The Sound Design Behind *Interstellar*

As far as what I hope the audience thinks of the sound, I would hope that they think the sound was all shot on the days they shot the movie and that it’s all there. — Richard King, Supervising Sound Editor & Sound Designer Interstellar

I found it interesting how the ultimate goal of the sound team was to have the audience not even notice their work. After all the extremes they went to — the airplane graveyard, the ice shoes, the sand blaster — they wanted their work to go unnoticed by the audience and instead have them simply assume it was all a product of the original film shoot.

I find such an interesting parallel to this in visual design: good, simple design is the obvious choice. So obvious, in fact, that people don’t even notice it. They just naturally assume “how could it be any other way?”

Reminds me of this quote, from the book The Inmates are Running the Asylum (which, if you haven’t read it, is great):

If, as a designer, you do something really, fundamentally, blockbuster correct, everybody looks at it and says, “Of course! What other way would there be?” This is true even if the client has been staring, empty-handed and idea0-free, at the problem for months or even years without a clue about solving it. It’s also true even if our solution generates millions of dollars for the company. most really breakthrough conceptual advances are opaque in foresight and transparent in hindsight. It is incredibly hard to see breakthroughs in design. you can be trained and prepared, spend hours studying the problem, and still not see the answer. Then someone else comes along and points out a key insight, and the vision clicks into place with tentacular obviousness of the wheel. If you shout the solution from the rooftops, others will say, “of course the wheel is round! What other shape could it possibly be?” This makes it frustratingly hard to show off good design work. — pg. 200

This is inline with what Alan Dye, Vice President of User Interface Design at Apple, said about Apple’s design goals:

Inevitable is the word we use a lot. We want the way you use our products to feel inevitable.

The goal is to make it seem as if the designers at Apple can’t even control the form and function of their products because the end goal is so natural and logical, i.e. inevitable.