If you’re seeking the conventional wisdom governing sound design for commercials, you’re going to be disappointed. While multichannel music mixing has begun to follow certain conventions, such as keeping vocals out of the center channel, sound design for television commercials is still a new frontier. “What 5.1 does for sound design is give it the opportunity to use many, many more sound elements,” explains Mitch Dorf, a mixer and sound designer at POP Sound in Santa Monica, CA. “But at this point it’s sometimes hard to see exactly where sound design ends and the mixer takes over. The roles aren’t as clearly defined yet as they are in film.”

On the Ford Mustang "Green Light" spot, shown in HD during the Super Bowl, Dorf took stereo sound elements from another company and directed them to the front and rear speaker pairs, then added additional sound layers of his own. In the spot, a river freezes solid on screen behind the wheel of the car. "The client wanted it to sound‘colder,’" he says. "I went into my sound files on the server and found more wind sounds. The difference was, with 5.1 I could spread those new effects out through the 3D spectrum. You can use more and get a more intense effect from your sound design because you’ve got so many more places to put it throughout the sound field than you do in stereo."

Dorf uses a combination of tools, including the "Unwrap" software on TC Electronic’s System 6000 (Reverb), to "upmix" stereo effects and music into six channels. Additional depth is achieved by coating them with stereo reverbs and delays.

Johannes Hammers, a sound designer at post house Ravenswork in Venice, CA, uses mostly mono effects in his designs, such as the ones he’s done for Activision’s Spider-Man 2 video game, whose spots will be shown initially in theaters. "Sound design in 5.1 is totally different from stereo- you can’t think in terms of two speakers or even pairs of speakers." He cites one scene in the Spider-Man game where the hero swoops through streets- a shot for which Hammers loaded eight separate tracks of effects. "We worked on that scene for over an hour," he recalls. "The scene itself lasted less than three seconds. It’s not so much that you can put more elements into a design but that you’ve got more places to put them. That’s the essence of sound design in 5.1."

It is also why Hammers, who works in Apple’s Logic Pro on a Mac G5, agrees that 5.1 sound design is a collaboration between the designer and the mixer. "There’s only so much you can attach to the files in terms of where the sounds will be placed, and you also have to allow for the fact that things may change by the time it get to the mix stage," he says. "We’ll send AIFF files via OMF to the mix house. They’ll retain the rendered level information and the plug-ins and other automation information in the bounce-to-disc to the mixer. But placement is another thing."

Will Riley, an independent sound designer working frequently with Santa Monica commercial audio company Wojahn Brothers, where he created the sound design for the Ford "Green Light" spot, says 5.1 sound design for spots often integrates a cinematic, stem-based approach. "When preparing tracks for surround, I try to give the mixer as much flexibility as possible, using as many four-channel groups of backgrounds as I have time to assemble," he explains. "Ideally, those groups are recorded using a custom quad AKG C 414 rig, but if the material originates from a stereo library I’ll do a faux-quad thing by offsetting two stereo pairs of the same material, editing them both to avoid loopiness. Everything else I deliver tends to be mono. Mono has terrific impact, especially below 500Hz, not to mention that in reality we’re dealing mostly with mono sources in 3D reverberant field." Sourcing his own elements, Riley uses a Fostex FR2, citing its compact flash card and USB-host mode that mounts the CF card on the desktop for import directly into a Pro Tools session.

Eddie Kim, sound designer at 740 Sound Design in Santa Monica, creates a track assignment sheet that opens automatically in Pro Tools, cueing the mixer for soundfield element placement. On a spot for Pioneer widescreen TVs, a 32-track session combined cues for mono, stereo, LR, LS, RS and sub. Executive Producer Scott Ganary adds, "When we work on sound design projects for commercials, we typically go weeks before the mix stage. Unlike movies, where all tracks are predubbed on the stage, we do a lot of the predubs in Pro Tools, setting up volume levels and speaker placement."

The sheer variety of deliverables underscores the lack of universal standards in 5.1 audio. Robert Feist, owner of Ravenswork and a mixer there, says that facilities and designers have to use the formats each client requests, which can include Genex drives, DA-88 tapes and various file formats sent via FTP. "Plus not everyone can encode to Dolby E, so the files have to be sent to Dolby for that, if required," he adds.

Nathan Dubin at Margarita Mix in Santa Monica believes the AAF file format will win out as the exchange format of choice for HD audio, and he invested in a Fairlight Dream Constellation workstation for that reason. Fairlight also staked part of its future on AAF with its acquisition of Australian software developer AV Media, which makes the AAF-based AV Transfer program.

Steve Thompson, creative and technical director at POP, says the broadcast commercial spot business has historically been looser when it comes to creating standards than its film industry cousin, with an even wider range of workstations used by sound designers than the Pro Tools universe of music and film sound. "Pro Tools is ubiquitous, but we’ll see DA-88 and other formats often used for deliverables, along with OMF data," he says.

POP has invested in its own Dolby E encoder, in part to better control the metadata aspects of 5.1 mixes for HD broadcast projects. Thompson says networks are asking mix houses to place dialog at between -20 dB and -25 dB below absolute zero (unity gain) in order to take better advantage of digital’s wider dynamic headroom. "Still, the goal is to not have huge variations [in level]," he says. "They want the metadata to represent accurate values so that consumer devices in homes can read it and adjust accordingly."

Tom Jucarone, senior mixer and president of Sound Lounge in New York, says relative levels within a 5.1 mix are crucial in sound design. "The center channel is typically the dialog channel. Having five other channels around it frees you up- you don’t have to compete with the message that’s in the center channel. You can literally create audio subplots around it."

Nathan Dubin agrees. "Sound design in surround enables the center channel voice-over to really pop- you can really make that thing sell," he laughs. "But it does allow for more complex sound design."

"We’ve pretty much got every aspect of audio into 5.1 now, including sound design," says Tom Ozanich, a sound designer at Soundelux Design Music Group in Los Angeles. "Everything except the agencies, that is."

Ozanich has recently worked on broadcast spots for Ameriquest, Budweiser and Altoids that were done in HD, and many of his colleagues feel that bringing sound design into the picture completes the undergraduate phase of commercial audio’s transition to HD and 5.1 sound.

"It’s just a matter of time. I expect by the end of this year that almost all audio for spots is going to be done in 5.1," Ozanich predicts. But to hedge that bet, Soundelux’s new satellite post facility, scheduled to open in July in Santa Monica, close to L.A.’s agency community, will do all of its spot mixes in both 5.1 and stereo, even if the client doesn’t request multichannel sound. "Once they come over and hear it, they’ll be sold," he says.

Hunter Murtaugh, executive music director at Manhattan advertising agency McGarry Bowen, suggests that it’s not technophobia that’s holding Madison Avenue back. Rather, agencies are waiting for consumer demand for HDTV sets to reach an as-yet-undetermined critical mass, at which point HD commercial content will also be stimulated. "Advertising dollars are incredibly tight right now, and the additional cost of HD, while not that much, is enough to make advertisers want to see some evidence of ROI on that investment first," he explains. "Once the networks find a way to connect the dots between HD and ROI, you’ll see commercials in HD and 5.1 audio for them become commonplace."