About 10 years ago, digital technology took the world of sound and sound design and turned it upside down. Now digital is everywhere. So is digital technology homogenizing sound design? Thomas Neuspiel of Toronto’s Keen Music Voice & Sound Design is unequivocal: ‘For people who are lazy it is and for people who are not, not at all.

‘The way digital technology can homogenize [sound] is that people start buying sample libraries, so eventually when a hot new synth comes out on the market, before you know it you’re hearing them everywhere.

‘It’s a question of not accepting whatever you have; it’s a matter of letting your imagination run wild and thinking ‘What should it sound like?’ So it’s limited only by your imagination, not by what you can do technically.’

Others also say when it comes to getting just the right sound, nothing is as good as a touch of imagination. Tom Eymundson of Pirate Radio & Television in Toronto says of his company’s creative process, ‘We listen to what our client wants and use our imagination, and from that point we can be 1,000 fathoms deep or 30,000 feet in the air.’

Eymundson says the true essence of sound design is about delving into the imagination to create plausible sounds, ‘and the hardware doesn’t know how to make that for you.’

He cites the example of the robot pursuer in Terminator 2, which walked through solid objects.

‘What would the sound of someone walking through a wall be? We’d think, ‘Hmm, it doesn’t really have a sound,’ and we’d talk about it and what we think it would sound like.’

In the case of the Schwarzenegger flick, sound designers resorted to unconventional methods to get the sound they wanted. ‘The sound they ended up making, they put a microphone in a condom and put it in and out of a can of dog food. That is pure sound design. You think, ‘Hmm, how could I make that sound?’ You imagine the sound and devise a way to create it. We do it every day. There’s a multitude of applications to capture the sound, but capturing it isn’t as important as manipulating it.

‘For example, for Jurassic Park, someone had to decide what a T Rex sounded like. A group of people got together and talked about it and ended up with the sound of a walrus and pitched it down so it became deep, throaty and quite scary. That is sound design: creating a sound for something that doesn’t really exist.’

Another example concerns an animated series of commercials promoting condom use and starring a dog that has ‘decided to make love to everything in its way.’ With the concept of putting in the real-life sound untenable, sound designers on the project substituted a variety of sounds for each of the dog’s conquests, for example, a steam train and wood being sawed.

‘It was a series of shots and in each shot rather than ‘see and say’ we put in a sound that really didn’t belong, but did because it created the motion. The sound created the motion,’ says Eymundson.

‘It used to be that sound design was limited to the capabilities of the technology. Now it is ruled by the ability to create, not by the equipment used to create it, and that is going to separate those who can and those who can’t by virtue of their imagination.’

Without doubt, digital technology has become the industry standard for excellent reasons, among them the logistical advantage.

Dave Sorbara of Toronto’s GraysonMatthews explains his company’s preference for Pro Tools: ‘It’s extremely efficient. In terms of hard-disk systems, a lot of it is the time factor as well – the whole concept of random access is pretty nice to work with. It’s pretty forgiving time-wise. It leaves more time to experiment if you need less time to get things locked up.’

Tom Westin, also of GraysonMatthews, continues: ‘What [digital] has done is it has straight away gone from a homogenous type of sound to there being so many options of what you can do and the way you can experiment. And there’s lots of software-based stuff out there that allows us to manipulate sound that we could never do before. Any two digital processes are not the same anyway, so it’s not a cookie-cutter approach. People come up with some wacky and different stuff [using digital technology].’

David Krystal of Krystal Music and Sound Design in Toronto takes a lateral approach. While Krystal Music has embraced digital, it has also consciously gone about collecting ‘vintage’ pieces of sound-recording equipment.

Two recent spots Krystal worked on used both digital and vintage items – either musical instruments or sound design gear.

‘We did some American Outback Steakhouse spots, where it was very montage-y and we cut everything up. We recorded a track and cut it up into two-second bursts. It was a very Red Hot Chili Peppers kind of track, very surreal,’ says Krystal.

‘It starts out on Rachel Hunter and then morphs to a tv set and white noise and then goes to a whole load of different quick cuts and then back to her. We had to be very creative with the sound design.’

Another spot, for Nikon, features a revolving camera. ‘It’s a very high-tech spot. That was quite unusual,’ says Krystal. ‘We put some jungle music and incorporated the sound effects into the rhythm of the spot. We created some real and some artifical sounds and morphed them together.’

The sound that can be had from Krystal’s recently purchased 1958 microphone from Nashville, which ‘cost a fortune,’ is irreplaceable, he says.

‘You can’t duplicate that sound now. We’re just getting some eq strips from the mobile studio that recorded [Rolling Stones album] Exile On Main Street and Led Zeppelin. It’s very important when bringing in sounds to digital that the sound has that warm old sound. The manipulation of sounds and ideas is absolutely fantastic because of the ease of [digital], so we’re marrying the two. Gear from the ’60s and ’70s within the digital domain is the answer.

‘We’re still using old amplifiers and old eqs, and the older the better. We’ve got a Beatles amp, an amp from the ’60s.

‘It’s that warm, tubes sound. Digital can be cold and that’s important; when you’re recording into a computer it’s important to keep it warm.’