The SoundCloud and VFS Full Scholarship Challenge started with hundreds of entries from all over the world, and included sounds that represented the birth of an idea, a post-apocalyptic landscape, the colour red, an imaginary animal being born, or falling in love, for the chance at a scholarship to Sound Design for Visual Media. Once we narrowed those down to a top ten, it was up to SoundCloud users to determine the winner – and by a wide margin they chose Gordon McGladdery’s track of an imaginary animal being born!

How did he create his winning, and very disturbing, track? Well, in Gordon’s own words, “by manipulating a sample of a Cicada I recorded in South Korea and a sample a friend recorded of a baby goat being slaughtered in Sierre Leone (been waiting for a reason to use that!) along with minimal instrumentation in Ableton Live.”

If you hang onto sounds like those, you must be destined to be a sound designer.

Coming in second and third, and receiving a $10,000 scholarship each, were Jonas Obermüller and Herve Carpentier.

Congratulations, Gordon, Jonas, and Herve!

Update: Click here to check out our interview with Gordon upon his arrival at VFS.