sound design experiments

I hate naming sound effects. It takes longer than the actual recording session, and I never know what meaningful names such abstract sounds could possibly suggest.

Was watching some Manga Sekai Mukashibanashi (or rather, "looking at" since no subtitles and mostly just skipping through for screenshotting bits) and I do really like those simple synthy bloops and bleeps they use for prods and blinks etc. For instance for a deer gracefully leaping, because the movement was so unnatural (she more floated off than jumped - no anticipation) they just had an oscillator ascend with tape echo. They sweeten a lot of impact sounds with synthy echoey zaps also.

So a synth session mostly started off with simple sine waves and echoes, before going off to other places (raw sounds after 0:28). Mixing in those bloops with punches is quite interesting! The laser gun sound has reversed wood filing (exciting the Workmate's metal frame) mixed with the synth for some grunge. For body fall sounds, I just dropped a big book in a cardboard box a few times and layered it.

I love the clichéd anime/Hanna Barbera sounds as works of musique concrete art. There is some real imaginative thinking behind the synchronicity between what the sound actually is of, and what it suggests (compared to the WB library which is mostly just slide whistles and smacks). But I also hate those libraries with a passion 'cause I've heard them so god damn often. The implementation of those creative sounds is no longer creative, it's stock. We now just know "that's the sound of someone leaving the scene" etc. With such a variety of different visual art styles, shouldn't the sound design also change with the nature of these different worlds? Even if the budget doesn't allow for new sounds, why not play library sounds at different speeds and use them in a subversive context? I don't know why sound is such an afterthought, when really it's half the picture.

It's all well and good me saying this when I'm not really satisfied with my own sound design here. Lost sight of the goal which was to do magical/cartoony synth sound sequences. I wasn't really happy with how those were turning out (there's a fine line between too few sound layers and too many), so I just did punches and lasers instead.