How it's made: Sound effects

Sound technician kicking in, this post is going to explain how the sound effects are created in Twelve

Sound effects are created using a base sound, usually a weird sound coming from someone's mouth, and adding onto it audio effects such as flangers, phasers and many more. The raw sound is imported into Ableton Live 9 and then those effects are added and tweaked until a desirable game-like sound effect is created. Finally, the sound effect is exported into a .wav file and sent to the code monkey.

Here’s an example:

I will attempt the make a laser sound effect. Keeping that in mind, I record a sound that very roughly resembles the sound a sci-fi laser might produce.

This does not sound very much like a video game quality sound effect. To change this, I add a Frequency Shifter with a low frequency oscillator. This allows me to shift the frequency down to 68 Hz and add a square wave oscillator at a rate of 1/16 bpm. In addition to the Frequency Shifter, I add a phaser and reverb to the sound, which makes the laser sound more lively. Since this is going to be a low frequency laser sound, I add an equalizer and filter off the high frequency noise and clean out the sound. Finally, I add a compressor to amplify the sound.

Basically my role is to make funny sounds with my mouth until someone approves of it. Keep an eye out for a future post where I explain how the soundtracks are produced.

-Sami