Working as a Sound Designer

The most objectively creative job I had was as a sound design intern for an animation studio. This was in the second semester of junior year, when most of my college friends were in the depths of recruiting for internships and jobs after college. Instead, I was an unpaid intern for a 3 person animation studio, making jingles on Ableton for a Children's television show, a realtors association, and an avengers inspired short film (the details escape me).

Those were my halcyon days. I'd spring out of some economics class to meet with the creative director who'd reference increasingly obscure video game soundtracks as we talked through my latest rough cut. Later, I'd take his feedback on the low end of a bass line or the phrasing of a melody and hammer it out in the universities math atrium.

The hardest part of the internship was explaining it to others. For the more career oriented individuals in my circle, there was no path between an economics degree and a brassy synth roll. To grasp for control, I'd revert to a spiel on my future life as an IP lawyer. It was as convenient a truth as any.

Although the work may have been conventionally unwise it taught me the core elements of project management. Every piece of work I produced, the tracks, filters, effects, and samples had to be in support of the final output. That output or the theme of the output as I began was the only known constraint, what I was learning was how to add and subtract elements with a goal in mind.

I remember the piece I put together for the realtors association. The core theme was distinctive sounds of home ownership think jangling keys and a creaking door backed by an escalating piano roll. In scanning through hundreds of samples of keys and doors I thought with each, does this connect to my idea, is it sufficiently good to force me to revise the existing tracks? This process was like sifting, taking the massive compiled world of noise and filtering for the piece that wouldn't sound dissonant.

I wasn't exceptional at jingle making and knew then that my lack of formal musical education was leading to generic output. I'd spent so much time deciding when each individual track could be called finished, that I realized I was finished making music myself.