Sound sits under creative work, guiding its message – what people notice, what they feel. You really only notice when it’s absent (and that’s another powerful way that sound can add impact).

Raja Sehgal, founder and sound designer, GCRS, talks about why sound matters:

As a leading commercial sound designer, I am often asked, “What is it that makes sound such an impactful piece of the creative process?” The answer is a complex one and not something that can be summarised in a few sentences.

Sound is at its most powerful when all the parts come together to create a ‘perfect marriage’ of dialogue, music and effects. In these magical moments, the sound design is so subtle, that you don’t even notice it – it carries the story along in a way that is perfectly pitched, but not invasive. With film, television and radio, audio is at its best when it is intrinsically linked to a story.

In the film world there are many wonderful examples of this in action. For instance, the 1961 movie, West Side Story, has an incredible opening sequence featuring a ball hitting off a fence, a stab of music, then silence, a ball catch, another stab of music, then fingers clicking, first one set of hands, then more, then another stab of music. The music builds slowly, you hear the sound of someone writing in chalk, then some heightened dialogue. The simplicity and clarity of the scene makes it near on perfect for me.

Or look at Hitchcock, who clearly understood the importance of sound design in telling his stories. He was quoted as saying, “When we tell a story in a cinema, we should resort to only dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.”

The sounds in Birds and Psycho are the ones that everyone immediately remembers, where the tension and drama are created from the way in which he uses both sound and silence. The repetition of sounds, combined with use of music and dramatic silences feel as crucial to the script as the dialogue.

I have worked on many iconic commercial spots, such as Nike: Write the Future, and Heineken: The Odyssey, and I constantly take inspiration from films when tackling my own sound design projects.

For example, with W+K’s Nike: Write the Future, I knew from the start what an epic piece of work it would be.

However, I didn’t want it to just be a wall of sound, I wanted to find ways to create moments of silence. Over a period of months I did everything from recording all the kicks and all the tackles myself to editing the Hocus Pocus distinctive riffs so that they complemented the narrative and the complex sound design.

More recently I have been working with Oscar-winning director, Tom Hooper, on the ongoing Jaguar British Villains campaign.

From the first commercial of the campaign, Rendezvous, it was clear that Hooper was striving for a cinematic approach to the audio post-production. He worked on a newly composed audio track with renowned composer, Alexandre Desplat, who had collaborated with him on The King’s Speech, and who recently picked up an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel. The slow, low-key build and tempo of the track, paired with the precise dialogue and intricate sound design, climaxes with a rendezvous that is worthy of any Hollywood epic.

I was recently asked to be a judge for the Diamond Skulls Awards in Australia and one thing that struck me was how the best pieces of work, from a sound point of view, be they radio or TV, all shared a cinematic approach. The good pieces of sound design stood out on their own but, interestingly, the very best pieces were soundscapes that worked as a combination of script and sound, without having the need to stand out or overwhelm.