How do you design sound for an experience you cannot control?
A filmmaker can frame an image. The edges of the screen define what the audience sees, while composition, focus, lighting and editing direct attention within it. Sound is less obedient. It extends beyond the frame, surrounds the audience, enters rooms with different acoustics and reaches listeners through systems ranging from enormous cinema installations to headphones, televisions, laptops and tiny mobile-phone speakers. A soundtrack may be created with extraordinary precision, yet nobody involved in its production can completely control how, where or at what level it will finally be heard.
During his online guest lecture for Edinburgh Napier University, supervising sound editor and sound designer Wylie Stateman explored the creative and professional consequences of working with such an elusive medium. Drawing upon a career spanning more than four decades and collaborations with filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone and John Hughes, he described sound as an art form positioned between science and subjectivity. Its physical behaviour can be measured, yet its meaning depends upon perception, attention, expectation and context. His work has extended from feature films and television to advertising, audiobooks and theme-park attractions, but a consistent question connects these different forms: how can sound professionals create an experience that remains clear, emotionally purposeful and dramatically coherent when both production and listening contain so much uncertainty?
For Stateman, answering that question requires sound practitioners to think beyond individual sounds. A designer may create remarkable material, but the audience experiences relationships: dialogue against music, effects within an environment, silence before an impact and the entire soundtrack through a particular playback system at a particular level. Creating those relationships at scale requires collaboration, while maintaining them requires somebody to understand the complete experience. Throughout the lecture, Stateman moved repeatedly between these levels, from the organisation of large creative teams to the placement of a single sound and from the controlled environment of the mixing stage to the unpredictability of a listener pressing play somewhere else. Connecting them was a consistent philosophy. Complexity is unavoidable behind the scenes, but it should produce clarity for the audience.
Stateman began with the unusual nature of sound itself. A visual composition can be stopped and examined. People can point towards a particular area of an image, discuss its composition and compare alternatives while the material remains stationary. Sound exists through time. A mixer listens, makes an adjustment, returns to an earlier point and listens again. Creative refinement becomes a repeated movement backwards and forwards through the material, making the number of meaningful passes completed within a working day directly relevant to the sophistication of the result.
Such a process makes both technology and collaboration important, but neither can replace judgement. Stateman described audio as a discipline in which scientific knowledge and subjective interpretation continually meet. Vibration can be measured objectively, while a listener’s response to it cannot be reduced so easily. Designers therefore work simultaneously with physical systems and human perception. Loudspeakers, auditoria, codecs and playback levels matter, but so do memory, expectation, emotion and attention. Even the most technically controlled production process eventually encounters a listener whose response cannot be engineered with the same certainty as the system delivering the sound.
Perhaps this uncertainty helps explain why Stateman spoke so strongly about collaboration. Rather than presenting professional success as the achievement of a solitary creative individual, he described a career built through relationships with people whose abilities complemented his own. Soundelux, the company he established with fellow sound designer Lon Bender, grew from a small operation into an organisation employing hundreds of people across several cities. Its development depended upon far more than creative talent. Business management, accounting, engineering, technology, sales and production all had to support the work of designers, editors and mixers.
The lesson for students was not that everyone should attempt to build a large company. Stateman’s broader point concerned complementary ability. Nobody needs to become equally skilled at every aspect of creative and professional life. Someone with little interest in finance needs a trustworthy person who understands it. A creative specialist working on complex productions benefits from engineers and technologists capable of turning ideas into reliable systems. Partnerships become valuable when they extend what a group can imagine and accomplish rather than merely reproducing the same abilities several times.
Professional value also emerges through reliability. Stateman described a valuable colleague in strikingly simple terms: somebody who can understand a problem, take responsibility for it and allow everyone else to stop worrying about it. Creative ability matters enormously, but large productions depend upon trust. A person who solves a problem without creating several new ones becomes increasingly valuable to the people around them. Careers are built not only through the quality of isolated work, but through the confidence that others can place in somebody when a difficult problem arrives.
Filmmaking itself operates through the same interdependence. Every specialist inevitably perceives the project through a particular discipline. Sound designers think about sound, composers about music, cinematographers about light and composition, costume designers about clothing and production designers about the physical world. Stateman compared this to a collection of unreliable narrators, each understanding the film from a particular perspective. The director’s responsibility is to bring those partial perspectives together into a coherent experience.
