Sound effect

A sound effect is a sound (excluding music, dialogue blip(s) or voice acting) made for use in a play, movie, game, or other broadcast production. Sound effects add to the realism of a production.

Four main types of sound effects include hard, Foley, background, and design.

• Hard sound effects sounds that are associated with an action or event but are not dependent on the performance of the sound such as car horns, gunshots and punches.
• Foley sound effects are sounds that are performed by a Foley artist, typically in sync with the action on screen. These actions would include footsteps, clothes movements and prop movements. Examples of events that might need Foley sound effects/Foley artists are: Horse galloping noises, footsteps, chewing noises.
• Background sound effects are ambiences that give an immediate ‘sound picture’ to the location of a scene. For example, crickets chirping can instantly give an interior shot the perception of nighttime. In the same respect, cheerful bird chirps can also indicate morning. When layered under a dialog track, these sounds can help fill in dead spots that can occur when cutting different takes together.
• Electronic Effects are synthetic sounds, like those produced by a keyboard or sounds that are heavily processed with audio plug-ins. They can be abstract or literal and can be used to give sonic character to titles and graphics. Laser blasts, spaceship hums and other science fiction sound effects would also fall in to this category.
• Sound design effects are sounds that are artificially created, typically by a sound designer. They help give sound to unreal objects, such as werewolves or electrical bolts shooting out of the hand of an evil sorcerer. They are often used to give a heightened sense of realism to a sound. These effects can also be necessary to create when the real sound is unavailable or too difficult to record, such as the sound of the Titanic sinking.