interested in exploring what happens when those expectations become unstable.

    Sounds frequently carry traces of the places from which they originated. A recording made within a large reverberant space retains evidence of that architecture. Urban recordings contain clues about movement, infrastructure, and activity. Environmental recordings reveal information about weather, geography, and ecology. Once such sounds are relocated into unfamiliar contexts, listening becomes an encounter between multiple places simultaneously: the place where the sound was recorded, the place where it is being presented, and the imagined place being constructed within the listener’s mind.

    Environmental sound occupies a particularly important position within this framework. Rather than treating such material as a backdrop to more significant events, Begg frequently treats it as artistic material. A distant vehicle, birdsong, footsteps, fragments of conversation, wind, or the resonance of a particular space can all become meaningful elements within a listening experience. These sounds do not simply establish realism. They influence how every other sound is perceived. Context becomes expressive. Relationships become as important as individual sonic events. Sound design shifts from creating isolated sounds to shaping the conditions through which sounds acquire meaning.

    Black Sky White provided a particularly fertile environment for exploring these ideas. Long before working with the Moscow-based theatre company, Begg encountered their production Bertrand’s Toys during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The experience left a lasting impression. Years later, after eventually establishing contact with artistic director Dmitry Artyupin, he found himself contributing to productions that demanded precisely the kind of boundary-crossing approach that characterises his broader practice. Creative directions often arrived as poetic images rather than technical specifications. Symbolic ideas frequently took precedence over practical descriptions. Sound design therefore became a process of interpretation and exploration rather than implementation alone.

    The production Omega served as the lecture’s central case study. Describing the work in purely narrative terms proves difficult. Circus imagery, tarot symbolism, mythology, ritual, biblical references, apocalypse, and transformation all intersect within a highly stylised theatrical environment. Yet the production itself is perhaps less interesting than the questions it raises about listening.

    Central to Begg’s discussion was the idea of “total theatre”. In this approach, the performance does not begin when the lights go down and end when the audience leaves their seats. The audience’s experience starts much earlier. Sounds encountered while entering the venue become part of the work. Audio in bars and foyers contributes to atmosphere. Environmental details shape expectations before the formal performance begins. Sound therefore extends beyond the stage, helping construct an entire experiential world rather than merely supporting individual scenes.

    Consequences for sound design follow naturally from this perspective. If audiences begin constructing interpretations before the formal performance starts, then every sonic detail becomes potentially meaningful. The boundary between performance and environment begins to dissolve. A sound encountered before entering the auditorium may later acquire significance within the performance itself. Atmospheres established early continue shaping perception long afterwards. Such an approach feels particularly appropriate for a production such as Omega. Tarot imagery, mythological references, ritual structures, and apocalyptic themes thrive on uncertainty. Clear explanations often diminish their power. Sound therefore becomes a means of sustaining ambiguity rather than resolving it. Audiences are encouraged to inhabit a world that feels coherent without becoming entirely predictable. The experience resembles exploration more than observation.

    Another revealing aspect of the lecture was Begg’s description of collecting sounds without necessarily knowing how they would eventually be used. Several examples involved recordings, objects, or sonic experiments that remained dormant for months or even years before finding a purpose. A recording session therefore becomes something more than asset creation. It becomes a process of building a library of possibilities.

    This attitude feels closely connected to the broader themes running throughout the lecture. If sounds can change meaning when placed into new contexts, then a recording’s future significance can never be fully predicted at the moment it is captured. A sound designer may record a piece of machinery, an unusual object, a resonant space, or an environmental detail for one reason only to discover later that it functions far more effectively in an entirely different role. The recording becomes a resource for future reinterpretation.

    Viewed in this light, sound libraries begin to resemble archives of unrealised possibilities. Every recording carries multiple potential meanings. The creative challenge lies not simply in finding sounds but in discovering unexpected relationships between them.