Sound professionals therefore need both commitment to their own discipline and awareness of the larger work. Stateman’s long relationships with individual filmmakers allowed such understanding to develop across several projects. By the time of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he had worked with Quentin Tarantino on seven films. Repeated collaboration created trust and a shared shorthand, allowing Stateman to take substantial creative ownership of the soundtrack while remaining clear that every decision ultimately served the director’s film.
That balance between ownership and service runs through much of professional sound design. Creative contribution requires conviction. A designer who merely waits for instructions cannot provide the full value of specialist expertise. Yet conviction must remain connected to the filmmaker’s intention rather than becoming an opportunity to demonstrate technique. Stateman’s account suggested a form of authorship that is confident without becoming possessive. Sound teams need enough ownership to make strong decisions, while recognising that those decisions belong within a larger work whose purpose they must understand.
Understanding that purpose becomes increasingly important as the available technology grows more powerful. More capability does not automatically justify more activity, and one of Stateman’s clearest demonstrations came from work beyond conventional cinema. Soundelux developed audio and show-control systems for large theme-park attractions, including a Terminator 2 experience designed to move hundreds of visitors through repeated performances every day. Audiences passed through a pre-show before entering a theatre containing three 3D IMAX screens and a motion base. Reliability was essential, but technical reliability alone could not create an engaging experience.
Despite having access to the motion platform throughout the attraction, the production reserved its major movement for a single moment. Audiences were allowed to become comfortable before the platform suddenly dropped. Their physical reaction was powerful precisely through its rarity. Continual movement would have made the mechanism familiar and reduced its dramatic value. Behind one carefully timed surprise sat engineering, amplification, show control, multiple screens, motion systems and the work of a large team. None of that complexity needed to become the audience’s concern. They experienced the result.
The same principle shaped Stateman’s approach to film sound. A system may offer hundreds of channels, extensive spatial control and enormous dynamic range, but the designer still needs to decide which possibilities deserve to be used. Creative sophistication can appear through restraint, and technical capability becomes valuable when it helps direct attention rather than continually demanding it.
When asked how he decides what an audience should attend to, Stateman returned to simplicity. Film combines visual and auditory information, but listeners cannot process every available element with equal attention. A dense soundtrack may contain extraordinary detail while communicating very little. The designer’s task is therefore not to make everything audible at once, but to create a clear path through the scene.
Dialogue often provides the starting point. Human listeners extract extraordinary amounts of information from voices. Words communicate explicit meaning, while rhythm, pitch, timbre, hesitation and vocal effort reveal character and emotion. If audiences struggle to understand what somebody is saying, an essential layer of narrative and performance has been weakened. Music offers another route through the experience, leading or following emotional movement, preparing audiences for change or allowing feeling to emerge after an event. Environments and sound effects establish space, physicality, scale, tension and perspective. None of these categories possesses permanent priority. What matters is understanding what the audience should receive from a particular moment and organising the soundtrack accordingly.
Stateman’s preferred method was additive rather than deductive. Instead of filling a soundtrack with every plausible sound and gradually removing whatever causes problems, begin with what is essential. Establish the dialogue. Introduce music when the scene requires it. Add environment to create space and context. Bring in effects deliberately, allowing each contribution to justify its presence. This approach makes purpose part of the design process before complexity accumulates.
Spatial sound presents the same challenge on another scale. Contemporary systems allow designers to place and move sounds through increasingly elaborate speaker arrangements, but movement acquires meaning only through its relationship with the story. Surrounding listeners with constant activity can make spatial information less expressive rather than more. If every sound moves, movement itself loses significance. Space becomes useful when its behaviour supports attention, perspective or dramatic intention.
For Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the absence of a conventional composed score created a distinctive set of possibilities. Music arrived through records, radio and material connected closely with the period represented by the film. Sound design could occupy areas that might otherwise have belonged to score, contributing low-frequency energy, changes in texture and transitions that influenced mood without announcing themselves as musical cues. The team did not begin by asking how every capability of contemporary soundtrack production could be demonstrated. They considered what would make the film feel connected to 1969.
That thinking also informed Stateman’s use of Dolby Atmos. He regarded the format as an impressive creative environment, but not as a reason to send objects continually moving through the auditorium. Early experimentation with expanded spatial systems could become cluttered when additional speakers were treated as spaces waiting to be filled. Stateman instead described a stable foundation with carefully selected individual elements used when spatial movement genuinely contributed to the experience.
For a film drawing heavily upon period recordings, radio and two-channel music sources, aggressive object movement could have conflicted with the aesthetic world being created. A technically advanced format can sometimes serve a film most effectively by concealing its sophistication. As with the single movement of the Terminator 2 platform, possibility acquires value through selection.
