Celestial Sounds: Sound Effects

Tiger Collins
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Celestial Sounds is a project where sound acts as a mechanic or alongside said mechanic. Although I am not creating the soundtracks myself, the sound effects for wind and rain as well as walking had to be made.

Using Adobe Premier Pro CS6, I made the following sounds;

Walking

I had to create a sound that was a once off noise that lasts roughly 1 second with no white noise and sounded as if an object hit dropped onto a footpath. Using freesound.org, I looked for a sound similar to that of tapping cement. I could only find this sound that looped and went on for too long.

To the left is the time of the entire audio file. I cut the entire audio file so that the first audible foot step was all the was left. I keyframed the volume so that it would start off loud and quickly drop to 50% in volume and then fade out. I also changed the following to try and make the footstep sound ‘heavier’ as the player model looks more masculine than feminine.

  • Treble: Boost 11.2dB
  • Panner: 3.0

The final result was this. The sound plays every time the player collider collides with the ground and each time it plays its pitch is randomly between .8 and 1.2, doing this stops the sound from being too repetitive.

Wind

The second soundtrack is one that correlates with a wind mechanic. It needs a sound effect that is continuous (loops) and sounds like gale force winds blowing as well as trees rustling every so often.

Getting original audio effects from freesound.org, I chose a 2 minute wind blowing sound. Using the default Premier Pro Sound Modifiers, I used the bass effect and changed it to -24. Doing this was to lower the dominance of the sound so it wouldn’t compete with the second puzzle soundtrack. On top of this, in a new layer I got a sound of leaves rustling, I changed their volume from 0dB down to -22dB so that it’d be in the background of the wind blowing. On top of that, I added the Adobe Premier Pro Sound Effect — Denoiser — the denoiser, can remove static and white noise to a degree, this removed the background static from the wind and other quiet noises in the leaf rustling sound effect.

The final effect was this. In Celestial Sounds, using the Unity sound source feature, I have turned the volume down in the inspector. I used Unity to do this instead of premier pro as I can change the volume easily within Unity without having to render every sound again as a .wav and then reimport it into the project.

Rain

Rain is the third sound track that correlates with a puzzle mechanic. It had to sound like rain and extra background noises would be a bonus. The sound had to loop, and the original had to be royalty free. So I used freesound.org to find audio once again.

Using keyframes, I made sure the audio started and ended at -20dB and within a second of that, it would be 0dB. Doing this allowed to audio to loop and sound like the rain merely dipping in volume as it did a few times in the original sound effect. I also added white noise with a bass boost of 5dB, doing this made the rain sound more constant. As an extra, I went through and found audio of thunder. I used the bass boost a changed it to -3dB so that it wouldn’t be so dominant in comparison to the rain and I also lowered its volume down to -10dB. Using keyframes, I faded the thunder from 0db down to -100dB and doing this made the thunder sound distant and it stopped the sound from ending abruptly. The final sound is here.

Button Press

I wanted every button press to be a popping sound that doesn’t loop and can be made by myself. Using Adobe Premier Pro, I chose the audio channel, changed it from read to write, pressed the R button in the Audio Mixer, select the red circle at the button of the audio mixer and then press player — doing this allowed me to record audio with my microphone and I made 3 different sounds.

I originally made a popping sound with my mouth and I was open to using tapping sounds of a glass and a frisbee instead. However, I decided to stick with the popping sound as it was the most audible with the equipment that I had for recording.

On the entire audio recording, I cut everything out so it was just the popping noise and made sure the clip started as the audio level raised, doing this was to avoid delays between clicking and the noise instantiating in Unity. As there was a lot of static, I had to use the Denoiser to change the Reduction down to -20dB and the offset to 10dB, and once I did this, there was no more white noise or static. The final audio clip is here.

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