How do you create audio for things that humanity has never heard before?
TL;DRAlien sounds come from experimenting with instruments, synthesizers and glitchy recordings, such as squishy dog food and vegetable sounds, then manipulating them and syncing them to the animation.
It's mostly playing with the different instruments that you have. I like creating glitchy sounds, and that's really what makes things sound not realistic. So you can play with synthesizers, you can play with different tools. One of the ways I created some sounds for the Xi'an Scout was, since they wanted it to be organic, glitchy kinds of sounds, I just recorded dog food, for example, and vegetables and things like that. It makes really squishy sounds.
So obviously dog food doesn't make a sound of its own. You're just pouring it out of a can, sloshing it back and forth.
Yes, exactly. And then from there, it was just a matter of playing with the different tools that we have. And again, it's a matter of creating an entire library of sounds that you recorded and manipulated. And after that, it's a matter of doing a cut and paste and making sure that it syncs with the actual animation.