Presentation: The Practice of Sound (Part 2)
In Part 1, I spoke about more about the definition, value, and mechanisms of practice within creative audio fields. In this portion I want to speak a bit more about the mental aspect of practice and the reality within our current industry climate. Then some thoughts on how to improve practice and a few things to try if you’re looking for some suggestions on where to start.
Balance and Awareness
If you’re looking to improve your craft two incredibly important skills to develop are your ability to balance and your awareness skills.
Balance
Growth within almost any field (but certainly game audio) is going to require a certain degree of balance.
Balancing Values
Balancing Time - Estimation and Moderation
Balancing Tasks - Multitasking vs Multi-Channel
Growth Loops - Input/Output
Consistency > Heroics
Rest
Balancing Values
It is impossible for anyone to perfectly define the areas in which you should focus your development, simply because it’s impossible to know if your values are aligned.
This isn’t always necessary when talking about simple advice. But if I said that you should practice sound design for at least 3 hours every day, does that mean this career is not tenable if you also want to spend time with your friends or family? So telling someone to just “practice more” is at best oversimplified, and at its worst can hide larger systemic issues that shifts any fault onto the individual.
It is absolutely true that any creative field is going to be a difficult pursuit, but how you define success is up to you and ensuring your values are aligned can let you know if that success is achievable or not.
Develop this ability to balance your values and ensure the things which are most important to you do not get the scraps of time left over after your work.
Balancing Time
When I asked a number of game audio professionals what one thing they would do to improve their practice, overwhelmingly, they all said “more time”.
This does refer back to balancing values, but once we’ve determined our priorities within the day, it’s up to us to allocate how much time we give to these priorities. It doesn’t mean highest priorities need the most time, it just means they need attention.
Personally, I like estimating my practice the same way I would my work. I get easily excited by new ideas and this can distract me.
“I want to go field recording, I want to play with my modular synth, I want to try learn some new software, I want to check out a new game, etc,”
By estimating the areas you want to practice, you can easily see if all these pieces can fit together. Especially once you balance this practice with your other values, you may find that all these practice related goals might take a year to get done.
That might be totally fine! No one said this was a race. By estimating and scoping your practice and development you can have an understanding of your timeline and this can stop guilt from growing if you feel you should be progressing faster.
Most people are fantastic at over-estimating what they’re capable of in the short term, and under-estimating what they’re capable of in the long term.
Heroic bursts of effort can be fun and may look good on social media. But they’re not sustainable and often don’t lead to long term results.
Don’t underestimate what you’re capable of with even a small amount of consistent and deliberate focus, it can be incredibly powerful.
Take your practice at a sustainable pace, and plan out your goals. Work at your own pace and you’ll be amazed at how far you can go.
Balancing Tasks
Similar to balancing time, if you struggle to find time - consider how you balance your tasks.
It’s well known that humans are terrible at multi-tasking. For example, we cannot critically listen to two songs at the same time, or take part in multiple conversation, we’re often not even great at the single thing we’re engaged in.
However, there are opportunities for finding extra time with “multi-channel” tasks. Tasks that use different senses/abilities at the same time, but not in conflict with one another. Most people engage in these types of tasks already in some form. Things like, going to the gym and listening to music, or driving and listening to a podcast.
This may not be a revelation, but it’s worth challenging things that take up significant time in your day and see if there’s a way to share this time with another one of your values and ways to improve your craft.
Can you go for a walk while on that zoom call? Can you involve your friends/family in a casual field recording hike? I started to find balancing tasks much easier when I discovered they could overlap as long as I was clear about my priorities.
The take away here is just to simply ask questions of the tasks that fill up your day and see if there are opportunities to overlap and gain some time that might otherwise be spent on a single task.
Growth Loops
It’s well documented that learning and creativity work in cycles. Despite the fact that social media would have us believe that everyone is always learning, growing, and improving at the exact same upward trajectory 24/7. That’s not true.
Growth tends to look more like a loop. We go through cycles of input and output. Ingesting new information and experiences, and then outputting it. Either sharing that information with others, or creating something with it.
I’ve found it can also take on a cycle that looks a lot like this:
We discover something new/exciting
We learn more about it
We dig into it more (maybe even too much)
We lose interest and move on to something new
Sometimes this loop can make people feel guilty, like they didn’t “stick” with something.
And to be clear, there is a different kind of value in deep, long-term knowledge and experience with a single subject. But there is nothing wrong with trying something new, learning a bit, and then moving on. If you’ve taken something away from that experience you still learned from it.
Understand that you’re never “starting over”, you’re only “starting again”. Embracing this will make it easier to practice and develop, without being so hard on yourself.
Rest
The value of rest is well known, but it still seems an illusive thing to prioritize.
All I will say here is that when you are taking on a new task or learning new information, prioritize your rest. It may be tempting to push hard, burn the midnight oil, and try to get ahead. But proper rest will help store new information in long-term memory, avoid fatigue, and improve your long term health.
Awareness
Awareness is a really powerful passive skill. Much like critical listening, it underpins so much of what we do, yet it’s rarely developed beyond entry level studies. Focusing on a few key areas to be aware of can help our practice and development in many ways.
Self-Awareness and Meta-Cognition
This might sound really fancy but all this is suggesting is that we should be cognizant of the conditions around us to identify what we need to do. Then we need to ask a simple follow up question of why we feel we need to do that. So the “What” and “Why” questions make up our self-awareness and meta-cognition loop.
Some examples of “What” questions to ask yourself to help encourage self-awareness:
Is my professional work helping me grow?
What do I feel I need to improve upon?
What do I want to do more of?