Working with very different directors reinforced Stateman’s resistance to universal solutions. The sonic worlds of John Hughes and Oliver Stone required radically different forms of expression. Moving between comedy and films such as JFK, Born on the Fourth of July and Natural Born Killers prevented one successful method from becoming a formula applied repeatedly. An early mentor had encouraged Stateman to approach every project as a new problem and continue trying different methods rather than relying upon established answers.
Experience, from this perspective, should expand the vocabulary available to a practitioner rather than narrow the range of possible responses. A Quentin Tarantino film does not require the same sonic logic as an Oliver Stone film, and neither can be approached as a variation of a John Hughes comedy. Even repeated work with the same director changes as the project changes. Trust allows a shorthand to develop, but familiarity should not turn into repetition.
Comedy offered a useful example of this contextual thinking. Familiarity can establish a pattern, while an unexpected interruption creates surprise. Yet the same broad relationship between expectation and disruption can also support drama, suspense and horror. A technique has no fixed emotional meaning outside its context. What matters is the audience’s developing expectation and the moment at which the soundtrack confirms, delays or overturns it.
Such decisions require somebody to understand more than individual sounds, which led towards the most distinctive professional idea in Stateman’s lecture. He argued that contemporary practitioners should think of themselves not only as sound designers, but as sound directors, sound producers and sound designers. These are not three disconnected jobs. They represent different perspectives on a shared responsibility for the complete sonic experience.
The sound director understands intention. This person can discuss the desired experience with the filmmaker, interpret creative needs and establish an overall direction for the soundtrack. The sound producer understands resources. Schedules, budgets, staffing and priorities determine what can be achieved and where effort should be concentrated. The sound designer turns those intentions and resources into creative work. Stateman regarded the combination of these abilities as a professional ideal.
Directors themselves often move through a similar expansion of responsibility. A writer may become a director to shape the interpretation of the material, then become a producer to gain greater influence over resources and priorities. Stateman argued that sound professionals can develop in a comparable way. Technical expertise remains essential, but understanding intention, organising people and resources and making creative decisions gives the practitioner a more substantial role in shaping the work.
His career offers several examples of this expanded responsibility. Building large creative teams required production thinking. Designing complex theme-park attractions demanded an understanding of playback systems and engineering. Long-term relationships with directors depended upon interpreting intention rather than waiting for technical instructions. Global distribution and localisation required the sound team to consider what happens after the supposedly finished soundtrack leaves the mixing stage.
At that point, the problem of control becomes larger. Stateman may work in a highly controlled Atmos environment containing an extensive loudspeaker system, while an audience member eventually hears the result through earbuds on a train. Another listener watches through a television with speakers facing towards a wall. Somebody else lies in bed listening quietly while another person sleeps nearby. A theatrical soundtrack mixed at a high reference level may later be heard at a dramatically lower domestic level.
No single master can guarantee an identical perceptual experience across all of those conditions. Low-level detail that remains clear in a cinema may disappear when the entire soundtrack is turned down. Wide dynamics that feel exciting in a theatre can become impractical late at night. Dialogue that is intelligible through one system may become difficult to follow through another. Translation therefore concerns more than whether a format can technically fold down from one speaker configuration to another. It concerns what survives perceptually when the listener, environment and playback level change.
Even cinemas introduce uncertainty. Stateman described discussions with theatre owners about films being played below their intended reference levels. Their explanation was practical. A film begins at the specified level, somebody complains, and the level is reduced. Further complaints lead to further reductions until complaints stop. From the exhibitor’s perspective, this is a rational response to the audience in the room.
Production can create pressure in the opposite direction. Filmmakers listening in a controlled mixing environment may repeatedly ask for greater excitement, prompting levels to rise until the result satisfies the room. One part of the system pushes upwards while another turns the finished film down. The problem cannot be solved by allowing dialogue, music and effects departments to maximise their own material independently. Somebody needs to maintain responsibility for the dynamic shape of the complete experience.
Dynamics, in this sense, organise attention across time. Genuine intensity requires quieter material around it. Low-level information needs to remain meaningful under realistic playback conditions, while moments of scale need enough contrast to feel exceptional. The same principle that made one movement of the Terminator 2 platform effective applies to the soundtrack more broadly. Constant intensity reduces the expressive power of intensity itself.
Global distribution introduces another kind of variation. A soundtrack may need to function across many languages, each with different rhythms, durations and vocal characteristics. Preserving quality across those versions is not merely an administrative task completed after the creative work. It is an audio-design problem involving performance, mixing, workflow and technology.
