Sound Editor/Maker

[stephb7]

Blender is a tool to create graphical content.  What would be the counterpart for creating audio content?

I can find some tools to manipulate existing music/sounds, such as Audacity.  But what tools are available for making sounds, such as footsteps, doors opening/closing, laser guns, etc.  And just as importantly, where can I read tutorials explaining the process of making sounds.  I'm a programmer at heart, but I also want to make some sound effects.

[mark]

You can't "create" a sound for e.g. doorclosing from nothing. You eiher must record it or code the soundfiles. Since no one codes the waves of soundfiles you have to record them.

[stephb7]

Makes sense for "real" sounds.  And I'm guessing that for "made-up" sounds (laser gun) you would use an existing recorded sound and modify it.  I'm a programmer at heart, not an artist.  My initial idea was to use "code" to make sounds.

[deckerego]

Pez dispensers work well for gun reloading. Slapping network cables against a file cabnet make for some good rifle sounds. Getting some corrugated piping against tile makes for some nice laser sounds.

It's basically a lot like building textures - get an image of something, then distort it until it feels new.

[stephb7]

This will not immediately seem relevant.

I finished watching a "Gnomon Workshop" DVD on using fluid effects to generate explosion effects in Maya.  The basic concepts was that you place effects emittors and manipulate "functions" at various time indexes.  For example you could manipulate the Y position of the effects such that it rises, modify the turbulance effects such that it creates swirls of smoke that roll over each other, manipulate colors such that initially, when the explosion has a lot of heat, the explosion appears a bright yellow and over time moves into reds and then blacks as it cools down.  Throughout the process the concept is that you modify settings at various times in order to produce the flow of graphics.  This influences how I perceive the crafting of sounds.

I've fiddled a little in Audacity, made 3 "plucks" (plucking a guitar string), overlapped them, applied effects at various time ranges and ended up with a nice effects (the first I ever made, so it was nice to me but would have been awful to a professional).  There's a myriad of effect plug-ins available, and new ones can be programmed in the Nyquist language.

My first attempt jumbled everything on top of the other, making it impossible to go to a time range and edit the parameters of the effect I applied.  Maybe the solution is to apply the effect to different tracks and Audacity would merge all the tracks.

There's a list of sound/audio editors on sourceforge.net:  http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=120&discrim=219.  That list has been limited to Windows software but if you remove the &discrim=219 at the end of the line you'll have access to Linux software as well.

[Sebek]

Hi
There's good sound synthesizer. It's called Buzz.
http://www.buzzmachines.com

This software works on Windows, but with a little work you can force it to work under Wine on most linux distros.
Tutorial how to use this software on linux:
http://web.hibo.no/~mva/viewreview.php?id=706

Whole directory structure for Wine (in case you don't want to read tutorial ):
http://www.galez.org/buzz/

Buzz is free software.

Sorry for my english

[Sanne]

For Linux users I'd like to recommend Om for sound synthesis. It's a relatively young project but very much usable already. Om is a host for LADSPA (effects) and DSSI (intruments) plugins and enables one not only to make music, but would also be usable for making synthetic sounds of all kinds.

There are also much more sound synthesis programs for Linux (and, to some degree, also for Windows). Most of them can be found at the very comprehensive Linux audio pages in the section 'Software Synthesis & Music Composition'. Most known are probably Csound, Pure Data, and SuperCollider, which feature a kind of music synthesis scripting language, in Pure Data's case even graphical.

Have fun exploring
Sanne

[p00f]

Hi!

Audacity is an awesome sound editor!

it is free and works on most OS platforms (If you run linux you might already have it with your distro)

years ago I purchased Cooledit 2000.... audacity has more features and is free!!

be sure to get the LAME libraries if you plan on recording MP3....