Outstanding sound blogs: Meet Gianpaolo D’Amico from sounDesign

Hi Gianpaolo, please introduce yourself and sounDesign:

Hi Asbjoern, I am a creative technologist for digital media working in Italy. I started my career as a computer science engineer at the university, and after many years I quit my research job to work as a consultant for companies and institutions. As many of us working in the field of sound, I am a musician and music-obsessed, so moving my technology skills to the field of sound was a natural process.

The story behind sounDesign is very simple and starts in 2004, when I met Sara Lenzi (the other cofounder) during a course on the design of sound in public spaces. After some months we decided to create a digital publication with the goal to study and collect all the information about the use of sound in diverse fields. A blog was the best solution and then sounDesign was born.

After so many digital years I can say that sounDesign is now strongly focused on unveiling stories about the use of sound in modern communication. I am not interested in driving a copycat of many other super cool websites out there. I don’t work as a conventional sound designer, but more properly as a sound communicator. My goal is to discover and discuss how sound is used today (and tomorrow), and to build a multi-sensory channel of communication with people. As simple (or complicated) as a waveform :-)
 

What’s been one of the best moments running the site?

I guess one of the most important moments in these years was surely the switch of language from Italian to English. I remember when I published the first post (this interview with Time Prebble) and saw the results in Google Analytics. Boom. I said myself: “Oh, f***, why didn’t you do this before?”. By the way it was the right time.

My favorite story so far is surely One Year in Sound, because it is a real story of someone like us: A guy from Italy going to Vancouver Film School and then starting a real professional career in sound. I know Carlo Ascrizzi’s posts were a great inspiration for many people who want to learn how to work with sound and where. Reading comments and tweets by people following Carlo’s sonic adventures was really something emotional for all of us.
 

Is there anything that particularly excites you within the field of sound at the moment?

First off, product sound design and sonification. These are two fields of sound communication which yet don’t succeed in going mainstream, because of many issues related to technology limits.

Good product sound design is really hard to develop. But maybe the latest solutions in acoustics and 3D printing can work together to give us a novel direction for the coming years.

Sonification is still considered something hidden in the secrets of research, something providing bad results in terms of perception. Here we need musicians and big data scientists to work together and make innovation. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Another important topic which strongly interests me is education, related to people who want to work, but also to customers and companies. As sound professionals we have to support people to learn the difference between music and sound, what a sound strategy really means – instead of explaining the difference between an MP3 and a FLAC file, or what a parametric equalization is.

Our responsibility in these years has changed. We have to focus more on the results (and the market) than on the technologies.
 

What can readers do to support sounDesign?

I would like to see a more open-minded approach while reading the articles. Sometimes I see people commenting on the last software or wasting a lot of time explaining why 192K is useless and bla bla bla. Sometimes I see our articles are not published in groups or forums because they don’t report a plugin or a DAW name in the title.

I guess subscribing our newsletter is the best way support us because we can create a real connection with people with our same state of mind.
 

Can you share anything about your future plans for the site?

A new digital strategy in some months, that’s to say: starting from a new website, we are going to build a new brand identity of sounDesign. After so many years now we know who is reading us and why. Then we can build a digital place where we can grow up together. And this can be possible only within a new digital identity.
 

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