Stateman’s approach was to break an apparently overwhelming challenge into smaller problems without losing sight of the whole. A modern feature soundtrack can require enormous quantities of editorial and mixing time, making meaningful control by one person impossible. Large teams become necessary, yet specialisation creates the risk that individuals see only their own component. The sound director-producer-designer model provides a means of maintaining overall intention while complex work is distributed among specialists.
Localisation makes the limitations of a single fixed soundtrack particularly visible. Different languages alter timing and vocal behaviour, while different audiences and distribution systems introduce further variables. Streaming services now possess forms of information and control unavailable to earlier theatrical systems. Different languages and formats can already be delivered to different users. Stateman’s discussion suggested a logical extension of that capability: audio systems that respond more directly to individual listeners and the circumstances in which they are listening.
Rather than treating a soundtrack as one fixed master expected to survive every possible situation, elements could remain available for intelligent recombination. Dialogue might receive greater prominence where needed. Dynamic behaviour could change for quiet listening. Different relationships between elements might be created according to the user’s environment, hearing ability or preferences.
Such possibilities do not necessarily weaken creative intention. They raise a more fundamental question about what preserving intention actually means. A listener who cannot understand the dialogue is not receiving the intended experience merely through being sent the same electrical signal as everyone else. Someone listening quietly in bed occupies a different perceptual situation from an audience inside a calibrated cinema. Identical delivery does not guarantee equivalent experience.
Adaptive audio therefore extends rather than abandons Stateman’s earlier principles. If the purpose of sound design is to guide attention, communicate story and create emotional relationships, then changes in listening circumstances matter. The challenge is to determine which aspects of an experience must remain stable and which can change to preserve them. A theme-park attraction, theatrical soundtrack, localised release and adaptive audio system appear very different, yet each requires designers to think about the complete journey between creative intention and audience experience.
Across Stateman’s lecture, simplicity emerged not as an absence of complexity, but as its successful organisation. Hundreds of people may contribute to a project. Thousands of hours may be spent editing and mixing. Sophisticated engineering may sit behind the delivery system. The audience does not need to experience any of that as complication. They need to understand a voice, feel a change in atmosphere, anticipate an event or be surprised by a sudden movement.
A film soundtrack can contain vast numbers of tracks, edits, recordings and processing decisions while resolving into a clear moment of attention. Achieving that clarity requires more than technical skill. Designers need to understand what matters within the scene. Producers need to organise the resources that make the work possible. Sound directors need to maintain the relationship between individual decisions and the complete experience. Teams need complementary expertise and enough trust for difficult problems to be handed to people capable of solving them.
Stateman’s lecture ultimately presented sound design as the organisation of attention through time. The designer decides what matters now, what can wait, what should disappear and what should arrive unexpectedly. The producer makes those decisions achievable. The director maintains an understanding of why they matter. Technology expands the available possibilities, but cannot decide which ones belong in the experience.
That distinction becomes more important as audio technology develops. Spatial formats offer increasingly detailed control inside theatres and listening rooms. Streaming services distribute content globally and create new demands for localisation. Object-based systems can preserve elements beyond a fixed master, while adaptive delivery may eventually allow soundtracks to respond more intelligently to listeners and environments. Each development increases possibility, but also increases the need for judgement.
Somewhere beyond all of those systems, a listener is trying to follow a story. They may be sitting inside an elaborate cinema, travelling on a train, watching a laptop or lying quietly in bed. The sound professional cannot control every condition surrounding that experience, but can understand the relationships that matter. Dialogue can remain clear. Attention can be guided. Complexity can be organised. Dynamics can create contrast rather than exhaustion. Technology can serve intention rather than advertise itself.
The response to uncertainty is not complete control. It is to design intelligently for variation while remaining clear about intention. Build teams capable of solving problems that no individual could solve alone. Understand the whole experience while taking responsibility for one part of it. Use complexity behind the scenes to create clarity for the listener. Know the story well enough to recognise when a convention should be followed, when it should be overturned and when the most powerful use of a technology is to leave it silent.
A soundtrack may be shaped inside a carefully controlled room, but it does not remain there. It travels through cinemas, languages, formats, devices, environments and listeners. Every stage changes the circumstances in which the work will be experienced. Stateman’s lecture suggested that the future of sound design lies not in pretending those differences can be eliminated, but in understanding them well enough to preserve what matters. The mix may be finished when it leaves the studio. The experience begins when somebody, somewhere, presses play.
