BLOG 7 : designing foley and soundscape  

For this project I decided to design foley and soundscape elements in the DAW rather than using field recordings. My project has a sci-fi aesthetic with dark themes and moods, which is why I wanted to start by designing some wind and rain sound which was straight forward as it only required me to process pink and white noise to my liking , it started to get more complicated when I was designing thunder sounds, I started by opening serum and selected the paper bag noise in the noise oscillator. Then I put a low pass filter on the noise and used a LFO to modulate the noise gain. I used asymmetric distortion and a huge reverb and slight delay which gave me the sound I was looking for. Now I needed to design some bird sounds, I started with a sine wave and used a low frequency oscillator (LFO) to modulate its level. The next step was to introduce randomness to the bird sound. Just listening to the environment around me it is obvious that birds do not chirp at the same rate, pitch, velocity etc. so I used Ableton’s chance parameter and set it to 50% while using a midi tool call random to introduce some more random. To introduce even more randomness, I used another LFO to modulate the rate of the LFO that is modulating the sine wave. And lastly I created some metal background sounds, sounds that you would hear in everyday life but just do not notice it, these sounds where also created with white noise but heavily distorted and I added a delay with feedback high and the time low to give it the metallic sound I wanted. These elements add depth and character to a track and helps build the world I am trying to portray.