When doing sound design I often have difficulties to judge my work objectively. I spend so much time on one particular scene or even one sound that I lose my ability to judge my work. Two examples:
1) I spend a lot of time designing a scene and feel very pleased with the result. When I bring in other persons, they do not like somehting I am actually very proud of and want me to remove it. This can also be the other way round, that they like something I am not so enthusiastic about. In the end, it often turns out that they were right (even if I still disagree with some decisions).
2) When carefully adding some sounds to enrich a scene (a car horn here, a telephone ring there), I often can't turn off my analytical brain listening to the scene as if I was an audience member. To my ear, the sounds I added always stick out resulting in me lowering their volume. The result is that my sound design tends to be rather quiet. When other people listen to the scene, they didn't hear any of the sounds (which of course doesn't need to be a bad thing). Goods sound design should remain unnoticed, but my knowledge of my work hinders me to just watch and not listen to the film.
What are your tricks to listen to your sound design as if was your first time? How do you work subjectively and judge / listen objectively?
