Raja Sehgal: I Am Sound

Veteran sound designer Raja Sehgal started messing around with the medium at age five, pimping up a freebie Frosties toy radio. Tim Cumming finds him still playing – wild-tracking around the world from Willesden to India, seeking the perfect effect for award-winning spots

Residents of Harrow: do not be disturbed should you find one of your neighbours waist-deep in the middle of his garden pond, dropping things into the water and ‘fishing’ for them with an electronic net. This is not a sign of madness, but normal behaviour from Raja Sehgal, sound designer on some of the biggest spots of the past three decades.

Boys and their toys

It’s been a lifelong love affair with the medium for Sehgal. “From when I was five,” he says simply, “I was sound.” It all began with a freebie toy radio from a packet of Frosties. “I put it in a perforated shoebox so it would look like a bigger speaker.” These days, he’s in command of vast sound desks and the entire sound design of major campaigns, but this long journey has been via experiments in cutting up tape, collecting and connecting hi-fi cast-offs from jumble sales (“I probably had 20 record players”) and sitting in on his mother’s studio work – she was head of an Indian music label (his father was an architect).

“Then I did sound at the Edinburgh fringe,” he remembers, “from when I was 14 to 17. My best friend, who was doing the lighting, now does the lighting at the Royal Opera House.” The friends both came to London in 1981, aged 17, and Sehgal started at Silk Sound, one of just four studios doing sound for radio and TV commercials at the time.

Grand designs

Sehgal’s first professional spot was for Ravel shoes, though ‘sound designer’ was still a job title of the future. “You had one go, it was live, that’s it,” says Sehgal. “Sound effects would be two record decks. You’d cue up your door slam, bird song or dog bark, and you had to be able to go ‘Take One’ and then the voiceover, the sound effect of the door, and that’s it. D’you like it? If not, set the whole thing up again. And if you couldn’t do it live, you just couldn’t do it – that was a massive learning curve. Of all the learning experiences I’ve had in my career, doing that for three years was the most important for me. But that’s where the whole industry’s changed now.”

Digital started coming through in the mid-80s, by which time Sehgal was already designing bespoke sound solutions at the newly established Grand Central Recording Studios in Soho, where he’s one of the founding partners, along with Carole Humphrey.

The first TV spot he soundtracked digitally featured the now-antique Synclavier, an early-80s sampler favoured by the likes of Michael Jackson and The Cure. The spot was Honda’s Crusher, and Sehgal’s task was to create the sound of crushed metal returning back to its original showroom shape.

“We were really proud of it. That ad was the first one where we could do something that wasn’t just voice, music and a few sound effects. It was really cutting-edge stuff for a commercial.”

On  the wild-track

More major campaigns came his way, future classics such as Allied Dunbar’s There May Be Trouble Ahead and Nicole & Papa, for Renault. In recent years, there’s been the Hero series for Heineken, Nike’s Write the Future and a London Olympics-inspired spot for Powerade that utilised those garden pond sound samples (otherwise known as ‘wild-tracking’) for the underwater sounds of swimmers powering through the pool, striving to better their best for 2012.

While he’s perfectly at home in the studio, developing that sound studio tan, Sehgal retains a lifelong passion for wild-tracking. Why pillage someone else’s digital library when you can find your own sounds? “If I go and record it,” he says, “it will be more where I want it to be than if I’d just pulled it out from an effects library. On most big ads, the first thing you’re told is, ‘We’ve shot no sound.’ So you start off with the stuff where you know what you have to record.”

A roll of the dice

He cues up the Heineken Skyfall spot, Express, and pauses at a dice roll. “They’ll want to hear that – all the sounds that tell the story through the film.” So Sehgal will sit there, rolling dice and recording it until it’s right. Those train screeches in the Express spot came from recording cargo trains while sat in a siding at Willesden Junction. “You don’t have to put it in,” Sehgal adds, “but it’s those details that give a subliminal depth. Without them, it still works, but with them, it’s all that much more believable.”

For Heineken’s latest India-set spot Voyage, Sehgal flew to the country to wild-track a sound design that matches the richly baroque visuals frame for frame. He inveigled his wife’s aunts to provide the high, keening (and not quite subliminal) sound of women beggars clustering around a bus. “The fireworks you hear I recorded during Diwali – I used sounds that are all quite real. They’re all authentic.” And, just as Hitchcock liked to play a cameo in each of his films, so Sehgal himself can be heard – maybe a shout here, a cry there – in each of his sound designs.

Express delivery

Then there’s syncing the music. “All Heineken spots have a track, and they’re edited very specifically to picture. I’ll do hundreds of edits until all the key points hit with a beat.” Heineken’s Express comprised at least 200 audio tracks, one on top of the other like some digital tower of Babel. One of Sehgal’s personal favourite spots, the multi-award winning Write the Future for Nike, is built up of more than 300 tracks. “It was a flowing project, with months of work for everyone,” he says. “And it was great to do.” He laughs as he looks back, “The amount of time editing music to make that picture!”

It’s all a long way from those early spots at Silk Sound, cueing live voice and vinyl. As with so much in the industry, the devil is in the detail. And in Sehgal’s studios at Grand Central, no detail goes unnoticed, you can guarantee that; it’s what keeps him so continuously in demand. And with new sound systems coming in all the time, the new age of the sound designer is only just hitting its stride. But you can bet Raja Sehgal will be there, designing the future.