Raja Sehgal Sounds Off

Veteran sound designer Raja Sehgal started messing around with the medium at age five, pimping up a freebie Frosties toy radio. In this extract from the new issue of shots, issue 146, 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.

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