Sound Design Job Interview Questions

/

Hi, there. After going through the process of doing a bunch of interviews for sound designer positions, I thought it could be useful to compile the most usual questions I encountered.

Take them as a guide to know what to expect. I personally like to have a rough idea of how I want to answer each of these, but I mostly leave it to improvisation in terms of what to actually say. I prefer the conversation to flow naturally as much as possible.

I left out a bunch of generic HR questions because they are just everywhere, although I left some in just to give some comments on them. Also, you will probably have at least 2-3 different interviews with different people and these questions are just taken from different interview layers.

About you / Personal

Tell me a bit about yourself. // Classic opener. Preare a summary in your mind, to the point. Quality before quantity.

What do you do on your spare time apart from video games? // You are maybe temtped to say “record audio libraries” here and that’s fine but I would prefer to show a different side of myself that complements the professional side.

What are you playing right now?

Favourite game ever?

Favourite game ever for sound? // This and the above questions are a nice chance to show your taste a bit more. You can taylor the answer to the interviewer or company a bit but I would pretty much answer honestly.

Who is your Hero? // Interesting one, think of something cool.

Career / HR

What is your dream job? // Could be a tricky one but nice to show ambition here.

Where do you see yourself in five years // Similar to the previous one but maybe if you get this one after the previous one you can talk more about your place in life in a more personal way.

What is your greatest achievement?

What is your greatest failure?

What is your best stregth?

What is your worst weakness? // HR bread and butter. Prepare reasonable answers and move on to the interesting stuff.

What hard or tricky problem have you found and solved? // A chance to show you are resilient.

Do you have experience working under pressure? // Use a real example here.

What has been the biggest disappointment in your career to date?

Why do you wish to leave your current position? // I prefer an answer here that points towards career growth if possible.

Describe a personal project you have worked on lately. // Good to show you are creative and have initiative which is probably the case since you want a sound designer job.

Questions for the interviewer? // This one does usually come up, at every level interview. I like to ask about the company culture and vibe, I usually ask them if they like working there. You can then ask more specific questions about the position itself and finally about the selection process.

Position Specific

What 3 things you think you need to thrive in your position? // I got this one and didn’t have anything prepared.. Your answer should show a nice range of things here. One of my mine was: “People around who know much more than me”, which was the first thing I thought.

Team player? // There is usually a “team” oriented question. I feel stupid just saying “of course, I love working with my collegues!” so what I usually do is prepare a real example of teamwork epicness on my previous jobs. In general, is always good to prepare an example for each thing that you claim. The more tangible the example is, the better.

Do you have experience working with clients? // Good to keep in mind an answer for this. As said above, prepare an example.

What interested you about our company? // Another classic, you should try to focus on positives about the games the company creates, if you know them or play them, much better.

Salary expectations? // There are many strategies out there for this one but my advice is that you try to get a range from them first but this doesn’t always happen. In my case, I like to do some research online about the company and area/city so I can have a reasonable range in my mind. Be confident.

How much notice do you need to give your current employer?

Willing to re-locate?

Audio Specific

DAW, Middleware, Game Engine, Plugins, Audio Library Software // You will get generic questions about whichever piece of software the company uses. Prepare answers that show how much you know them and try to give as many examples as possible. Don’t stretch the truth here.

Do you have experience using Middleware? Which one? // Even if you don’t have experience with the middleware the company uses is still good to talk about your experience with others.

Which DAW do you know how to use? Which one you like the best? // I usually give my honest opinion here but I like to stress that all modern DAWs nowadays are pretty good and capable.

Do you have experience using any audio library software like Soundly or Soundminer?

Your favourite audio library or your most used one?

What is your favourite sound generation tool or synth that you use?

What did you use to do (insert project name)? // Give as much info and details here as possible, this is a great question to get.

How do you balance quality and deadlines? // Like this, of course.