    Sound collage offered perhaps the clearest demonstration of this approach. Dogs growling, rattling chains, distant crowds, machinery, storms, radio fragments, poetry, animal calls, and tram brakes all appeared within evolving sonic environments designed to produce uncertainty. None of these sounds are inherently unusual. Their significance lies in the relationships established between them. A tram brake normally belongs to a particular place and context. A crowd recording carries assumptions about social activity. Animal sounds imply specific environments. Once removed from their expected settings and combined in unfamiliar ways, these sounds begin behaving differently. Listeners search for explanations. They attempt to organise the material into a coherent world.

    The effectiveness of these collages does not arise from any individual sound. A chain heard in isolation remains a chain. A tram brake remains a tram brake. What matters is the moment when such sounds begin interacting with one another. A mechanical sound may acquire ritualistic associations when placed alongside spoken poetry. An environmental recording may begin to feel mythological when surrounded by unfamiliar textures. A crowd may initially suggest celebration before gradually becoming threatening. Meanings shift continually as new sounds enter the environment and alter relationships between existing elements. The audience is therefore not simply decoding information but repeatedly revising its understanding of the world being presented. Every new sound has the potential to reorganise the listener’s interpretation of everything that came before it.

    Listening itself consequently becomes a creative act. Hearing is often treated as a process of receiving information, yet Begg’s work suggests something more complicated. Listeners continuously construct explanations for what they hear. A crowd implies a location. A chain implies an object. A tram brake implies a city. Audiences unconsciously assemble these fragments into coherent worlds. Sound design can therefore work by providing information, though it can also work by destabilising information. Once familiar sounds appear in unfamiliar relationships, the listener’s confidence begins to erode. The world remains intelligible, though only partially. Listening becomes an active process of negotiation and discovery.

    Ambiguity remained one of the lecture’s recurring themes. Are particular sounds part of the fictional world? Are they symbolic? Are they memories? Are they environmental details? Are they artistic interventions? Such questions often remain unresolved. Rather than reducing ambiguity, the sound design actively cultivates it. The distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound therefore becomes especially important. Theatre, film, and television often depend upon relatively stable relationships between sounds that belong to the fictional world and sounds added for dramatic effect. Begg’s work repeatedly challenges that stability. Environmental recordings acquire symbolic meanings. Atmospheric textures begin behaving like narrative devices. Sounds migrate between functions. Familiar categories begin to collapse.

    Seen from this perspective, the connection to sound art becomes much clearer. Much sound art is concerned with context, perception, listening, and the reassignment of meaning. A sound heard in one environment may communicate something entirely different when relocated elsewhere. Meaning emerges not solely from the sound itself but from the conditions under which it is encountered. Begg’s work appears to operate according to similar principles. The sounds themselves matter, though their relationships matter just as much.

    What emerged most clearly from the lecture was a particular way of thinking about listening. Sound becomes less a collection of discrete objects and more a network of relationships. Recording, soundscape, installation, theatre, environmental sound, narrative, and abstraction all contribute to the same broader project. The objective is not simply to create sounds but to shape how audiences experience the worlds those sounds inhabit.

    A central insight running through the entire lecture is that the meaning of a sound is never fixed. Sounds acquire significance through relationships, environments, expectations, memories, and the other sounds that surround them. Remove a sound from one context and place it into another, and its meaning may change completely. A recording therefore carries more than acoustic information. It carries traces of places, moments, and experiences that continue shaping interpretation long after the original event has disappeared.

    Sound design, in this context, becomes more than the creation of individual sonic events. It becomes the construction of conditions through which listeners make sense of the world. Places overlap. Memories become entangled with present experiences. Familiar sounds acquire unfamiliar meanings. Audiences find themselves navigating environments that feel recognisable yet strangely uncertain.

    For Michael Begg, the most interesting creative opportunities emerge precisely within that uncertainty. Sound ceases to function as a background element supporting events occurring elsewhere. Instead, it becomes a medium through which relationships are negotiated, meanings continually shift, and worlds gradually take shape through the act of listening itself.

