Customer Reviews

Exploring Sound Design for Interactive Media (Design Exploration)

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Cancellaro has written a thorougly accessible text here. This isn't one of those dry thousand-page tomes that will never get read. He writes like a real human being speaks - which makes the learning all the easier.

Whether you are a musician, digital video artist or a college student learning digital audio - this is the book for you. It covers everything from basic audio and acoustic theory, digital concepts and compression issues and even introduces music theory - and keeps it all fun and approachable.

Highly recommended.

The book is not really about sound design. It does not give any new techical information and the musical stuff is very basic. In the book says that the CD files can be used for classes but ther isn't anything that is worthwile (and they are only a few!!!). The only information that it has some interest is about games sound design but is very very short.It was disapointing.Do not be fulled by the tittle.

Exploring Sound Design for Interactive Media amounts to a detailed glossary. It's a good read if you're new to the field of acoustics, and need a primer. But if you're not new to the field of acoustics, and are trying to learn about sound design, look elsewhere. The amount of sound design theory is minimal, as well is information about recording in the field.

If you want a book that will take you to the store (to buy equipment), to the field (to get recordings), to your computer (to do the whole sound design thing), to the end product (what you were doing sound design for), this isn't the right book. It covers microphone selection, but information on getting recordings from the field is completely absent. Information on the sound design part itself is covered in its most basic form, as well getting sound into the game is loosely covered. It is 200~some pages long, but most of that is technical knowledge that a lot of people getting into sound design already know, or information about "Sound design for the web", which is a topic that most people getting into sound design for film or videogames will have little interest in.

The first bit of the book explains how sound works, which is something a lot of people getting into sound design already know. The next chunk the book is about hardware (microphones, mixing boards, loud speakers), which is relevant to sound design, but knowing about the hardware needed to be a sound designer doesn't tell you anything about sound design, and like I said, it's something that a lot of people getting into this field already know. The next ten percent is about music theory, which I imagine a lot of people buying this book have little to no interest in, or if they do have interest in it, they'll look elsewhere to get that information.

Not all is lost, though, there are a few useful chapters. A chapter titled "Computer and Audio" has some valuable information, a large portion of which is marred with descriptions of what RAM and CPU does, again, things that a lot of people getting into sound design already know. And at page 156/230, for chapter six, the book finally decides to tackle "Principle of Sound Design" and from pages 216 to 228, applying sound in videogames is addressed, which in my opinion, should make up at least a third of a book titled "Exploring Sound Design for Interactive Media".

I'm not going to say it's bad, just that the title is misleading. I don't what I would call it, but there's very little information here about designing sound for interactive media, more information about the hardware needed to design sound, some of the science behind sound itself, and some things completely unrelated to sound design for interactive media. If you need to start it all from the top (meaning you don't know anything about speakers, micorphones, or how sound itself works), then it might be useful for you, but if you want a book focused primarly on sound design, look somewhere else.