Why Sound Design Can Become a Trap
Sound design promises control at a moment when music is already drowning in possibility.
For much of electronic music’s modern history, sound design has carried an implicit moral weight. To design one’s own sounds, to sculpt waveforms, build patches or engineer bespoke signal chains, is often treated as a marker of seriousness, originality or technical legitimacy. By contrast, assembling music from loops, presets or commercial sample libraries is routinely framed as a compromise, a shortcut or at worst a creative failure.
This hierarchy has become so normalised that it is rarely examined. Yet at a moment when sound is cheaper, more accessible and more abundant than at any point in recorded history, a condition explored in The Global Sound Library Is Already Functionally Complete, the fixation on originality at the level of raw sound is producing unintended consequences. In some cases, it is not fostering innovation at all but slowing it, diverting time, energy and talent into forms of labour whose creative return is increasingly unclear.
This is not an argument against sound design. It is an argument about proportion, incentives and confusion between means and ends.
The Cost of Re-Inventing What Already Exists
Modern producers operate inside an ecosystem saturated with high-quality sound. Companies such as Splice, Native Instruments, Spectrasonics and Output employ specialist designers whose full-time work is to create and refine sonic material across genres. Their libraries draw on decades of accumulated practice, studio access and technical iteration. For many functional musical contexts, drums, basses, atmospheres and transitional effects, there are already thousands of usable options, often indistinguishable to listeners once placed in a mix.
Against this backdrop, large numbers of musicians still spend disproportionate amounts of time designing sounds that closely resemble what is already available. This labour is not inherently misguided. Learning synthesis can be intellectually rewarding and personal workflows do matter. But the opportunity cost is real. Hours spent rebuilding a competent but unremarkable pad are hours not spent composing, arranging, editing or finishing work.
Several prominent producers have acknowledged this trade-off openly. Deadmau5, known for his technical depth, has repeatedly argued in public discussions and interviews that most listeners cannot identify the origin of a sound once it sits inside a finished track, particularly after compression, EQ and mastering. In livestream discussions about workflow and later reflections in the music press, he has been blunt that how a sound was made matters far less than whether the song itself actually lands.
The point is not that sound design lacks value but that its value diminishes when detached from musical outcome.
Different Cognitive Tasks, Different Outcomes
Sound design and musical assembly are not interchangeable skills. They engage different cognitive processes and reward different temperaments.
Designing sounds from first principles is analytical and iterative. It involves systems thinking, parameter exploration and often prolonged solitary focus. Assembling music from existing materials, loops, presets and samples, a distinction examined in Is Using Loops Cheating?, is more associative. It prioritises pattern recognition, timing, contrast and narrative flow.
Cognitive research into music perception supports the idea that these tasks recruit different mental resources. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and former producer, has written extensively about how listening, structuring and creating music activate distinct neural systems depending on task and intent, a distinction explored in his work on how the brain processes music.
Neither mode is inherently superior. Problems arise when proficiency in one is assumed to substitute for the other or when moral status is attached to the choice of method rather than the clarity of result.
This mismatch can be destabilising. Producers highly skilled at synthesis may struggle with arrangement or communication. Others, fluent in structure, may hesitate to finish work because the materials feel insufficiently pure.
Originality, Assembly and the Myth of Purity
Many artists routinely cited as exemplars of originality have worked extensively with existing tools, presets and sampled material. Daft Punk’s catalogue, often held up as sonically distinctive, was built around well-known drum machines, synthesizers and repetition rather than bespoke sound invention, a process documented in studio analyses of their later work.
Similarly, Brian Eno has long framed authorship as the design of systems rather than the manual creation of every component within them. His writing and interviews on generative music challenge the assumption that originality depends on material novelty alone, arguing instead for composition as the shaping of conditions and outcomes, a position articulated in his discussions of AI and authorship.
In these cases, assembly is not a shortcut. It is the work.
Saturation, Speed and Platform Pressure
The pressure to innovate sonically has intensified just as the barriers to sound creation have collapsed. Software instruments are cheaper and more powerful than ever while distribution platforms reward volume and regularity over prolonged experimentation.
On streaming services, industry reporting suggests that more than 100,000 tracks are uploaded every day, a figure that continues to rise.
This volume creates structural incentives for speed. Producers are encouraged to release quickly, differentiate superficially and move on. Yet at the same time, platforms such as YouTube implicitly pressure creators to demonstrate originality at the level of source material through automated copyright enforcement.
YouTube itself has acknowledged limitations and false positives within its Content ID system in its own documentation, a problem that has also been examined through independent reporting on erroneous copyright claims.
The contradiction is stark. Creators are urged to prove originality in increasingly narrow ways while operating in environments that prioritise scale over depth.
AI, Automation and Misplaced Anxiety
Concerns about AI ruining music often collapse multiple issues into one. Automation certainly changes workflows and poorly deployed tools can flood markets with low-effort material. But artists working closest to these systems often describe them as accelerants rather than replacements.
Holly Herndon, whose work integrates machine learning directly into compositional practice, has consistently framed AI as an extension of human authorship rather than its negation, a position she has articulated in interviews discussing AI as a compositional tool.
Critical coverage has echoed this more cautious framing, resisting both utopian and apocalyptic narratives in broader discussions of AI and music.
The risk may be less that machines replace musicians and more that musicians misallocate their effort trying to out-innovate systems designed for speed rather than meaning.
What Visual Art Already Accepted
Visual art largely abandoned material purity as a criterion for legitimacy decades ago. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades reframed authorship as selection and context rather than fabrication, a shift explored in institutional writing on his work.
That logic later surfaced in works such as Tracey Emin’s My Bed, where framing and proposition mattered more than craft, as discussed in curatorial context from Tate.
No serious critique of these works hinges on whether the artist manufactured the materials themselves. Music, by contrast, continues to wrestle with questions visual art has already resolved.
When Process Becomes an Alibi
Perhaps the most damaging consequence of sound-design absolutism is how easily it becomes a substitute for completion. Endless refinement can masquerade as rigour. Patch-building can defer the exposure that comes with finishing and releasing work.
Rick Rubin has spoken publicly about this tendency, noting that creative practice often stalls not from lack of ideas but from resistance to closure, a theme he explores in his reflections on creative process.
The observation is not prescriptive. It simply points to a pattern. When process becomes an identity, output can quietly disappear.
Balance, Not Doctrine
None of this resolves into a simple prescription. Sound design remains central to many practices and genres. There is genuine artistry in deep technical exploration and there are cases where invention at the material level is the work itself.
The unresolved question is one of balance. At a time when sound is abundant, platforms are saturated and attention is scarce, it may be worth asking whether originality is best pursued at the level of source material or whether, in many cases, it emerges more clearly through selection, structure and completion.
What matters may not be where a sound comes from but whether the effort spent proving its origin ultimately serves the piece it was meant to support.