  • Why Do the Sounds of Don’t Starve Feel So Alive? Matthew Marteinsson on Experimentation, Voice, and Play

    Matthew Marteinsson

    Many games strive for realism. They aim to reproduce the sound of the world as accurately as possible, carefully modelling spaces, materials, physics, and behaviours so that players feel immersed in a believable environment. Don’t Starve takes a rather different approach. Its world is filled with living scarecrows, walking trees, giant spiders, impossible creatures, and surreal landscapes that seem to have escaped from the pages of a dark storybook. Very little about it appears realistic in any conventional sense. Yet despite this, the game feels remarkably alive.

    Matthew Marteinsson’s guest lecture explored how that happened. Although the talk covered specific technical systems, recording techniques, production challenges, and implementation details, a broader idea repeatedly emerged beneath them. The sounds of Don’t Starve do not feel convincing because they imitate reality. They feel convincing because they remain connected to physical performance, playful experimentation, and a constant willingness to explore unexpected possibilities.

    During the early development of Don’t Starve, Marteinsson was effectively the sole audio designer working alongside two composers, with no dedicated audio programmer and no substantial audio department behind him. Development moved rapidly, content changed constantly, and there was little opportunity for elaborate production pipelines. Rather than treating these limitations as obstacles, the team repeatedly used them as opportunities to find simpler and more creative solutions. Constraints were not merely something to overcome. They actively shaped the character of the game’s sound world.

    The game’s character voices provide an excellent example. Traditional voice acting would have required large quantities of dialogue recording, scheduling actors, and continuously updating content as the game evolved. Such an approach was difficult to reconcile with the speed at which the project was being developed. Yet the characters still needed personality, emotional expression, and identities that players could immediately distinguish. Instead of using spoken language, Marteinsson turned to musical instruments. Inspired partly by the adults in Peanuts cartoons and partly by Peter and the Wolf, where different instruments represent different characters, each character in Don’t Starvereceived its own instrumental voice. Wilson’s distinctive muted trumpet became the starting point, with subsequent characters developing from their own carefully chosen instrumental identities. What began as a practical solution ultimately became one of the most recognisable features of the game.

    Human vocal performance appeared repeatedly as a creative tool throughout the lecture. Many memorable sounds originated not from extensive libraries or complex synthesis chains but from experimentation with the voice itself. The spiders, for example, were largely built from Marteinsson’s own vocal performances combined with processing. The Gobbler, one of the game’s most beloved creatures, began with attempts to gather suitable turkey recordings. After examining the animation, however, he found himself instinctively making a strange vocal sound that immediately felt more appropriate than any authentic turkey call. The library recordings were discarded and the vocal performance became the creature. As he noted, the deliberately exaggerated human performance communicated personality far more effectively than realism alone could have achieved.

    Realism and believability emerged as distinct ideas within Marteinsson’s approach to sound design. A perfectly accurate turkey recording might have sounded more realistic, though it may not have felt more alive. The Gobbler succeeds precisely because it occupies an unusual space between animal, caricature, and performance. Players are not simply hearing a creature. They are hearing a performance of a creature. The sound communicates character as much as biology.

    Personality often seemed more important than realism throughout the lecture. Many of the creatures in Don’t Starveexist within a visual world that is intentionally exaggerated, stylised, and slightly absurd. Conventional fantasy sound design might have felt strangely out of place. Marteinsson instead described grounding many creatures in a “weird reality”, where recognisable physical behaviours remain present but become filtered through performance, humour, and experimentation. Human vocalisations proved especially valuable in this regard. Audiences are extraordinarily sensitive to nuances in human expression. Even heavily processed vocal sounds can communicate intention, emotion, vulnerability, aggression, or curiosity in ways that are difficult to achieve through purely synthetic or animal-based recordings.

    Environmental audio presented an equally interesting challenge. Procedurally generated worlds create difficulties that traditional environmental sound design rarely encounters. Designers cannot assume where players will travel or which environments they will encounter. Marteinsson described a system that continuously examines the terrain surrounding the player, identifies the dominant biome types within the immediate area, and dynamically blends the corresponding ambiences. Grasslands, forests, marshes, and other environments continuously mix together according to what the player is actually seeing at that moment. Rather than creating a fixed soundtrack for a predetermined world, the system responds to the world being generated in real time.

