Over the course of a month, they emerged victorious over 53 other teams, winning four consecutive sound design battles, and earning the title of Sound Design Showdown champion. They dispatched 7 other teams by cooking up some incredible audio for sound design prompts such as “a giant menacing creature gets polymorphed into a tiny harmless one’ and “a musical performance of an organic alien flesh bagpipe”: before they reached the nail-biting grand finale, which they eventually managed to win 50.5% to 49.5% via a public vote.
So: let’s have a chat with the reigning champions of the Sound Design Showdown and see if they can share any secrets:
Hello Cai, Becky, and Luke! Let’s go from the beginning: how did the 3 of you meet, and what drew you to enter the previous Sound Design Showdown?
Cai Jones (CJ): So, I originally met Luke at University, both of us were on Music Tech courses at USW Cardiff and worked on some short films together!
Becky Street (BS): I met Cai at the 2019 Game Audio London Christmas drinks and became good friends from then on playing games. It was only when we started playing Sea of Thieves that Cai introduced me to Luke and our little trio was formed!
Luke Evans (LE): We all vibed on a personal level and became friends super quickly. From that we moved to doing a lot of sound design challenges with each other, we were sharing ideas and tips and any free plugins/sounds we could find. When the Sound Design Showdown was announced we really didn’t have to question who we were going to work with, it was more of a matter of can we fit it into our schedules!
And it’s a good thing you did manage to fit it into your schedules: as the 3 of you went on to win the whole thing! Did you think you had a chance at taking home the grand prize? When did you realise you might be in with a shot?
BS: We definitely didn’t think we would get anywhere near the final! With the amount of teams and incredibly talented people taking part, we didn’t think we had a chance, but wanted to give it a go as it sounded like great fun.
LE: God no. From seeing all the other teams and seeing the incredible talent across the whole competition I didn’t think we’d win. We were really happy to get past the first round and I think every round we got through was a sigh of relief.
CJ: I thought maybe there’s a 25% chance we can get through Round 1, I honestly had no idea what to expect. I remember at the start of round 4 I said to the others “It’s amazing we made it this far, I’m happy that we will be in the top 3 at least!”. I had no idea we’d win, especially when I heard the sounds by the other 2 teams during the final livestream – I was blown away by how good they sounded! Trim Reapers and Lo-Mid Meta were amazing.
And, just like the grand prize for the upcoming Sound Design Showdown, you also won 3x buyouts of Boom ONE for winning the whole competition! Have you gotten much use out of the prizes since winning?
BS: I’ve used Boom ONE on every single project I’ve worked on since getting it. It’s so versatile with the mix of sounds that it’s a no brainer in my eyes for any sound designer to have so winning it as a prize was incredible!
CJ: LOADS! Since it’s so versatile I’ve used it on at least 5 games since we obtained it in 2023. I don’t think there’s a category it doesn’t cover. I remember quite a few times I’ve been searching for sounds that I can’t possibly have in my library and then suddenly Boom ONE sounds pop up in the Reaper Media Explorer and I’m like “of course it has that!”.
LE: EVERY – DAY. Anytime I work on any project whether it be working on games or production in music Boom ONE always creeps into my workflow.
What were your favourite memories from the first edition of the Sound Design Showdown? Any favourite prompts, or nailbiting moments from the results livestreams?
CJ: My favourite prompt to create sounds for was “a giant menacing creature gets polymorphed into a tiny harmless one” . It was such an exciting prompt, thank you Samantha Schellenberg for coming up with it! This one played into our strengths as a team as we had good skills in sci fi, creature design and environmental design which were all utilised!
Check out this breakdown video of the Teamname_Final16.wav submissions for “a giant menacing creature gets polymorphed into a tiny harmless one”, by Cai Jones
LE: I still get cold sweats from the semi final prompt “a musical performance of an organic alien flesh bagpipe”: never again would I want to do that. But in terms of favourite memories I loved designing and storyboarding around the final prompt “Around the World”. Also getting to work with these two more and more was a great experience.
