I've spent more than 20 years building an audio company around something most people never stop to think about.
Sound.
Not voice, not music. Everything else.
For many of us, when we think sound, we immediately think voice and music. But then there is everything else. And everything else is why Pro Sound Effects exists. Sound exists on the periphery, outside of the audio spotlight, yet it’s the invisible anchor to our everyday listening and how we make sense of the world around us.
It’s the early-morning hiss of our coffee machines, the birdsong as we take our first steps outside, our vehicle starting up, the elevator opening, the cicadas at dusk and the subtle rustles of our sheets as we settle in to sleep. Sound is vital to our experience of the media we consume every day, the games we play, our favorite shows, movies and all the videos we watch. As more media is being created today than ever before in history, sound plays an even more powerful role in our daily lives. At the same time, it's now harder ever to protect the livelihoods of the people behind it.
Over the years, I’ve chosen to stay quiet and let Pro Sound Effects speak for itself. Now, it feels like the right time for me to speak up, share my story, and stand up for human rights in a rapidly advancing AI world that is fueled by IP theft.
Many don’t know that Pro Sound Effects is a small, proudly independent company with no outside investors. Since 2004, PSE has developed a living library of 1.2M+ sounds that supports the livelihoods of our people, including the 50+ sound artists and core team of 20 employees who bring their own creative practice to the work. Together, we've traveled the world recording, editing, tagging, and curating sound. It's a collective effort representing hundreds of years of expertise, millions of dollars invested, and an infinite love for sound and the world around us.
We help creators across all walks of media and technology bring their ideas to life with the highest quality, deepest and most diverse sound effects library possible. Our customers pay for legal licenses to use our library, we ensure the sound artists we work with get paid, we keep developing more sounds, and the wheels keep turning. In all that we do, we aspire to contribute to a world that sounds better and rewards those who contribute to it.
The biggest threat to our future now is that our work is being stolen.
Massive amounts of professional audio works have been scraped, extracted, pirated and exploited by AI companies without legal licenses or compensation to the creative professionals they seek to mimic with their tools. Look no further than Suno, where a recent hack exposed that they scraped and trained their models on the equivalent of 142 years of audio data - music, voice and sound effects. Unfortunately, this is one story of many.
PSE is in the business of licensing sound. Any time anyone uses our sounds to create a film, show, game, creative tool or technology, they must license properly and pay fairly for those rights. In turn, we pay our sound artists and employees so that we may continue doing what we love. Unless companies legally license the sounds they use to make money, the business I’ve built, the people whose livelihoods PSE has supported for 22 years, and the professional sound industry at large are at risk.
If theft eliminates the financial incentive to create professional sound, real people suffer, everyday listening becomes more synthetic, and the world all begins to sound the same.
“Over the years, I’ve chosen to stay quiet and let PSE stand on its own. Now, it feels like the right time for me to speak up, share my story, and stand up for human rights in a rapidly advancing AI world fueled by IP theft.”
Sound gets taken for granted because it lives in the background. Music and voice command the most attention, earn billions per year and have established powerful seats at the big business table. Sound is consumed peripherally, is comparatively small industry-wise, and is virtually unrecognized in the business world.
Music has the RIAA, the NMPS and PROs. Voice has SAG-AFTRA and NAVA, established unions and protections. Each represents the collective interests of big industries with long histories. What’s missing is awareness and advocacy for sound.
MPSE and CAS advocate valiantly for those working specifically in audio post for film and TV. However, there is currently no unified alliance that exists to promote the interests of professional sound as a multi-disciplinary art form, encompassing editing, design, interactive, field recording, foley, sound effects libraries and beyond.
The people who craft our sonic world, the recordists, designers, editors and library companies have never had a unified collective voice. This is why sound matters more than ever and why it’s time to stand up for our rights.
As sound continues to play a foundational role in all that we watch, play, listen to, and create, we face a real choice: will we protect, reward, and encourage the human artists who make it?
Our own answer is yes, always. Every sound in our library is professionally recorded, edited, tagged and curated by human experts. We pay salaries and royalties - we don’t scrape or steal. We capture the sonic reality of the world as it is - we don’t use AI to generate our sounds and synthetically build our library. We are sound professionals who have dedicated our careers to this, depend on it for the livelihoods of our families, and work together to create an authentic, self-respecting, and better sounding world every single day.
At PSE, we are working towards a future where media, technology and creative tools are fueled by the highest quality sound, reflect the sonic diversity of the real world as it evolves and enhance the experience of our stories. We want to contribute to a world where creative possibilities with sound are limitless, sound artists are rewarded and our everyday listening experiences continue to improve and inspire.
This is Part 1 of me sharing PSE’s story. In Part 2, I'll share why I founded Pro Sound Effects and how sound is deeply personal to me. In Parts 3 and 4 will look ahead at how we pay sound artists and what PSE stands for in an AI world.
Discover how PSE is working to protect professional sound, support the people behind it, and build a better-sounding future.