    What makes this system particularly interesting is that the underlying idea remains remarkably simple. Players should hear the world they are looking at. Technical sophistication only becomes valuable when it strengthens the player’s experience. Systems matter not because they are complex but because they help players understand the world around them. Throughout the lecture, Marteinsson repeatedly demonstrated a preference for elegant solutions that serve a clear experiential purpose.

    The broader design philosophy became especially clear during the discussion following the lecture. Marteinsson argued that game audio should generally perform one of two functions: it should either build the world or inform the player. If a sound accomplishes neither, its value becomes questionable. Such a statement sounds straightforward, though it carries considerable implications for design practice. Many games accumulate audio over time, layering additional sounds onto already crowded mixes. The result can be confusion rather than clarity. Marteinsson instead advocates careful consideration of why a sound exists and what purpose it serves. Sound is not decoration. It is communication.

    Small details often became surprisingly important within this design philosophy. During the lecture, he discussed how player feedback during early access revealed complaints about a particular pickup sound. Some players even requested a dedicated option to disable it. Rather than immediately changing the sound itself, Marteinsson investigated further and discovered that the underlying issue was simply that the sound was mixed too loudly. Once its level was adjusted, the complaints disappeared. The lesson was not that players were wrong. Rather, it highlighted the importance of identifying the underlying problem rather than accepting proposed solutions at face value. Players are often very effective at identifying areas where something feels wrong. Determining why it feels wrong remains part of the designer’s responsibility.

    Recording sessions often sounded closer to scientific experiments than conventional sound production. Music boxes, improvised instruments, jelly, pudding, toys, unusual household objects, mines, and novelty items discovered in shops all found their way into Marteinsson’s recording collection. A music box originally intended for composing melodies eventually became the basis for the unsettling sounds associated with the Shadow Hand. A visit to a local mining museum produced unique underground ambience recordings for the game’s cave systems. Strange objects were collected not because a specific project required them, but because they might become useful in the future.

    Playfulness often appeared not as a break from the work but as part of the work itself. Making strange noises while watching an animation, experimenting with unusual objects, collecting sounds without a specific purpose in mind, or exploring unexpected combinations of recordings all reflect a willingness to follow curiosity wherever it leads. Listening to these stories, it became increasingly clear that creativity often depends upon creating opportunities for surprise. The value of an unusual object or recording does not necessarily become apparent immediately. A sound designer may encounter something intriguing, record it, store it away, and only discover its purpose years later.

    Technical decisions rarely appeared separate from creative ones during the lecture. Recording techniques, implementation systems, middleware, debugging tools, and production constraints were all discussed in detail. Yet none of these elements were treated as separate from creativity itself. Debug tools existed to facilitate experimentation. Procedural systems existed to strengthen immersion. Recording techniques existed to discover new forms of expression. Technology remained important throughout the talk, though it rarely appeared as the primary source of innovation.

    Reflections on game development brought many of the lecture’s themes together. Marteinsson acknowledged the challenges facing the industry, including long hours, instability, and periods of significant uncertainty. Yet his reflections consistently returned to enthusiasm, curiosity, and the joy of creating experiences that players genuinely care about. That optimism felt closely connected to the ideas that had surfaced throughout the lecture. The sounds of Don’t Starve emerged not from a search for perfection but from a willingness to experiment, adapt, collaborate, and occasionally embrace absurd ideas simply to see where they might lead.

    Perhaps that helps explain why the world of Don’t Starve feels so distinctive. Its sounds rarely seem trapped by expectations about what things ought to sound like. A spider may begin as a human vocal performance. A terrifying shadow creature may emerge from a modified music box. An iconic turkey may owe more to an impulsive noise made while watching an animation than to any field recording. Throughout the lecture, Marteinsson repeatedly demonstrated that memorable sound design often emerges when curiosity is allowed to guide the process.

    Rather than attempting to recreate reality exactly, Don’t Starve constructs a world that feels alive through performance, experimentation, and play. Many of the sounds discussed during the lecture began as accidents, improvisations, constraints, or strange ideas that simply seemed worth exploring. What emerged from that process was not merely a collection of sound effects but a coherent sonic world. Listening to the lecture, it became difficult to separate the sound of Don’t Starve from the spirit in which it was created. Both are defined by curiosity.

