Craig Smith

Craig Smith has been recording and manipulating sound since childhood. After graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, he worked as a sound editor and production mixer in Hollywood. He left that world in 1986 to supervise the Film/Video Sound Department at CalArts where he teaches sound design and technology.

In his own work, he experiments with implied narrative and accidental sound design -- putting together sounds and images that have nothing to do with each other to create unexpected stories.

Craig also archives, preserves, and restores vintage Hollywood and radio sound effects. He has made thousands of effects available to the public for free at Freesound.org, The Internet Archive, and Soundly. Last summer he gave a presentation to an international conference at the Library of Congress, making an argument for more aggressive preservation efforts to save early sound effects.

Craig is a Life Member of SMPTE (the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers,) and AES  (the Audio Engineering Society.)