The Sound of a Place That Doesn't Exist
Short answer: You can't record a place that isn't real, so you have to decide what it sounds like. What helped me was an old idea about real places. Every place has a background you stop noticing, events that stand out, and one sound that belongs only to it. I built three made-up worlds this way, and most of the work turned out to be deciding what to leave out.
Nothing to go and listen to
With a real forest you can walk in and listen. With "an ocean, deep and calm, that must not distract you from work" there is nowhere to go. I started by guessing.
An idea I found afterwards
The word "soundscape" was coined by a city planner, Michael Southworth, in 1967. It was made popular by R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer who spent years studying how places sound. That's from Wikipedia. Schafer split the sound of a place into three parts.
- Keynote sounds. The background you don't consciously hear: wind, water, or traffic in a city.
- Sound signals. The foreground sounds you do notice: bells, whistles, horns.
- Soundmark. In Wikipedia's words, "a sound which is unique to an area". It's the sound version of a landmark.
I hadn't read any of this when I built the app. When I did, my own layers dropped into his three boxes.
- Background. Circles make soft washes and bars make a low drone. They are steady and easy to stop noticing.
- Events. Triangles and diamonds fire once when they touch another shape. A call, a strike, a tick.
- The one sound. Ocean has whale calls and sonar pings. Forest has temple bells and singing bowls. Space has radio static, whistles and a long echo that drifts.
Squares, which carry the harmony, sit somewhere between background and event.
Most of the design is what you leave out
I expected a world to be defined by what I put in. It was the other way round.
- Ocean stays mostly low and slow.
- Forest has bells, but without the hard knock of a real strike.
- Space has no pulse, no home note, and none of the interval that makes Forest sound like bells. That interval is in a fifth plus a soft onset.
Space taught me this. For a long time it kept sounding like Forest again, which I wrote about in can filtered noise have a pitch. Adding new sounds didn't fix it. Taking things away did.
How do I know when it's right?
There is no recording to compare against, so I can't check whether a world is accurate. These are the questions I ask in its place.
- With my eyes shut, can I tell which world is on within a few seconds?
- After an hour, is anything getting on my nerves? That's the subject of how long you can listen before it becomes noise.
- Does anything make me look up from my work? If it does, it is too loud, too sharp or too tuneful.
None of these tests whether the place is true. A made-up place can't be true. It can only agree with itself, and that turned out to be enough.
Sources
Try it: Open Ambient Sound Online and listen to Ocean, which is free. See if you can pick out the background, the events and the one sound that belongs only there.
Open Ocean, free