Asking simple questions like that may yield an answer. But where this gets the most interesting is when you start asking follow up questions to your own thoughts. Ask “why?”:
Why do I feel my work is or isn’t helping me grow?
Why do I feel I need to improve in this certain area?
Why do I want to do more of a particular task or style of work?
You can continuing to ask why as many times as you need. And sometimes the answers your brain throws are glib “…because I need to pay my bills”. But pushing past those, and it can start to reveal the real core of why you may or may not want to develop in a particular direction.
The Big Challenges
When speaking about skill development in our careers, it’s natural that we will encounter other challenges along the way. These are some of the main ones I feel are relevant to game audio folks:
Procrastination
Challenges with starting work
Burnout
Challenges with sustaining work
Plateauing
Challenges with skill progression
Perfectionism
Challenges with releasing/sharing work
Inconsistency
Challenges with quality
Boredom
Challenges with engagement
It’s easy to beat ourselves up and see the appearance of any of these challenges as a personal failure - especially in creative roles.
There’s an interesting suggested approach to these that comes from a different learning model, often called “the 3 H model (3H)” and it challenges us to be curious about our challenges and struggles..
Head
Do I understand what I need to do? Is it sensible for me to be doing this right now?
Heart
Am I interested or passionate about what I need to do? Do I want to do this?
Hands
Do I have the means and ability to do what I need to do? Am I capable of doing this?
This model supposes that almost all of the above challenges can be traced to a simple disconnect within this formula.
Example: You may not be procrastinating because you’re lazy, you may be procrastinating because you don’t have a full understanding of what you need to do?
So if you encounter any of these challenges, try meta-cognition (why questions) and be curious about the conditions leading to your situation. When approached with curiosity and without judgement or shame, it can be easier to identify the real source of difficulties and often leads to better results. That don’t involve getting up at 5am, or cold plunges, or whatever productivity hack is suggested this month.
Which is a good time to mention the next topic…
Toxic Productivity
This is simply the idea that you MUST be creating, practicing, and outputting - all day, every day.
All your time must be devoted to your craft.
This is obviously a terrible idea, but it doesn’t take long on social media to see people glorifying “side hustles” and “grind life”. Like most of social media, this is a distortion of reality. But it can start to warp our own perceptions and cause additional pressure, guilt, and anxiety.
However, lets be honest about a few unfortunate realities in our industry:
Careers within creative fields absolutely take additional effort that is beyond that of most “regular” jobs.
Those early in their career may need to do extra effort to stand out and gain employment.
While there are unique challenges within our industry, these do not mean that you need to burn out trying to work all the time. Balance your growth and development with your other life priorities. Balance your time and focus on your work when it’s time to work.
Then go home!
Be Yourself
Each of us brings our own unique backgrounds, tastes, and personality into our creative work. This can create unique perspectives that may not be immediately obvious but can lead to really interesting and wonderful results that may not be immediately obvious.
Maybe a musical background encourages UI designs that adapt to background musical structures? Maybe understanding another language adapts creature designs to mimic a different dialect?
Be yourself in your practice and try to lean into how your past experiences blend with what you’re learning and see where this takes you.
It may not be the immediate priority but it can really be a multiplier to add value to any new skills.
Suggestions for Improving Practice
Alright with all that out of the way - if you’re looking for some suggestions on ways to improve your practice:
Tune your instrument
Ensure your software/hardware - whatever you use to do your practice - is easily accessible, functional, and ready to use. We’re much more likely to practice when our instrument is ready to pick up and play. No one wants to sit down and practice sound design only to have to install updates or connect hard drives. Check your speakers, and give some reference a listen before you start.
Copy, copy, copy
Redesigning and reimagining the work of others is fun. But sometimes trying to imitate exactly the work of another can lead to new discoveries. When trying to match the sound created by another we may do things we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. You can also much more effectively know when you’ve completed your goal. Creating other sounds helps to build a knowledge library of how to create other styles.
Get some friends
We’re much more likely to practice when we have a partner. Find other likeminded individuals, be clear of your goals, share the work. Again, not everyone needs to be at the same skill level. See if someone is a knowledge expert and suddenly a solo practice session can turn into a 1:1 masterclass.
Grab a microphone
There are many ways to practice, but best “bang for buck” I feel is field or sound effect recording. Grab a microphone, find a source, and just …play.
You get to understand your prop, you understand the actions required. Suddenly something as boring as a metal filing cabinet is as expressive as any instrument. In the end you also leave with sounds that are uniquely yours and gain the experience of mic placement, room sound, editing, processing. It’s much more powerful than just plug-ins alone.
Share your results
Nothing will help solidify your knowledge more than having to form it into a complete sentence and vocalize it for others. I am not suggesting everyone needs a professional teaching job or become a youtuber making tutorials. But just share what you learn with others, and be open to learning yourself. It will be difficult and challenging at first, which can give you a chance to validate and improve your own understanding. Knowledge you share doesn’t just help others, it really helps yourself too. It is an amazing multiplier on any practice and development you do.
Be yourself
And lastly, lean into what makes you unique. Find your own way to practice and combine the elements that make you unique.
Summary
If you stuck it out through both parts of my rambling - thanks for reading and I hope you take something away from this. If you caught my talk at Our Sonic Landscape you may have noticed it was a bit rushed, and that’s because I was trying to fit all of this into 20 minutes - probably a bad idea, but I tired.
So high level recap of some key points:
Effort for your employer is work. Effort for yourself is practice.
Focus on process, not results.
Have an output for your practice.
Check in with yourself, confirm your direction.
Balance as best you can, embrace the cycles.
Have fun, it’s only practice.