    In doing so, Marteinsson offered a useful reminder that some of the most memorable sounds are not discovered by following established rules. They emerge when designers remain willing to ask a simple question: what happens if we try this?

  • Creating Sounds for Things We Cannot See: Kenny Young on VR, Music, and Guiding Attention

    Kenny Young

    Many forms of media depend upon controlling attention. Films decide where audiences look through editing, framing, and camera movement. Theatre guides attention through staging and movement. Conventional games frequently do something similar through interface design, visual effects, or camera behaviour. Important information rarely appears entirely by accident. Designers often decide where attention should go long before audiences realise those decisions are being made. Most of this guidance becomes invisible precisely when it works well. Players rarely stop to think about how often games quietly redirect their attention from one place towards another. Experiences simply feel natural. Objectives appear at appropriate moments, important events seem difficult to miss, and information arrives when required.

    Kenny Young’s guest lecture explored what happens once some of these assumptions begin disappearing. Virtual reality introduces a relatively simple change that gradually creates much larger consequences. Players control the camera continuously. Looking left means physically turning left. Looking upwards requires physically raising the head. Looking away from something important may simply mean missing it altogether. Initially this sounds like a relatively minor alteration, though the consequences begin spreading surprisingly far once control over attention starts shifting away from designers themselves.

    Imagine hearing something important happening behind you in a conventional game. Designers possess numerous methods for ensuring that players notice it. Cameras may shift automatically, indicators can appear around the screen, and control may even be briefly interrupted. Decades of game design have produced increasingly sophisticated methods for solving these problems. Virtual reality complicates many of these solutions. Fixed interface elements become intrusive, large overlays can weaken immersion, and information existing outside the player’s field of view can remain entirely unnoticed. Questions therefore begin emerging around how players discover important information once designers can no longer simply place it directly in front of them.

    Young suggested that sound changes role at precisely this point. Human vision behaves selectively. We actively choose where to direct our eyes and ignore much surrounding information. Hearing functions rather differently. Sounds continue arriving whether or not we intentionally seek them out. A player may choose not to look towards something important, though hearing something nearby can still trigger an immediate response. Sound therefore begins moving away from a supporting role attached to visible events and towards something more active.

    Players do not simply hear sounds in games. They gradually learn them. Initially a sound may exist only as another event occurring within a larger environment. Yet repeated exposure slowly changes its role. Through familiarity, sounds begin accumulating meaning. This process often happens without players consciously noticing it. A sound that initially appears neutral gradually becomes linked with expectations, actions, and outcomes. Eventually hearing the sound no longer involves interpreting something unfamiliar. Players instead recognise patterns they have already learned.

    Young discussed the familiar alert sound from Metal Gear Solid as an example. During early encounters players hear a brief cue alongside visual information, though repeated exposure gradually changes the relationship. Eventually players stop hearing the sound as a sound effect at all. Instead, it begins behaving almost like language.

    Language may not be entirely the right word, though the comparison becomes useful. Words themselves do not naturally contain meaning. People gradually learn relationships between sounds and ideas through repeated experience until recognition becomes almost immediate. Something similar begins happening within games. A short musical cue or brief sound effect acquires meaning through use rather than explanation. Players are not consciously translating sounds each time they hear them. Recognition simply becomes increasingly automatic.

    Nobody pauses a game to explain that a particular sound means danger. Players learn these relationships through repeated experience. Over time certain sounds become linked with expectations, actions, and outcomes until responses begin occurring almost automatically. Listening changes in subtle ways once these associations form. Players stop consciously analysing what they hear, as attention begins shifting before deliberate thought catches up. Sound therefore becomes something more than feedback occurring after an event. It starts creating expectations about what might happen next.

