The SpeaK methodology for sound design

Abstract

The first meetings of a sound design project aim to present the request which may concern the identity of a brand or the emotion associated with a new product. It is then crucial to elaborate recommendations for the sound designer. However, the major difficulty encountered is to specify the request in terms of sound features. The Speak methodology is based on an efficient co-design workshop to help participants, ranging from the project manager to the communication manager, to specify their request with words related to sound features. Frist, a lexicon composed of 35 words often used by professionals is presented to the participants; each word is related to a sound feature explained by a definition and highlighted by a corpus of sound examples. Then, a card game is provided to each participant; each card is associated with a word from the lexicon. The rule during the workshop is to use only the cards to describe the desired audible intention; each participant can select or reject a word, and exchange with other participants focusing only on the sound features. Finally, participants are actively involved in the process to develop sound recommendations. During the presentation, we will focus on a specific project.