Audio design, also known as sound design is art and practice of creating sound tracks for a variety of needs such as movies, television, video games, radio, music, etc. Designing sound and audio involves specifying, acquiring or creating auditory elements using audio production techniques and tools. The process of recording, developing, and producing audio elements is included under the sound design umbrella as well. With that being said, sound designers are responsible for creating soundscapes for a production team and for the post production process. Besides audio skills, sound designers need to have a lot of creativity and imagination to come up with audio that would fit well with the concepts they are working with.
Building sound concepts for projects is typically done through digital sound processing. With digital sound processing, a key part of the design process is enhancing and/or altering sounds and the sound designer doing the project usually does this process through synthesizers, samplers, and audio plug-ins and they then mix the audio sounds using a Digital Audio Workstation, or a DAW. A digital audio workstation is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. Digital audio workstations facilitate the mixing of multiple audio sources on a time-based grid. Some examples of a DAW include Audacity, Garage Band, and Adobe Audition. Each DAW tends to have their own pros and cons and it is genuinely a good idea to try different ones to experiment with which one would be best for the project that you are working on. It is important to acknowledge that there are primarily two types of digital audio workstations, standalone and software DAWs.
Most DAWs have four kinds of programs within the software for various types of design work. These four programs include a digital audio processor, music notation editor, virtual instrument, and MIDI sequencer. Digital audio processors are designed for recording, editing, and mixing digital audio information. MIDI sequencers are designed to record, edit and mix MIDI specific information. Virtual instruments are plug-ins that accept MIDI information then assigns it to various pre-recorded sampled sounds. And music notation editors enables users to create music by inputting notes straight on to a virtual stave which is basically like digital sheet music.
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Emily Ramirez 