59 — David Kamp

Sound Design

DAVID KAMP

59

"IT’S ABOUT FINDING THE LINE BETWEEN SOMETHING THAT IS INTERESTING OR UNIQUE BUT STILL WORKS AND SERVES THE PURPOSE."

DAVID KAMP

David Kamp is an internationally recognised sound designer, composer and sound artist. His output covers everything from animation, to film, and art installations.

David has helped brands such as The New Yorker, Greenpeace and The BBC to define their sound. Meanwhile, his field recordings and experimental pieces manage to be both evocative and accessible.

A designer of sound worlds and a creator of audible art, David is deeply in tune with his chosen medium. Here, he talks about the creative process, his route to sound design and the escape from human reality.

Field Recording Nepal Forest

DO YOU OFTEN GIVE TALKS ABOUT YOUR WORK, OR WILL DESIGN FRIENDS BE A NEW EXPERIENCE FOR YOU? I have given a few talks at festivals and universities in the past. So it is not entirely new, but this time, I want to make the subject a bit broader, while still giving some insight into some of the projects I do and the way that I work.

ARE YOU AN INTUITIVE OR A LOGICAL THINKER, WHEN YOU’RE WORKING?

DO YOU WORK THE SAME WAY NOW? I’ve streamlined my processes a bit and work in a more structured way than in my early years.

I still go into very hands-on, intuitive exploration phases for projects where I follow my instincts, but I try to avoid getting lost in it too much, especially when collaborating with other artists or clients.

SO, WAS YOUR ORIGINAL INTENTION TO BECOME A COMPOSER?

I realised when I was studying electronic composition at University, that I work very intuitively.

Yes, sort of. I was always involved with music and sounds, and in school I played various instruments.

Most of my professors, on the other hand, thought about composition, in a very structured, top-down way.

Before you made any sound, you were supposed to describe the concept and maybe even the math and the structural idea behind it.

I also started recording things with a little tape recorder when I was very young. So I always knew that, whatever I was going to do, it would be something related to sound and music.

I was the opposite of that. I would start with a basic idea about what I want to explore, maybe certain types of sounds I want to use or a feeling I wanted to evoke. Then I would deep dive into it, iterating over sections, listening to it, changing it, without limiting that exploration process by having to stick to the initial structural plan, theoretical approach or composition technique.

YOU BEGAN BY COLLECTING SOUNDS. WHERE DID YOU GO FROM THERE? First, I looked into some of the more technical career options. I considered working as an audio tech at a broadcasting company, but I quickly realised that my interest lays elsewhere.

I’m interested in what is actually going through the cables and not how it's going through the cables.

YOU WANTED TO CREATE YOUR OWN SOUNDS?

WE NEED MORE PLACES LIKE THAT IN THE WORLD!

Yes, but the issue I had then was that to study music composition, you had to play an instrument really well.

To be accepted back then - this was around 2006 or something - the first thing you had to do was play perfect Beethoven. Only if you could do that there would be a next step.

It was a pretty amazing place to study and I feel very privileged that I was able to go there.

THAT SOUNDS INTIMIDATING, TO SAY THE LEAST. Luckily, I found that there was this more avant garde art music thing going on.

At the University where I studied, the audition was about bringing something that you had made with sound. You didn’t have to play Beethoven, or know everything about music theory.

Their attitude was, ‘If you are interested in exploring sounds, we will teach you the other stuff.’

So, I have a diploma in electronic composition from the ICEM Folkwang University of the Arts, Institute for Computer Music and Electronic Media.

It was a really great place to explore stuff freely. But they didn't tell you how to survive when you were done with studying. It was a bit like, “Congratulations, you are now an avant-garde composer.” But then you had to ask yourself, ‘Now what?’

You can go back to academia, or you can try to get commissioned by orchestras and do all the ‘new music’ festivals… But this seemed like a very serious world, I just didn’t think I could pull it off, nor was I entirely convinced that I wanted to go in that direction.

HOW DID YOU FIND YOUR WAY INTO ANIMATION? It began while I was still studying. I felt like animation was a fascinating area where you could explore exciting things with sound, because the audience doesn’t always expect realism.

In live-action films, the sound designer’s job is usually to recreate the sound in a way that exactly matches the action.

When you do a good job of that, it's not noticed that you did anything.

Animation Final Cinema Mix

Animation David OReilly PLEASE SAY SOMETHING

Animation Réka Bucsi LOVE

Animation Rory Byrne AN ISLAND

AND ANIMATION IS DIFFERENT?

There are so many possibilities in animation, especially if you go more abstract. That’s what fascinated me, so that's where I started.

YOU WANTED TO CREATE SOUNDS THAT ARE NOTICED, BUT IN A GOOD WAY? Even in animation, sound has to be believable, within its own rules, so to speak.

