Week 1 - AA1 - Sound Design

This week, we looked at sound design: what it is, the purposes, what it's trying to achieve and it's technical aspects. A sound design can be used as a sound effect or sound logo, etc. I have chosen Deep Note, a sound logo created by Andy Moorer in 1983. The sound is famous for being the sound logo for THX.

The sound can be downloaded here.

This piece of sound design was created for the purpose of a sound logo to accompany a logo to be put before the movie Return of the Jedi. The design specification given by the producer is that he wanted, "something that comes out of nowhere and gets really, really big!"

In essence, what it's trying to achieve is to produce sound that appears and gradually gets very grand and big.

Moorer achieved the big sound not only through loudness but also texture. In the beginning of the sound, lower frequencies were used and as the sound gets "bigger" the higher frequencies gets louder too and as a result, a big sound is achieved. He used a really dense texture to achieve this very loud and big sound.

References: Tiny Music Thing Makers: Pt. 3: The THX Sound. Accessed: 4 August 2008. Available: http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/05/tiny-music-makers-pt-3-thx-sound.html