“And I read this book, it was about acoustic communication. It was about how sound in everyday life mediates our relationship to the environment, and how we use it to communicate with each other, and so on, and that opens really a totally new field for me. So this was kind of the ignition, probably, for me to enter the non-musical sound world, which I’m still in. So there’s the world of noises, of everyday sounds and so on, and that’s how it started, basically. And from there I then came into interaction game design more or less by accident, and they had no one that knew anything about sound. And I kind of built up in this relatively new field of interaction game design at the time. This was in the early noughties.” – Daniel Hug

This episode’s guest is a sound and interaction designer who co-directs the Master’s in Sound Design at Zurich University of the Arts. His work explores how sound shapes our experiences, from health technology to movement and education. He’s a leader in Sonic Interaction Design who serves on the steering committees for key sound design conferences and awards, and through research, teaching, and hands-on design, he bridges science, creativity, and business. He’s also a fellow jury member of the International Sound Awards, which is how we met. His name is Dr. Daniel Hug, and we’ll be exploring how sound can influence how we feel, move, and interact with the world around us.

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(0:00:01) - Exploring Early Sound Memories and Design

Our conversation starts with Daniel’s earliest memory of sound, a lightning bolt striking a river one night when he was child. “It was like somebody just jumping on top of a huge church organ,” he says, “with the whole body, like really all the keys playing at once… it was really amazing, [and] I have never heard this again.” We talk about how he got into sound, from jazz school and piano lessons to his early work on video-game sound design, and he recalls how a book by composer Barry Truax changed his perspective on sound and music. “It was about acoustic communication,” Daniel recalls. “It was about how sound in everyday life mediates our relationship to the environment and how we use it to communicate with each other and so on, and that opened a totally new field for me.”

(0:13:19) - Creating Environmental Sound Innovations

Our discussion turns to his work with Caru, a medical company whose devices use an audio-first UX, and the importance of considering how such work contributes to and fits into the user’s soundscape. “That’s our sonic environment and that’s our relationship to this environment,” he explains, “and by designing it, we design experiences or we contribute to experiences which are multi-sensory all the time. So even if there is no sound, there is a sound, but it’s one that you didn’t design.” We talk about how he draws inspiration from such wide-ranging sources as nature sounds to sci-fi movies, and how quickly those sounds can become integrated into our everyday experiences, regardless of their origin. “Design quality is only one aspect,” he says, “but the other aspect is to have positive experiences together with a certain sound that makes the sound actually work. Like a coffee machine doesn’t make a nice sound, but we love it because it’s related to this act of producing coffee.”

(0:24:27) - The Art of Sound Growth

As the first half of our discussion wraps up, he shares a few samples of his UX work and tells us more about how he blends familiar and impossible sounds together into a unique design. “I always try to design sounds in a way that uses layers,” he says, “actually many layers, really, along with traces of familiar, material sounds with more synthetic stuff, but with the goal that the individual components cannot be extracted clearly, that you get more the feeling of something.” We touch on the impact of AI and how it challenges sound designers to push themselves further. “Maybe that’s one positive aspect,” Daniel tells us, “it pushes you to focus on our thinking out of the box and thinking in terms that a probabilistic machine doesn’t anticipate, and thus creating sound experiences that are new.”

Episode Summary

How jazz, piano, and a bolt of lightning helped shape Daniel’s career in sound design.
Daniel’s work on the audio-first UX design of Caru, a screenless medical alert device.
Weaving new audio UX sounds and the surrounding soundscape into a seamless whole.

Be sure to tune in for next week’s episode as Daniel and I talk about the cautionary tales that Hollywood franchises like the MCU offer to sound designers, what video games and household audio sounds have in common, and Daniel’s approach to making sound design more inclusive.

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The Art of Captivating Sound Design: A Conversation with Daniel Hug - Part 1