What should young people just getting started or gaining interest know about sound design and production?

Question

I am working on a project to develop resources and free online music learning experiences for 13-18 year-olds around several themes, one of which is producing music. It would be great to feature sound design as part of the project and to have your perspectives included to inform the project.

If you have perspectives on:

• What should young people know about sound design (just to get them started)
• What online resources would be most helpful to young people in relation to sound design and production
• What types of activities or projects should young people do to learn more about sound design and production

Please consider providing answers on this survey (also happy to compile your answers here and use them to inform the project).

You can learn more about the project, Sound Explorations: Creating, Expressing, and Improving Communities here

Thank you so much for your help and apologies if you feel this is inappropriate to ask in this community.

Answer 1

Sound designs not really my area, but one thing I wish I'd been taught from day one as far as production goes, (I wasn't even taught this at college doing a sound engineering city and guilds) was get your monitoring as good as possible. Investing your money in this area from the start will get you better results than spending it on anything else to begin with. It's crucial and the best investment to achieve professional results. All the best gear in the world will not sound good if your monitoring is off. So some good industry standard headphones to start with and then moving onto your monitors and your environment. Best of luck with project. Sounds great.

Answer 2

Cool idea. I'm a sound designer and composer in the game industry. I'll write out a couple suggestions:

• Emphasis open source / freeware / public sound libraries. One of the greatest hurtles in sound design / audio production is financial. They need to understand you can make awesome, beautiful sounding things with just what's out there. For beginners, gear has little correlation with quality. Learning on a cheap rig is an awesome learning experience, and will make students get so much more out of later purchases and upgrades.
• Post videos with muted audio so students can make their own sound design and original music. With a subject like sound design, it can appear rather technical and abstract to most young people (and most people in general!) Nothing beats them using tools for themselves and taking the mystery out of the process.
• Create a community! Encourage them to interact, collaborate. Create contests for scoring / sound designing videos. This will engage them, and encourage self learning, and get them working on independent creative projects!

Best of luck. I was lucky to have some great online community resources when I was learning all this stuff in 2006; the friends I met along the way kept me going.