Creating Sound Effects for an Immersive Audio Drama

Working in a non-visual medium presents an interesting challenge: How do you make an entire world come alive, when there's nothing to see?

Audio dramas and podcasts provide an exciting opportunity to explore sound on a deeper level. However, it also carries it's own set of unique problems:

1 - With no visuals, the audience relies on their ears only.

As a result, every sound effect needs to be interesting, feel realistic and sound natural.

2 - A lot more audio work is needed to build the story world

Therefore, sound designers have to create a significant amount of sound effects quickly, to fill in the blanks that image fills for film and television.

Overcoming challenges likes these takes time...a lot of it.

A Use Case: Making Realistic Sound Effects for a Robot Audio Drama

When working on Vaporware, a sci-fi audio drama with robot characters, Composer and Sound Designer David McKee faced these very problems:

"[Vaporware Main Characters] Eden or Poly aren't human, or even humanoid. As such, making them sound natural in a medium that has no visuals is tricky. I have to place each movement sound piece by piece manually to create movement that was natural and believable."

Instead, McKee set out to find ways to “animate” his characters more efficiently. As a result, he stumbled a tool which seemed to solve many of these issues:

"Krotos Studio Pro allows for intuitive manipulation of sounds. Not only that, but with the “Pro” version, you can create your own custom presets."

With Krotos Studio Pro, McKee was able to import his own sound effects and perform them in real time. The result? an easier workflow that empowered him to create the Dynamic, realistic robot sound effects he was looking for.

"With Krotos Studio Pro, I can map & trigger sounds...so I can fine tune things...WOW! This just made things a HECK of a lot easier!"

Enhance your own projects with Krotos Studio

Audio Drama's films, TV and games all benefit from a faster, easier, more dynamic sound effects workflow. Give Krotos Studio Pro a try and see if, like david, some of your day to day sound effects problems disappear, enabling you to carry on creating, without the hassle

_{David McKee is a music composer and sound designer from Cleveland Ohio. As well as working on Vaporware, he is an active streamer, content creator and composer.}