Sound Effects

Sound effects are the artificial or enhanced sounds of films, movies and video games. In movies, a particular sound effect is prerecorded and then added to the scene during the editing process. Dialogue and music are also sound effects, but are treated as a separate category. There are different kinds of sound effects used in terms of the movie and film industry:

Hard core sounds are the common sounds enhanced to make them louder, such as the sound of a car door slamming or the branch of a tree banging against a window. Background effects do not have anything to do with the storyline, but rather help to enhance the setting of a scene. A scene that takes place on a beach, for example, would have the sound of the waves lapping the sand or crashing onshore. Foley sound units are synchronized on the set and require a foley artist to synchronize such sounds as the rustling of a silk dress. Design sound effects are those used in a science fiction movie and are not natural sounds.

Sound editors are needed to integrate the sounds into a film by prerecording the sounds and processing them. They accumulate large libraries of sounds so that they have many to choose from when they need sounds for a film. Once the sound effects are recorded they are downloaded to a computer that has an audio non-linear editing system. Then the sound editor manipulates each sound to meet the needs of the film. The most common way of processing the sound effects is to layer two or three normal sounds to create a completely new one.

Some of the other techniques used in creating sound effects include:

Echoing – several delayed sounds of the same sound are added to the original to produce an echo
Flanger – a delayed signal is added to the original signal to produce an original sound.
Phaser – the sound signal is split, a portion of it is filtered and then the unfiltered and filtered sounds are combined to create an unusual mix.
Chorus – a delayed sound is added to the original sound with a constant delay.
Equalization – several different frequency bands are accentuated to add specific characteristics to the sound.
Overdrive – this is used to create distorted sounds by using a fuzz box
Pitch shift – raising or lowering the pitch of sounds