What is your favourite tool, technique, process or software? // Cool one to have prepared with that tool or plugin you can’t live without. It is ideal to describe what you do with it and then give examples from real world projects where you apply it.

What is an understimated area of audio?

Describe your process of creating an SFX from the idea to implementation. // Give a general idea of your pipeline (with examples) but is also good to show hints of flexibility to work with other pieces of software.

Which SFXs have you created recently that you are very satisfied with?

Do you have experience doing field recordings?

Do you keep notes during recording sessions? How do you do this?

Do you have experience creating audio libraries?

Which game engine have you used professionaly?

Do you know how to code? Which langaugaes do you know? // You have to be careful with this one as programming is a deep subject, try to give an accurate idea of what you are capable of.

What audio system have you coded that you are proud of?

Have you used Git or SVN?

Do you have experience recording/composing/producing/mixing/mastering music? // It all depends on the position offered. I only went for pure sound design jobs and still got asked about this so you will need to preapre answers on music.

What is the area within audio that you are less confortable with?

What gear do you use? What are your 3 must haves? // Be specific here, talk about pieces of equipment you like.

What motivates you as a sound designer? What realy excites you about your job?

Additional Advice


Quick & early iteration for game audio

/

When your job is creative and open ended sometimes is hard to feels things are finished. Even if you design, export and implement a particular SFX on your project, is hard to be sure things are done. Art is not finished, is abandoned. This sometimes produces a kind of “paralysis by analysis” situation where if you try to really make sure everything is perfect you would never finish in time.

That’s why I’m advocating for a diffferent approach on this post: Quick and early iteration. Don’t worry about things being perfect, not even “finished”, just put ideas together and throw them into the real world as fast as possible. There are a few advantages to this approach.

Context

For the most part, audio is never going to be heard in isolation so why bother making a SFX super detailed and interesting if its context is never going to allow it to shine? This is analogous to the mixing engineer trying to make the kick drum sound awesone for hours, only to realize that it doesn’t work in the context of the song.

You don’t always know how much spectral space do you have. You don’t always know how much time you have. If you try to get these things perfect you will probably be too slow on a project with hundreds of sounds.

Instead, make your best guess, put some audio together and get it into the game. As more and more audio gets in, you will start to get a sense of how the sounds work together. Later on, is when you can start thinking about teaking: with context.

Implementation

Getting audio into the game quick also lets you know sooner rather than later how an audio event should work functionally. This is important because it can affect how it should be designed. Should it be a loop? Use a speed parameter? Should you bake many different sound into a single file or have many small sounds played from a scattered instrument?

If you actually implement it, you will be faced with these decisions in a real way that will always be better than just planning. Don’t get me wrong, you should plan your work of course but that is never going to tell you if things are going to actually work. For that, you need to get your hands dirty.

On the code side of things, an early simple implementation will give you insights about your current audio tech. You will know if your audio scripts are sufficient or if you need to add new functionallities or ask a programmer to help you out. In terms of project planning, knowing this soon is a big advantage and producers will appreciate it.

Lastly, somehing nice about early implementation is that once you get feedback on the audio, you just need to swap or tweak the assets and future iteration will be quick and painless.

Focused Priorities

It would be tricky to know what is important if you don’t have a clear idea of what is going to be there. Throwing audio to the game soon gives you a more clear idea of what you need to focus on. Your time is not infinite so you need to pick your battles and add detail and love to the content that most will benefit from it.

Once a respectable amount of audio is implemented, it will be easier to decide what is best to focus on and you will get a better sense of what is important.

Earlier Unknowns

Game development is usually about solving problems and these problems are often hard to predict. You can sit all day and plan how you are going to do things but it would be impossible to take some of these future issues into account. The next best thing is to know about them as early as possible.

That way, you can tackle them with more time and have a better chance getting the resources you need.

Optimization

Something to also consider is how efficient you are in terms of memory and CPU. This is hard to determine in the earlier phases of the project and if you go too slow on the first stages of the game development, it may be too late to have enough time to react.