    Music introduces another layer to these learned relationships. Discussions around game music frequently focus on emotion, atmosphere, and immersion. Players may notice tension increasing during combat, emotional themes returning around familiar characters, or changing musical textures supporting movement through a world. Young explored another possibility entirely. Under certain conditions, music may also begin operating as information.

    Much of his work on Tethered explored whether these kinds of relationships could be developed within virtual reality environments. Strategy games already involve unusually large amounts of simultaneous information. Resources require management, environments continue changing, threats emerge unexpectedly, and events occur across multiple locations at once. Conventional interfaces frequently solve these problems visually. Players monitor maps, indicators, menus, and notifications distributed around the screen. Translating these expectations into VR introduced a more difficult question. How can players remain aware of a world once they can comfortably see only part of it at any given moment?

    Rather than functioning purely as atmosphere or emotional support, musical phrases could gradually become learned signals recognised through repeated interaction. Certain sounds became associated with changing conditions, important events, or emerging situations. Initially these sounds carried little meaning beyond existing as recognisable musical gestures. Over time something rather different happened. Players were not simply listening to music accompanying a world. They were gradually learning the world itself.

    Listening consequently begins developing an unusual relationship with navigation. Physical landmarks help people orient themselves within real environments, though players may also begin constructing sonic landmarks. Certain sounds become associated with places, behaviours, or changing conditions. Listening therefore starts becoming part of understanding how a world behaves. Particular musical phrases began functioning almost like landmarks within an environment. Certain combinations of sounds became associated with emerging threats or opportunities requiring attention. Over time players could respond before consciously thinking about what had changed. Listening therefore became intertwined with understanding the behaviour of the world itself.

    Examples such as these begin shifting the discussion slightly. Rather than asking whether music sounds appropriate or emotionally effective, another question begins appearing. How do people learn sonic environments? Under what circumstances do sounds stop behaving like sounds and begin behaving more like information? Underlying processes of this kind may already exist across many forms of game audio, even if virtual reality makes them easier to recognise.

    Extending these ideas into working systems introduced additional challenges. Sounds needed to remain distinctive while fitting comfortably alongside underlying music. Delays had to remain short enough that players still connected events with their causes, while multiple simultaneous events could create confusion or dissonance. Initial solutions often resolved one issue only to reveal another elsewhere. Technical constraints, musical decisions, and player behaviour continually interacted throughout development. Creative work therefore emerged less as a process of executing perfect ideas and more as a continual process of adjustment.

    Running throughout the lecture was a broader observation concerning the role of sound itself. Discussions surrounding game audio frequently emphasise realism, emotion, and atmosphere. These remain important concerns, though Young’s work suggested something slightly different. Once familiar methods for directing attention become less reliable, sound begins taking on responsibilities traditionally associated with cameras and interfaces.

    Virtual reality may therefore reveal something that has existed quietly within games for much longer. Sound has rarely functioned only as decoration or atmosphere. It has also shaped where players look, what they notice, and how they organise experiences around them.

    Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether sound helps players understand virtual worlds. It may instead involve asking how much of our experience has always depended upon sound guiding us in ways we barely notice. Once designers lose many familiar methods for directing attention, sound begins moving from the background towards the centre of interaction itself.

  • Beyond the Frequency Response: Dr Nick Zacharov on Why Sound Quality Refuses to Stay Simple

    Sound quality appears to be something that should be relatively easy to define. Modern audio engineering has become remarkably precise, allowing engineers to measure frequency response, distortion, sound pressure level, impulse response, and countless other properties with extraordinary accuracy. Pages of graphs and measurements can describe how an audio system behaves in minute detail. Looking at these increasingly sophisticated tools, it becomes tempting to assume that the problem has largely been solved. Better systems should produce better measurements, while increasingly detailed measurements should gradually lead towards better listening experiences.

    Yet most people who spend time with sound eventually encounter an uncomfortable contradiction. A new pair of headphones may arrive with impressive specifications and glowing reviews, promising exceptional clarity and technical accuracy. Everything appears correct on paper, yet after listening for a while something feels slightly wrong. Another pair with less impressive measurements somehow sounds more engaging, or perhaps two products that appear remarkably similar perform very differently in practice. Even more confusingly, people listening to exactly the same material can disagree entirely about what they hear. Experiences like these raise an interesting question. If sound can already be measured with extraordinary precision, why do we still need people to listen?