Things like size, texture, movement, speed, and environment have to be considered when designing sounds for animation. Even so, the range of things that will be accepted - if it is synced to a visual element - is much bigger than in other films.

For live-action, you can do subtle things to change the feeling of certain sounds, but you still have to remain in this human reality.

ANIMATION ALLOWS YOU TO ESCAPE HUMAN REALITY? Animations, many of them, create their own world. Visually and sonically.

What’s really interesting from my point of view is that with animation, you start from silence.

So, except when there's a prerecorded dialogue, you always have to design or define the sound of the film's world from scratch.

WAS THAT HOW IT WORKED ON DAVID OREILLY’S ‘PLEASE SAY SOMETHING’?

That film was one of my first animation projects. A narrative film with iconic characters, elaborate sets, and a unique visual style that inspired a whole generation of animators.

David made the entire film by himself in his bedroom, on a laptop, and won a Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlinale for it.

The sound in the film was extremely minimalist. For example, the footsteps of some of the characters were this tiny digital clicking sound. Every single footstep was just copied and pasted.

This aesthetic worked well for ‘Please Say Something’, but it would feel entirely wrong in something with a different visual style - let's say a nicely lit, stop-motion film with characters built from organic wool, like ‘Oh Willy’.

FOR ANIMATION, ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SOUNDS WHICH ARE AESTHETICALLY PLEASING IN THEMSELVES, BUT ALSO FORM A BELIEVABLE WHOLE? Yeah, it’s about finding the line between something that is interesting or unique but still works and serves the purpose of the film.

I wouldn't say all my sounds have to be pleasing. I made some pretty horrible sounds as well! But, there needs to be a reason why and when they are happening.

YOUR ‘MIMICRY’ PIECE IS AMAZING IN LOTS OF WAYS, BUT ONE OF THE THINGS THAT COMES OUT REALLY CLEARLY IS THAT YOU'RE HAVING FUN. IS THAT TRUE?

YOU’VE RECORDED SOUNDS IN SOME REALLY INTERESTING PARTS OF THE REAL WORLD TOO. THE JUNGLES OF THE CONGO, THE MOUNTAINS OF NEPAL…

That is definitely true.

I started recording things when I was a kid, but then I sort of went more in the direction of music and designing sounds from scratch.

‘Mimicry’ is about recreating the experience of being in a rainforest, with all its acoustic depth and complexity.

I had been in the Congo to record rainforest sounds for another project, so I know how absolutely amazing the real thing is.

I took the realism and depth of the environment I was building very seriously, but the sounds I used were all artificial. I created them by mimicking animal calls using various synthesisers or devices that I found in a hunting store.

THE CALL OF THE WILD?

Yes. Some specialised hunting stores have all sorts of flutes, mechanical devices, and obscure mechanical gadgets to recreate specific animal sounds.

I learned that some hunters make the sounds of the creatures their prey wants to eat. So there’s a little flute that imitates the sound of a dying bunny.

Foxes, for example, are really attracted to this sound, because a dying bunny is very easy to eat, compared to a living bunny.

Then, a few years ago, I got excited about recording "reality" again. So, I invested in really good microphones and recorders and began looking for things to record.

DO YOU SPEND A LOT OF TIME STANDING STILL, JUST LISTENING? It’s almost like meditation when you're recording environmental sounds. You set up your microphones and hit record.

But you can't move while in range of the mics or you will disturb the recording.

You can’t really leave because if you do, your equipment will be stolen. You can’t talk to your girlfriend. You can't breathe loudly or shuffle your feet.

You want to capture at least 10 minutes of each location, so you're just standing there listening and doing nothing, looking at your microphone, or the environment in front of you. That’s something I rarely do at other times, but I really enjoy these moments.

Animation Klimpa ISLAND

Sound Art MIMICRY Premiere at Silent Green Berlin During Pictoplasma Festival

Animation David OReilly PLEASE SAY SOMETHING

Bauhaus Sound Recording Drum sticks used to create sounds from Bauhaus objects

"CONSISTENCY IS KEY WHEN DESIGNING A BELIEVABLE SOUND WORLD."

Exhibition Ed Atkins Schinkel Pavillon Foley equipment used by David Kamp

YOUR FIELD RECORDING TRIPS WERE ALL PRE-COVID? It was. Before COVID, I made these trips that were somewhere between work and holidays.

I would pick a place that had the potential to have interesting sounds and then, with my girlfriend, we would travel the area and I would stop along the way to record stuff.

DID YOU RECORD ‘HAIL IN THE HIMALAYA’ ON ONE OF THESE TRIPS? That’s right. We didn't get really high in the mountains, only 3700 meters. This is pretty high for me, but not by Nepalese standards.

