Creating an ambience in my soundtracks are important as they set the locale of what is going on in the visual medium, and it particularly important to research as creating an ‘eerie feel’ to a scene for my animation client was one of her requirements. Investigating this is directly relevant to my Learning Outcomes 1 and 3.
Creating eerie ambience is quite similar to creating ghostly sounds, as it is sound that can’t be directly recognized or classified, like reversed, stretched (natural) sonic events and very high or very deeply pitched sounds. Uncontrolled rattling or rumbling sounds or very high ringing and suddenly dwelling and moving sounds can also be used. The easiest way to generate a dark, unsettling soundscape is to start with a dark drone. This could be a deep, LowPass-filtered Synth Sound or Roomtone, or a heavily pitch-shifted Ambience Sound (with at least 96kHz). It gets very interesting if that ambience has several sonic events in it, like a construction site ambience with hammering, drills and excavators. You can use several pitched and edited ambiences and layers, crossfade and mix them to get very unsettling textures. A suggested tool to use is iZotope’s Iris 2.
Reversing, pitch shifting and time shifting sounds make them instantly surreal, reverbs and delays to give it an otherworldly touch, especially if reverbs and delays are reversed. The reversed reverb effect can be achieved when you reverse a source (e.g. voice), apply some reverb to it (not too much and not too long) and reverse it all again. The result is the voice playing back normal again with a reversed reverb in front of each verb. Make it move with automation.
References
- Andersen, A. (2015). How To Create Horror Sound Effects That Are Truly Scary. [Online] Available at: https://www.asoundeffect.com/how-to-create-horror-sound-effects/. [Accessed: 20 April 2017].