    This question formed the starting point of an online guest lecture delivered by Dr Nick Zacharov, whose work has spent more than three decades exploring sound quality and sensory evaluation across industries including telecommunications, professional audio, and product development. As co-founder of AudioSense Lab, his work focuses on understanding how people experience sound rather than simply measuring the physical properties of signals. Across the lecture, one idea gradually became increasingly clear: sound quality is not hidden solely within the signal itself. It also emerges through the relationship between sound and the people hearing it.

    Part of the challenge begins with assumptions about hearing itself. Measurement systems generally behave in predictable ways. Microphones can be calibrated, repeated measurements can produce highly consistent results, and instruments respond reliably under controlled conditions. Human hearing behaves rather differently. Rather than functioning as a neutral recording device, the auditory system continuously interprets incoming information before we consciously become aware of it.

    Zacharov described hearing as an extraordinarily sophisticated process operating across enormous ranges of frequencies and intensities. Sounds arriving from different directions interact with the shape of the head and ears before even reaching the inner ear, while loudness, timing, and spatial position all influence the information ultimately reaching the brain. Listening therefore involves more than passively receiving information from the outside world. The auditory system actively reconstructs what we hear, continually shaping experience rather than simply recording it. Measuring sound pressure level may therefore be relatively straightforward, though measuring how people actually experience sound quickly becomes much more complicated.

    This issue becomes clearer when considering the language people commonly use to describe audio experiences. Terms such as brightness, warmth, spaciousness, clarity, depth, and fullness often feel straightforward and intuitive, and most listeners immediately recognise what these ideas mean. Yet many of these qualities do not correspond directly to simple physical measurements. Loudness provides a useful example. Loudness is not merely a sound pressure value but a perceptual experience allowing listeners to organise sounds along a continuum extending from quiet to loud. Anyone who has increased the volume of a quiet dialogue scene in a film only to be startled moments later by a sudden explosion or a swelling piece of music has experienced this distinction directly.

    Similar relationships exist for many of the characteristics listeners use when evaluating sound systems. Spaciousness involves more than physical distance between sound sources, warmth cannot simply be reduced to a particular frequency range, and clarity often emerges through interactions between multiple factors rather than a single measurable value. Describing sound therefore becomes surprisingly complicated. People often use similar words while imagining different things. One listener’s idea of warmth may not correspond exactly to another person’s understanding of the same term. Researchers and designers therefore face the challenge of developing shared vocabularies that allow experiences to be discussed more consistently.

    This need for a common language has led researchers towards the development of perceptual descriptors and sensory lexicons. Rather than relying on vague impressions such as “good” or “bad”, listeners are encouraged to think in terms of more specific qualities that can be identified repeatedly. The aim is not simply to produce more words for describing sound. Instead, the goal is to create reliable ways of connecting subjective experiences with measurable characteristics. The question therefore shifts again. Rather than asking whether sound itself can be measured, attention moves towards understanding whether measurements adequately describe the experiences listeners actually care about.

    One of the most interesting ideas discussed during the lecture emerged through a distinction between preference and perception. Initially these concepts seem almost interchangeable. If somebody prefers one sound over another, it appears reasonable to assume that the answer provides everything necessary. Preference feels direct and uncomplicated. Yet preference quickly becomes more unstable than it initially appears. People notice different details, bring different expectations into listening environments, and respond differently depending on context. Prior experiences shape listening behaviour, while cultural backgrounds and individual habits influence interpretation. Preferences can also change over time, meaning two listeners hearing exactly the same material can arrive at entirely different conclusions.

    To explain this distinction, Zacharov introduced an example involving cheese. Imagine placing several cheeses in front of a group of people and simply asking which one they prefer. Most people would answer almost immediately. The process feels natural and instinctive. Yet the situation changes once different questions begin appearing. Which cheese feels creamier? Which one seems more acidic? Which has a stronger texture? Attention gradually moves away from simple preference and towards analysis. People begin thinking differently about the experience itself.

