Phil Peers-Smallwood · Lead Sound Designer

Taking all our secrets. Bob, do you want to talk about some dialogue design stuff, or I can approach it from the sound effects side?

Bob Rissolo · Lead Dialogue Designer

I mean, the idea behind it in general is finding sounds. You can take a real Earth animal, or even use your human voice, to create a base of something, and then layering sounds and processes and working with that to create something new is kind of the key there. But you don't have to start with a real animal source to get a real feeling of a being. It's just a matter of how that sound interacts, or how you can play with that sound to make it sound like a living being. And that's what's really special about sound design for creatures, creature design in general. So it can really come from any kind of source. It's just about what's the palette that you're looking for, or what's the sound, or what's their function, that really sets you up with what your source is.

Phil Peers-Smallwood · Lead Sound Designer

Yeah, you can do a lot. So one technique that's used for dinosaurs is birds and stuff: you slow them right down. So if you record at a high enough sample rate, say 192 kilohertz, you can really slow that down and you don't lose fidelity of the information. So you can take a tweet tweet from a bird and pitch it right down to make it sound like a behemoth, like a stegosaurus or something. But what's on the market now is certain microphones that can record frequencies way above what the human ear can perceive. We can hear up to about 20,000 hertz, but there are microphones that can record up to 90,000, 100,000. So it's audio content that we can't even perceive. Now, if you record at 192,000 and above the 20k range, so you're recording at, say, 100k, and then you pitch all that stuff down, you're moving stuff that is unperceivable to the human ear into the audible range. And it's also high fidelity because of the sample rate. So you could take a bird recording, a walrus, a horse, and you could pitch it down, and you hear all this hidden content that is just out there in the world, but you just can't perceive it. So you can draw upon that for sure. And then the other thing we can do for creature design is use plugins that can morph sounds together. So you can get the sound of one thing and take its impulse, its dynamics, its frequency content, and have that morph with a completely unrelated sound. You can get a dolphin and a chainsaw, so you can make a chainsaw that has all the articulation of a dolphin call, or vice versa. So that's a good technique to employ. Or just, as Bob said, making vowel sounds, sounds of the vocal tract. There's loads of formant filters out there that you can make things sound like "ooh, ah, ee, ah, ooh". That really grounds sounds in some kind of creature, because it's all relatable, right? All these vowel formants that we all make. And that's a trick that we do for wind. If you want wind to sound creepy or ominous, you'd put an element through a formant filter. So as you walk past a door, you go, that's creepy, not going in there. No, thank you. But yeah, there's loads of techniques we can do. Creature design is really fun, and you'll come up with some absolutely ridiculous results, and that's part of the fun. So yeah, looking forward to that.