What about sound design?

Hi there guys.

(first post, yay!)

I did the sounds for KDE 4 within the Oxygen project, and if I'm not imposing I'd like to share with you a few lessons learned from past projects creating sound themes:

-Sounds must have a reason to exist. Judge this well, if a sound has no reason to exist, don't even create it. (most important lesson learned from KDE, it has far too many sounds enabled on the default install and that's partially my fault)
-Sounds should never under any circumstance distract the user from the task at hand.
-Sound should aid usability, they should mean something to both the user and the environment.
-Find a theme and stick to it (yes, you can make this an oriental cliché, however, the less sounds "throw" at the user, lesser is the risk of that happening.)
-BE MINIMAL

@Lexen: you're off to a great start there, mate. if you want it to sound "happy" always end on a higher note in relation to the penultimate one. (advertisers love using that trick in commercial jingles).
To make it sound real add some reverb to the sound, reverb is like a very very short echo that will give you the idea of "space". If the flute is sounding 'thin' add a *very* light chorus effect to the sound. (careful with the trimming, don't cut the sounds as soon as they end, let it breathe)
Here's the problem with the rain: the logon sound has to be short, and that won't give the listeners brain time to recognize that sound as "rain" it can sound to the listener as anything from simple white noise to a crowded street, you're leaving perception to chance.
DarkWyrm was spot on. Less is more. If I could be so bold as to share with you guys what I think would be a I believe would be a reasonable sound list it would be:

Logon, Logoff, USBin, USBout, Error, Info1, Info2.

These last two sounds should exist but shouldn't be assigned to anything, leave that to the user to assign to IM and Email (thus two of them!). And don't assume emails only popup every now and then, you have no idea if those 20 mailing lists are in digest mode or the guy is getting each message at a time. And although you could assume most people are sensible...wait...no, you can never assume that. :)

On a side note: kudos for the vibe you guys got going as a community. :)

Cheers,
npovoa

Ps: If overhead is a problem try to avoid Midi (since it's unpredictable how it will sound on someone else's computer) and look into Trackers, .mod's are *very* light. Most computer games out there use trackers for the sound tracks. It's light, fast and the processing power to get it going is residual.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker )

@Nuno Povoa: Thanks for the compliment man. I will try to end on higher note and see how it sounds. I hear what your saying about the background, but I really would like something there. I guess my question is: What background noise is easily comprehendable in a short amount of time. Would nature sounds work? Would people at a party work? Would kids playing at a playground work?

What do you guys think about the error message being a stick breaking? On KDE it's a light bulb breaking and it really gives me the impression something went wrong. It scares the crap out of me. The stick would give that impression and would stick with the theme.

About the license: What do you think I should do? I want as many people to use it as I can and I don't need any money from it. I don't even really mind if someone else sells it with their OS.

Thanks,
Lexen

Hi Lex!
I think moving away from synthesized sounds toward natural sounds is a great idea! Maybe add some electronic tricks like npovoa suggested or even some alienation later.

The broken stick is a nice example. Others are water drops, a heavy stone thrown into mud, ball bearings smashing into echother, stones thrown onto a frozen lake, bashing a stick on a tight steel cable, the ringing of a katana being whipped out of it's sheath...

I've been always fascinated by these sounds, but never got, and don't know what is, the right equipment to record these things. That's the crux, I suppose. We need totally high quality for that stuff.

Regards,
Humdinger

yeah, nice - on the second page... this isn't slashdot :/

My bad :) (I can be an ass sometimes)

@Lexen okay, found a few sounds that you could possibly use. get them here: http://npovoa.fileave.com/haiku_samples.wav

you have a few percussion sounds at the beggining, some oriental bells and a gong (hey! what's an oriental set without a gong, eh?)
I also included a few nature sounds I happened to run across, there's rain, rain+birds (dare I call it a rain forest?) and thunder.

The file is quite big (10Mb), but its at 48.000kHz so it should be high-quality enough for you to play around for something more "final".

Have fun!

Is there something wrong with not having a license?

you could put it under the public domain licence.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

some system sounds, I've used a midi composer using instruments like marimba and pad (echo), rendered to waveform using a soundfont named Chromium, and a final wave editing to normalize them and put some stereo effects, the results are there:
http://xoomer.alice.it/mushaspot/pub/zuMis-hsdp-20081112.tar.bz2

Sorry, I don't understand...has it some meaning?

http://www.7-zip.org/

http://bebits.com/app/3218

seriously, get with the times - bz2 is much more efficient than zip (pretty much the only format that comes with windows xp)

And linux supports it as well (most distributions come with it - just type bzip2 from a cli)

Pardon? You should get your head fixed, who needs to compress already compressed files? Ogg and mp3 are already compressed, zip or bz2 isn't going to compress it any furthur.

Besides on a work machine I cannot install anything.

I thought so, but it's 404 file not found :-) But why pack it at all? How many files are there?