Are you into working with sound effects or trying to get in? In this article, Damian Kearns describes his method of approaching SFX Design in a way you might never have a thought of, by providing the keys to doing it right.

It All Starts With A Horrible Joke

A writer, a musician and a sound effects designer walk into a bar. They order one beer between them. It turns out they’re all the same person. Kidding aside, arranging superior sound effects design for superior projects requires a sort of three-in-one approach, adhering to a single basic mantra: The script is sacrosanct.

Yeah, sound effects design actually has more to do with the script than you might think at first. As I break down my approach to soundscaping and SFX creation, I’ll always have the script at the top of my mind. Any other methodology, as some might say, means you’re ‘chasing rainbows’. Script: Words. Sacrosanct. Done.

Writers Write, SFX Designers… Write?

Pathetic Fallacy is a fundamental, rudimentary tool of practical, good writing. It’s “the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human.”

Nature is empathetic and mirrors the emotions of the protagonist of our stories. Nature tells us what our characters are feeling at all times and where they are when they’re feeling what they’re feeling. So:

Key Number 1:

Nature tells us how to emote or what the emotions of the scene are. Crickets don’t chirp when someone dies. Birds don’t sing, traffic doesn’t move. Everything is cold and dead, just like our deceased person in this, scenario one. Nature must reflect the tone and feeling of the script so that pathetic fallacy bolsters the story all the way through to the end.

An excellent example of this is how I use birds in horror and true crime TV. I always start with a lot of happy, chirpy birds and as the story grows colder, the birds thin out, the birds of prey come in and eventually, even they disappear when the story hits its darkest moment.

Repetition, Repetition…

Key Number 2:

Great pieces of prose are self-referential. Things are foreshadowed earlier in the tale and reveal themselves later. Then, they come back at other moments to remind us of earlier happenings and bind the tale together. This is also SFX editing 101: Repeat elements for effect, not because you’re lazy. No one likes to hear ‘samples’ repeating in a sound edit.  But a gunshot under a door slam or tire pop or table hit early on can be the same gunshot used to kill our deceased later on, and after he’s dead, can be used to close his coffin, or under the judge’s gavel when the perpetrator is found guilty so that the sound provides a sort of glue for the structure of the SFX composition. I do this all the time. Foreshadowing is the artful way to re-use the same sound. If you’re not being artful, you’re just being lazy.

These two literary mechanisms, Keys 1 and 2, are present in most great SFX compositions as well as post audio mixes. They are serving the script in the sense that we are using audio to reinforce feelings written into the script. By artfully applying literary tools, we can form the backbone of the structure of our overall sound design. We also reveal to our directors and producers that we’ve actually understood the structure of their projects, rather than witlessly throwing sounds at a mix to see what sticks and what doesn’t.

It turns out that being soundsmiths means we are also wordsmiths. Yeah, I made up ‘soundsmiths’. Making up stuff is probably key number 8 but I won’t be discussing that here.

The Importance of Rhythm

Key Number 3:

It turns out being musical helps audio designers. People don’t always realise this but the best SFX designers (and Foley Artists, and dialogue editors, and mixers) almost always have some sort of musical background. And music isn’t just about pitch, it’s about rhythm, which is beats. So any time a scene is falling flat, throw in a car pass, crow caw, kids playing, metal stress or whatever is needed to break the spaces up and create those heretofore nonexistent beats. A sound effects composition needs beats to pace its organic heartbeat. Your voiceover host and or actors are counting on your sense of rhythm to cement the structure of each scene. Again, see script for details.

Change Pitch

Key Number 4:

The second fundamental musical element—beyond rhythm- is pitch.

Lighter-hearted scenes can be built around higher-pitched elements like birds, children’s voices, happy car horn honks and leaves rustling in trees. Emotionally dark scenes rely on drones, hollow winds, heavy impacts, etc to bring the emotions in line with the story arc. By removing higher pitched sounds or replacing them, we can push the listener down that dark hole. I always say a good mix is about taking away what we don’t need and a large part of that emotional journey for the listener is about the changing pitch elements to lead them merrily along. High pitches can also be shrill and frightening so it’s not like there’s a hard and fast rule here but by playing with light and dark motifs, you are now sound effects designer, musician and writer all in one. Arrange and compose to the best of your abilities.

Silence Isn’t Golden… It’s Gold!

Key Number 5:

Silence isn’t just about long durations, it’s about incredibly short spaces between sounds too. For comedy, I’m often moving elements a frame or two at a time until an effect or grouping of effects is the funniest it can be. The space between elements is critical and needs to be practiced to be learned. Space creates individual events, rather than long, lifeless mixes. Silence is second only to sound in our SFX compositions. Use it well and often.

Actually, comedic impact relies heavily on silence to create spaces (see Key 3). Other genres aren’t always as dependent on short silences between events but all genres of sound for picture need moments of silence for maximum impact. If everything audio is impactful, the mind retreats. Silence draws them back in again. Think on that one, silently.

