Using foley or effects

A good thing to realise about sound effects is that things are rarely what they are. The wings of a bird flapping might be a person frantically flapping a pair of leather gloves in front of a microphone. It makes sense if you think about it. Imagine how difficult it would be to stay close to a flying bird with a microphone while getting a recording not spoiled by wind noise, or getting a bird to stay in place while flapping its wings in the studio.

Also as humans we are very bad at defining what a sound is without its context. A ticking sound can be interpreted as a clock when used as a single, spaced tick. When used in multitudes with a random timing the exact same sound becomes rain. When singular but slightly erratic it might become an insect or somebody neurotically tapping a finger nail. The exact same principle that works for us in film, where we believe the sound of an egg frying is rain when we hear it while seeing drizzly weather, works against us when sound is used purely as audio, and more importantly: without context.

When using sound effects in your soundwalk ask yourself what message the sound effect is supposed to convey. And if the sound you recorded or choose is indeed the right one. Sometimes you will find that there is nothing wrong with the sound itself but instead of going into the individual sound design process you need to manipulate the context for the reason just explained. So a sound effect might need to be part of a series of effects in order to be understood. A reference in the spoken word might be needed. Or you might choose another sound after all which is not literally what you want to be understood but which triggers an association with it.

When diving into the world of sound effects you might come across the term ‘foley’. This is a concept from film sound, where specific sounds like footsteps are performed live to the recorded image. This does not mean the foley artist is present at every screening of a film. It does mean that in the studio the foley artist might for example perform a series of footsteps while watching the footage of the actor walking. So the synchronicity comes from a foley artist actually performing in sync with the sound of their feet being recorded rather than pulling a footstep sound effect from a library and editing the timing of that. Even apart from the sync the foley process makes the sound effect unique and gives a lot of possibilities to tailor it exactly to what is seen on screen.

For those unfamiliar with film sound: you might wonder why the footsteps need to be added in the first place. Film sets can be very noisy environments, and camera angles and framing choices often make it impossible to get a microphone close enough to pick up every sound you want. The sound recording process for film is also often very much aimed at getting the dialogue recorded, and not so much the rest of the world. If you are very lucky the sound recordist might find time to get a bit of ‘silent’ roomtone (the background noise in a ‘silent’ room) from a location, but certainly no close up recordings of all props et cetera. For that reason in many films almost every sound is added afterwards in the post-production process. One side of this is thus technical, another aspect of doing it in post-production is that it suddenly gives the possibility to tailor every sound to what you want to tell with it.

In a soundwalk there is no image to sync to, so in that sense foley might not seem particularly relevant. But making your own sound effects by performing them can still be an interesting way of creating them compared to ‘only’ editing. Of course with sounds that are easily performed like footsteps, breathing, et cetera this might even be much faster than finding a sound that is exactly right from a library. Also there is a lot to learn from sound design for film in terms of creating coherent sonic worlds- and in terms of telling a story with elements which at first glance seem very documentary.