At that elevation, I was feeling it physically, so I didn’t want to go any higher. Then we found the remains of this wooden shed and I decided to leave my recorder in there overnight.

When I listened to it the next day, the recording was almost entirely silent.

There was nothing except wind and hail.

I think at maybe hour number eight there was a single hiker. You can hear him approaching from the distance, coming really close to the microphone like he's looking at it. Then you hear him just crunching away through the snow.

IT’S A REALLY MAGICAL RECORDING It’s just wind blowing through an abandoned shelter and the sound of hail dropping on its ancient wooden frame.

But you can hear all the tiny details of the hail.

This is interesting for me because human-made sounds are usually hard to get rid of. There are always planes.

There's always some farm machinery.

There's always a car somewhere in the background.

You don't have to go far to find interesting sounds, though. For example, one source of sounds that I use often, and for very different things, are stethoscope recordings of my own body. Heartbeat and blood flow, even digesting things and the sound of my lungs.

Sticking a mic onto your own body, that’s probably the shortest path to an interesting recording.

HAVE YOU BUILT UP A LIBRARY OF SOUNDS OVER TIME? Yeah. That's very important to me. It’s something every sound designer has to have, because going out to record new sounds for every project would be pretty much impossible.

I keep adding to this collection of sounds that I recorded myself. But also, there's been a big democratisation of recording equipment. Microphones have got better and everything has become cheaper and smaller.

You can make really good recordings without having to spend thousands of dollars on equipment.

THE SOUNDS YOU COLLECT, CAN THEY BE CLASSIFIED BY THE EFFECT THEY HAVE? ‘CHEERFUL’ OR ‘SCARY’ FOR EXAMPLE? To a degree, yes. But there are cultural differences. For example, all Western music is based on a specific tuning, and from that we have all the theory for musical harmony.

That means, if you tune a piano differently, it will immediately sound scary, wrong and confusing to western ears. But, other cultures have different tunings, so the emotional reaction to a change in tuning and harmonies is not universal.

On the other hand, some fundamental aspects of sounds are perceived in the same way across all cultures. For example, anything that is bass-heavy is probably something bad. It's either a dinosaur stomping somewhere in the distance or a big rock falling nearby.

Nice things usually don't make bassheavy impact sounds.

Field Recording Nepal Kophra Mountain Wind Hail

Field Recording Nepal Kophra Mountain Wind Hail

Field Recording Himalaya Mountains

"FIELD RECORDING IS ALMOST LIKE MEDITATION. YOU SET UP YOUR MICROPHONES, HIT RECORD, WAIT AND LISTEN FOR 15 MINUTES WITHOUT MOVING."

Bauhaus Sound Recording Drum sticks used to create sounds from Bauhaus objects

Field Recording Side Street in Seoul

SPEAKING OF NICE THINGS, YOUR SOUND IDENTITY FOR THE NEW YORKER IS ABSOLUTELY CHARMING. IT’S ALSO TINY. DO YOU ENJOY THIS KIND OF SUPER-FOCUSSED WORK? It's very different from a longer-form piece, like Mimicry.

I like the challenge of having to really figure out an intensely focused thing, but these days I’m moving towards doing slightly longer pieces.

My planetarium piece about rainforest sounds was 45 minutes of 3D-audio, but the average animation these days is around 20 minutes. When I started out, this was probably two minutes.

In the basement of the exhibition space at Schinkel Pavillon, we screened the film without sound. On the top floor, you can listen to the synced sound of the movie, but without picture. This was a fascinating take on how image and sound effect each other. The sound was in sync but physically separated, therefore impossible to watch at the same time.

YOU’VE BEEN BUSY ON INSTAGRAM TOO, HAVEN’T YOU? Yeah, I’ve explored how Instagram face filters - the ones where you add realtime AR 3D-elements to your video - can be used for sound.

THE WORKS ARE GETTING LONGER. ARE THERE ANY OTHER TRENDS?

I created a set of musical instruments for Instagram that you control using facial expressions. The first-ever on the platform, I think.

One thing is that I’m going back to the art context more.

ARE THERE ANY AREAS OF SOUND DESIGN LEFT FOR YOU TO TRY?

I recently worked with Ed Adkins, adding sounds to a silent movie by Stan Brakhage. This movie is from the ‘70s, it was the first time anybody had gone into a morgue with a camera, documenting the work being done there. It’s pretty hard to watch.

Of course! There is so much left to explore with sound in both physical and digital spaces that I am as excited about it as I was on day one. Even after all these years.

Ed and the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, commissioned me to recreate the sounds we would have heard if there had been a microphone present during the original visit to the morgue.

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