I will continue to update this as I go along, the process is slow especially because of university and such but here you will find some explanations as to how I made various sound effects in the latest episode of Chain of Being
In the interests of honesty I will say that I am writing this after having done a few sound effects and editing for this episode the ones I have done are: “party outside from the inside”, “dust storm in a dream”, “4 beats throbbing”, “groan and body horror crack”, and “burning house” the way I will do an episode is I will first write the Script, go through and make notes of where certain sound effects would be appropriate and then create a list and tick off one by one. Some of them I will make separately in audition and then just make them first and then use them later when the time arises but sometimes the ambience will change and in that case it will rely on the timing. I will keep it as the audition session file and then just copy and paste it in afterwards.
Fire suppressant foam:
So one of these sound effects I have to do is the sound of a fire suppressant drone sending some foam into a burning house and for this I kind of struggled a little bit but as a start I went down the route of fire extinguishers and then the sounds of some shaving foam cans (all from freesound.com) I wanted the motion to feel quite cacophonous and rapid so I ended up layering them all together, I had to lower the pitch and up the bass of the shaving foam in order to add an extra level of size to the sound. I then layered everything together like so:
Unfolding a bow:
For this sound I described the bow as a “sleek scoped folding bow” so I decided not to go too overboard with the sound effects in terms of mechanical noises and clicking and that sort of thing. So all I did was get my zoom H1 recorder and went to the door of my room in the accommodation and just recorded myself flicking it and holding down and letting go and doing all these sorts of things and it came out quite nicely and so I decided to only use that and just cut up the different ones I had to do the sound of unlocking on either end and then unfolding automatically, I also added the twang of a longbow that I got from freesound just to place the image of a bow in the listeners mind. I think it came out quite nicely. It’s very simple and the sleekness is really present
Folding a Bow:
It’s very tempting to just reuse the elements from the unfolding and just do them backwards but unfortunately in trying to emulate and semblance of how things would sound I must consider that the sounds would indeed be different, a car door unlocking and locking are two different sounds, a folding chair or any sort of unfolding mechanism has two different sounds for opening and closing and so I went along a similar route of finding some sounds of locks, a small motor noise, and clicking. The motor noise is to signify the winding up of the bow string, as it’s being opened this would not be needed as the force of the actual unfolding would pull it out whereas as the tension is lost there is not force to wind it back in so I decided the sound of a motor would suggest to the listener that this kind of thing is taking place. Overall it is relatively simple to do and just requires a bit of shifting around to get a good sense of motion.
Beep:
One character has a communication device built into the side of her head, she taps it and I had decided that it should make a sound, realistically it wouldn’t, whenever I open my phone it doesn’t beep every time however having this podcast be an exclusively audio medium, I have to emphasise certain elements to paint a stronger image and so in order to place this idea that the character (Lanralis) has this piece of tech built into her head. I always have trouble doing UI and tech beeps and so this was a bit of a struggle, I decided to go an entirely different route this time and instead of generating a tone in audition or trying to tailor a synth plugin I would try and take a sound recording and manipulate it into the kind of thing I want. The character in question is a Veatorian, one of the motifs I have in mind for the veatorians is fabrics, cloths and tapestries, so as my initial base I took the sound of a cloth belt being put on. I then upped the pitch, in order to make it have more of a beeping quality, having it too low makes it sound too natural and also often UI noises that are too sudden/harsh and deep show that something has been done wrong, and the intention here was to do an activation sound. Ultimately the sound overall wasn’t smooth enough to use and so I decided to start from scratch. I have noticed in my admittedly limited experience that I find it much easier to do darker, ominous and negative sounds then I do anything with slightly more positivity, I suppose this is what I have yet to develop but I find it quite daunting especially when I have no real idea on how to begin