I listened to the Knock Knock: 200 Years of Sound Effects programme as preperation this week, which I found to be an interesting insight into sound effects creation and how sounds can be replecated and crafted using household objects and objects that have very little relation to the sound it’s related to, whether that be because of its size or material. In the sound design section a few key ideas that stood out to me where that “What sound effects can and must do is reproduce noises not as the necessarily are but rather as they are usually noticed by the ordinary person.” I found this mostly of note because it connects to something mentioned by Dr Carrie Giunta in her guest lecture where she talked about how she designed the sounds for the desert scene of whatever film, saying that ” The problem is that if you record the actual sound that goes with that space it has nothing to do with the emotion of being there”, which justified her unrealistic use of howling wind in the scene she showed.
Further on this idea, in this section the sound designer states that “When I am crafting a sound, I am not seeking realism, but essense,” which gets to the core of this idea of more exaggerated and often unrealistic interpretations of a sound or a space can have more of an emotional resonance with the listener and ultimately more connection with that sound than if it were recorded, which to me makes me appreciate sound design as not just an art form but more of a science (and maybe think about sound design’s possible deceptive creative uses).