“A Preliminary Theory of Sound Design”

I spent some time last Sunday afternoon with Nathan Ho, a San Francisco Bay Area musician, coder, and educator whose name you may recognize from his gorgeous, sound-producing, complex Venn diagrams, which I wrote about at the start of 2021. ( served as the “cover” for this issue.) I mention him here not as a log of my social calendar, but because of something he wrote toward the end of last month on his excellent blog. It’s an essay that collates his thoughts on the underpinnings of sound design. He breaks the concepts down into nine “traits.” 

The piece takes as its title  and he notes Disney’s “12 Principles of Animation” as a model. The traits are, in alphabetical order: Contrast, Directionality, Fidelity, Regularity, Space, Transients, Verticality, and Vocals. They appear in a different sequence in Ho’s post, beginning, appropriately, with Transients (specifically the “initial” transient: “A tiny click,” he writes, “or burst of noise added to an attack, or a fade in, can make a huge difference”) and closing with Verticality (which he associates with other concepts, such as “arrangement” and “layering”). Whether you make sound or just think about it, the divisions he points out provide a useful classification system. 

After reading it, you might try the following exercise: consider a sound, and then break it down into the eight traits that Ho has delineated. If you do, please report back.