Building the audio earlier would give more information about how things perform and you will be able to make better strategic decisions on how to do things. In turn, this will also influence how audio is built and designed.

80% is enough

Quick iteration has an additional advantage: if anything goes wrong or new time constrains come, you know you will be 80% of the way there and that could be enough to save the day.

This is something that goes against all our instintcs as creative, detail-oriented people. We always strive for more emotive, interesting and inspiring audio but that can only happen if we have the time to do it and sometimes we just don’t. If worst comes to worst, at least we know things are functional and all the main aural information is already conveyed to the player. Maybe is not pretty but it works and sometimes, in an emergency, that could be just enough.

Iteration

So that’s pretty much the idea. As you get more and more audio in place, always trying to be fast rather than perfect, you will get a better idea of what to spend more time on and that’s when iteration comes into focus. As a project reaches maturity, you will find yourself working less on new content and more on iteration.

You will be surprised to see that most things will just need tweaking while only a few will need to be re-done from scratch. On the long run, I think you save time working this way and the result will be better. Another nice advantage is the peace of mind that comes from knowing that most things are in place and now is just a question of iteration and refinement.

Lastly, as you get more experience working this way, you will find that your initial quick, dirty work gets closer and closer to be good enough quality sometimes even high quality as you sharpen your instincts and workflows.

Does this sound good?

/

I’ve been working on audio for a bunch of years now. That means making hundreds of decisions everyday about audio perception. Does this sound too big? Too dark? Too harsh? Too muffled?

You make those decisions based on your sonic experience of the world on the one hand and on your experience of other media on the other hand. So you decide what sounds good based on other people decisions in the past. You stand on the shoulders of giants. How many people do sound design for a living? Ben Burtt must be quite sore.

Audio, good audio at least, is always somewhere between true reality and that distorted perception of reality which comes from years of listening to media. Guns really don’t sound like they do in the movies and probably dinosours didn’t either. We are all subjected to this sonic zeitgeist that we can’t escape. You need to distance yourself from reality and use trickery so the audience feels that what they hear is authentic. Such is the irony of the sound design job.

But I can cope with that. Art is really about encouraging that delusion, isn’t it? About being larger than life, about dreaming, fantasy and imagination. That’s fine. The problem doesn’t really come with being real or authentic, we crossed that bridge when we started doing cave paintings. The issue comes with the simple challenge of evaluatiing quality.

For the most part, of course you know when things sound good. You even know how to improve them if you have the time. So you make choices, tweak things and listen again. But on the back of your brain there is this weird feeling, that tells you, but how do I really know? This is a common illness among creative professionals.

Objective things that you can measure are much more easy on the human neocortex. Maths and physics (maybe not quantum physics) are comfortably predictable. On the same vein, the logic behind programming offers the same warmth. Even though you don’t understand why something doesn’t work, there is a logical explanation and you just need to find it.

But quality appreciation on a creative field is a different beast. Is still processed in the brain, but much more based on instinct, computed using a mix of new and ancient parts of it. This is something that my analytical part dislikes because is a process that I can’t contain and use at my leasure that easily. It is not a lightbulb, clean and convenient, but a fire with uneven heat and light.

So there is not much else to do but to let go and follow your instincts. Sometimes it won’t feel right, sometimes you won’t be able to even tell but that’s the gig.

Is always good to sanity check with the people around you but beware. The perfect recipie to do a bad job is trying to please everybody. People have very particular opinons about audio and they don’t usually know how to express them very well so for sure take the feedback, but not at face value or you will go crazy.

Leaning on your own opinion all the time sometimes feels like that Nietzsche quote "if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you", but is probably your best bet. Firstly because you will always be improving as you flex your creative muscle. And secondly, and most importantly, because you is the only constant in your career. Leaning on the only tool you will always, always have seems like a good idea to me.

Or if everything else fails, you can always take a break.