BS: As the others have said, the bagpipe prompt still haunts me to this day. I really enjoyed the very first round as it laid the base of us learning how to really tell a clear story just through audio by making use of the stereo field to separate out the sounds. But my favourite would be the final prompt “Around the World”. I’d originally worked on an idea focusing on Whale migration and put together a rough blockout but couldn’t quite convey the story properly in the time we had. However, when it came to the idea we submitted: “A scientist’s portal gun creation malfunctions and sends him around the world”, we were able to use the transition sounds from the initial idea and also add an underwater section (even with a little whale cameo) to make sure that time spent wasn’t wasted!
So, after winning the Sound Design Showdown, what have the 3 of you been up to since? Have you ever managed to relive that high?
CJ: I wake up in night sweats shouting “OUR ALIEN BAGPIPE DOESN’T SOUND ALIEN ENOUGH WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?” . In reality the Airwiggles Sound Design Showdown inspired us to start our own games company after the challenge. We started Noodle Noise and have worked on 4 games together as a team!
BS: Like Cai, I am also still slightly traumatised by the look of confusion and a hint of disgust on Lewis’ face when he heard our bagpipe sound. So recovering from that has been quite the journey. But on a serious note, the showdown very much shaped the direction of our careers and gave us some amazing feedback and skills that help us to this day!
CJ: We still use our Teamname_FINAL16.wav Discord server for our jobs!
For all of our new teams getting ready to enter the 2026 Sound Design Showdown: what tips can you offer them? How can contestants progress through each battle – or maybe even… go all the way?
LE: Listen and communicate to each other. Find out what tools you’re using (DAW, plugins etc). Make notes of what you’ve done to make it easier for each other. Every member of the team has good ideas!
CJ: Also, if you have holidays booked, or if you get sick, tell people immediately so you can plan correctly! We had 2 sicknesses and 1 holiday during this challenge and we communicated well and prioritised our health and supported each other (we actually have a talk on this from AirCon 2024 called Teamwork Makes The Dream Work)
Watch Teamwork Makes the Dream Work from Airwiggles Audio Conference 2024 here
BS: Creating a group chat where you can share exports of progress and gain feedback was essential for us to really work well collaboratively. As Cai previously mentioned, we made a discord server so it was easy to share feedback exports, ideas and finished files which was insanely useful!
And finally, if you had one single bit of advice to offer sound designers entering the contest, whether it’s directly about the tournament or about sound in general, what would it be?
BS: Start off with a really basic blockout and build from there, that way different people can take different sections or different layers. This also gives a really good feeling as to whether the story you’re trying to tell will fit in the time and be well conveyed through just sound.
LE: If you need to scrap an idea, scrap it and start again. We did this for our second round and it turned out so much better.
CJ: We did this during round 2 “a giant menacing creature gets polymorphed into a tiny harmless one” . We were originally making a high fantasy idea with multiple characters fighting a large spider. 3 days in we realised this had lots of moving parts that we couldn’t keep up with and wasn’t conveying what we’d be judged on and our output wasn’t matching our timeframe.
BS: Any sounds you’ve already made won’t be wasted as you can either use them in your next idea or add them to your library to use for a future project!
CJ: We adjusted to a simpler idea of a creature in a science lab getting hit with a sci fi laser. It aligned with our strengths as a group, felt much easier to follow as a story, and really conveyed what the prompt said. We ended up winning this round with the popular vote: so not being afraid to re-strategize and start again saved us!
LE: Simple is more, most of the time, you can start off with something simple and add many textures and layers as you go to give what you want depth and character. Keep yourself grounded as you don’t have much time to create these prompts and the prompts aren’t as long as you think. I’m sure on our first prompt we went over by a second or two and had to cut something out. But mostly have fun! It was a great experience and I have learned a lot from doing it and I’m sure you will too!
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Thanks so much to Cai, Becky, and Luke for catching up with us 2 years after their famous victory! We hope they’ve inspired you to make some kick-ass sounds this upcoming Showdown!
The Sound Design Showdown kicks off on February 2nd and will be running over the course of a month. It’s always a blast tuning into our weekly livestreams to hear everyone’s amazing sound design clips and to have a say in who advances to the next round! Join us for the kick-off livestream here, and stay tuned into airwiggles.com/showdown to follow the competition as it develops!