Organic or Synthetic?

Key Number 6:

Choose your sounds based on what works best. In most cases I’ve encountered, organic sounds— made by people, flora or fauna- arouse primal emotions in listeners. I tend to favour organic sounds and organic combinations of sounds. The inorganic can be cold and chilling which work well in various scenarios but synthetic sounds— from tone generators, synthesizers, machine-generated- can operate on a bunch of higher level emotions, such as our modern concerns about AI, automation, etc or set an environment like a computer room into being. Sometimes adding synth sounds to the latter can actually add character to devices that don’t typically have a lot of character. So organic and inorganic sounds can add life or remove life from the mix.

The organic-over-synth balance has struck a wonderful set of tones in ‘Stranger Things’. From Tim Prebble’s seal sound recordings (I own this and several of his other libraries) for the creatures coming through walls, to the retro drones and synth pads for the opening music and some of the darker scenes, it’s clear the best sound design enmeshes a host of organic and inorganic elements. By the way, the Foley in that series really binds everything together and that is totally…organic.

Right Sounds, Right Place

Key Number 7:

People screw this one up a lot. As a guy who worked on nature shows back in the late 1990’s, I can tell you the ‘birders’ know when you’ve used the wrong bird. They like to write in to complain too. Elsewhere and prior, when I lived in Vancouver in 1996-97, when I went to bed at night, I never heard a cricket, I heard frogs. Yeah, I know, it sounds strange but it’s true. The west coast of Canada is frog heaven. It’s a singular ambience. Knowing a place is tantamount to proper storytelling.

Our job as SFX designers is as much as anything, to “scene set,” to tell people where we are. Younger SFX creators who work with me are often amused by the fact that I use Google Earth to examine a region and then read up on the basic ornithology, flora, fauna, civic infrastructure, dominant religion and ethnicity of an area before I start sending them notes on what to add in. I want to put myself inside a place and the best way to scene set is to vividly imagine the world enveloping a character or etched into a script. This brings the audience on the journey with us which is, of course, the intention of the script. Speaking of script, boy, this self-referential writing sure is fun!

The Role Of Texture

Key Number 8:

Texture is a vital sound design tool. It denotes the substance of a thing, can project friction or smoothness, and when used creatively, texture can graft attributes onto a character, environment, animal or action. Footsteps also have texture and in this sense, the right feet can place us inside or outside a space. A gritty handshake, a tire spinning in the snow, a slimy snake slither (snakes aren’t actually slimy so you see where I’m headed here) all help create the ‘reality’ of a story.

Imagine The Whole Image

Key Number 9:

Perspective helps render our story into a 3 dimensional, living, breathing set of scenes. It’s not enough to add a bird chirp; the bird has to be the right distance away from us and situated at the appropriate angle. One of my regular tools is to sit a little bird behind me in a surround mix but then have other birds different distances away, panned different ways. But we don’t need multiple speakers to create some perspective. We can do this by choosing reverberant sounds, by turning certain sounds down or muffling them with a low pass filter and by choosing other closer sounding recordings to convey sense of space between sound sources.

This key is one I feel requires a great deal of practice to get right. All too often, I’m handed SFX compositions where distant objects sound too close, or close objects sound too distant. I suggest to SFX Designers that they imagine the world they’re trying to create as a 3D model, then place things inside the model they’ve made in their mind. Of course, the script always suggests how things ought to be. It’s also an excellent guide for perspective.

Performance Issues

Key Number 10:

It seems a little strange at first, to suggest that performance has anything to do with sound effects choices but consider the fact that not all impacts have the same weight; not all wing flaps have the same heft or rhythm; not all walla works for every location. In the past, when I’ve been a Foley Mixer on various projects, my usual direction to the artist is to go heavier or harder than called for, so I can turn it down to fit inside the mix and still have some presence. I do this with traffic and children playing as well, when I’m cutting effects. I go bigger on the things I want to play down in the mix or for the loud stuff, I’m going for maximum impact.

Up Is Louder

Key Number 11:

I probably don’t have to include this but I will. Level is a major key to success. Loud sounds, along with silences, can really make an audience jump but only if they’re enlisted tastefully. Some sounds are meant to be heard but not necessarily felt so those things ought to come to a mix, in place, at the appropriate levels. In this regard, an SFX composition that is well premixed helps the mixer understand the intent behind the SFX design. It also means this is intent behind the design.

Level is really the fundamental key because if an SFX designer is listening properly and turning things up and down as they work, things like perspective, texture, performance and even pan all gel together to create a cohesive, creatively interesting composition.

Conclusion

By grasping the mechanisms through which writers, musicians and sound effects designers support the stories they are helping to tell, it is possible to make more creative, more focussed sonic landscapes and story elements. We must always remember that our place is to support the direction of the plot and the actors involved, so that our work, invisible though it may be, lays out the emotional and sonic architecture of the stories we are telling.

Photo by Vladislav Smigelski