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New Year's Noise Makers

© Chris Mindel

A few months ago, I accepted a job to design sound for a small professional children’s theatre. I thought this would be a simple task, as it couldn’t be that difficult to find sound effects. I was wrong! But, in finalizing the sound design, I learned an incredible amount. And I would like to share my experiences with you.

The musical I was designing sound for was the original version of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale. A young girl ventures to save her prince (when she met him, he was a bear) from trolls, meeting the four winds along the way. This was my first real sound designing gig, and I thought it would be a piece of cake. With the help of a great director (and my best friend, who was playing the brave young girl) this job might have looked like a piece of cake on the outside. But inside, I was losing sleep as the show’s opening approached.

Many of the sound effects I needed were easy to find on sound effect CDs: thunder, storms, and a blizzard. But others proved more difficult. Each wind required a different wind sound. For the harshest wind, the blizzard worked. For the wind slightly calmer than that, I bought a CD that had one 52-minute track of “wind before the storm.” I listened to the entire thing, isolating an appropriate two minutes worth. The wind below that, the director requested (after many unsuccessful sounds I presented) wind chimes. I borrowed my parents’ wind chimes, took them back to my apartment, and recorded two minutes worth. For the lightest wind, crickets were desired. I made a slight two minute mix of crickets and sparrows. One paragraph to write about, but two months of worrying over.

Another sound that proved troublesome was the sound of someone knocking on the front door. I pounded on everything I could think of, but nothing sounded right. The final thing I tried (about a week before the show opened) was one of the carpeted risers at the theatre. Perfect!

Which leads me to my main point. In theatre productions, movies, and TV, many of the sounds you hear for things are not what they seem to be. No one would have guessed that the front door I recorded was really a riser. Another example is one of the podracers from Star Wars Episode 1. The engine sound was created by moving an electric razor in a metal bowl. This (in movies and TV) art of recreating sounds is called foley work. The microphones used in film and television to record the actors, normally only pick up their voices. Every other sound you here has been recreated in a foley studio, perhaps miles away.

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