    Listening behaves in much the same way. Zacharov noted that if people are simply asked what they prefer, they often respond immediately and instinctively. Once listeners are instead asked to evaluate characteristics such as distortion, bass, or other specific attributes, something changes in the listening process itself.

    “If I ask people what they prefer, they will instantly tell you. If I ask them to evaluate distortion and bass and all of these different characteristics, they start thinking consciously about things.”

    What initially appears to be a relatively small distinction gradually becomes much more interesting. Once people become consciously aware of what they are listening for, their relationship with sound itself begins changing. They are no longer responding naturally in the same way they might during everyday listening. Instead, they begin examining specific characteristics and separating experiences into individual components. Listening effectively becomes analytical rather than instinctive.

    This distinction sits at the centre of sensory evaluation. Rather than asking people simply whether they like something, sensory evaluation attempts to understand how people perceive particular characteristics and why those characteristics influence experience. The goal is not merely to identify winners and losers but to understand the qualities shaping listening itself.

    Zacharov described how this often involves training listeners to recognise and describe perceptual attributes systematically. This process does not necessarily involve teaching people what they should hear. Instead, it focuses on developing consistency. Listeners learn to identify particular forms of distortion, tonal differences, changes in spatial presentation, or other relevant characteristics. Over time, they develop a shared vocabulary allowing listening experiences to be discussed with greater precision.

    Training becomes particularly important since untrained listeners often respond differently from experienced listeners. Someone listening casually may immediately focus on broad impressions such as whether a sound feels enjoyable or unpleasant, while trained listeners may identify subtle changes in bass response, timbral colouration, spatial width, or artefacts introduced by processing systems. Neither response is inherently better than the other, though they provide different forms of information. One reflects instinctive experience while the other provides analytical detail.

    These methods become particularly valuable within product development. Preference testing can identify whether people generally favour one system over another, though such tests often reveal relatively little about why decisions occur. A product may consistently outperform competitors while leaving important questions unanswered. What exactly are listeners responding to? Greater spaciousness? Reduced distortion? Increased clarity? Better balance?

    Sensory evaluation attempts to bridge this gap by identifying the characteristics influencing perception, allowing researchers and designers to understand not simply whether products succeed but why they succeed. These approaches have applications across a wide range of industries. Telecommunications systems aim to optimise speech quality and intelligibility. Headphone manufacturers seek desirable listening experiences across different musical styles. Automotive companies increasingly design not only engines and interiors but also the sonic experience of travelling within vehicles. Consumer technologies ranging from smart speakers to voice assistants similarly depend on understanding how people perceive sound rather than simply reproducing signals accurately.

    Towards the end of the lecture, another issue gradually emerged concerning the relationship between controlled testing environments and everyday listening experiences. Listening tests often take place under carefully designed conditions intended to isolate variables and remove distractions. Such environments are extremely useful for identifying subtle differences and maintaining consistency, yet real listening situations rarely behave in the same way.

    People do not spend their lives sitting silently in isolated rooms rapidly switching between competing systems. Sound exists alongside movement, conversations, expectations, distractions, and activities unfolding simultaneously. Headphones are used on trains and buses, music accompanies exercise and travel, and films are experienced within social environments rather than laboratories. A technically ideal system under laboratory conditions may therefore not necessarily produce the same experience within everyday contexts.

    This raises questions surrounding ecological validity, a concept concerned with how closely experimental conditions resemble real-world experiences. Zacharov reflected on this as an increasingly important direction for future work, suggesting that listening research has gradually begun moving towards broader and more realistic forms of evaluation.

    “I think there is a trend in going more holistic nowadays and going more ecological.”

    Running throughout the lecture was a wider point. Sound quality is not simply a technical problem waiting to be solved through increasingly detailed measurements. Measurements remain essential and enormously valuable, though they only describe part of the listening experience. Signals, technologies, environments, expectations, and listeners continuously interact with one another. Understanding sound therefore may involve more than measuring systems accurately. It may also require understanding the people hearing them.