When sound effects are better than the real thing

Abstract

Sound effects technicians (‘‘Foley Artists’’) have long exploited the fact that two physically different events can produce perceptually similar sounds, such as squeezing a box of cornstarch to imitate footsteps in the snow. Although some sound effects succeed because they produce acoustic waveforms nearly identical to the sounds they are imitating (their targets), in other cases there are obvious acoustic differences between sound effects and their targets. Those differences may provide information about which acoustic features are essential, and which are extraneous, for auditory recognition of an event. To address this question, twelve pairs of sound effects and their associated target events were recorded. Listeners attempted to identify each sound as it was presented over headphones. Next, the listeners were informed of the target sound (e.g., footsteps in the snow) and were asked to rate the sound’s realism. The sound effects were sometimes judged as more realistic than recordings of the target events. Acoustic differences between the waveforms of the most realistic sound effects and their targets were interpreted in terms of psychoacoustic principles.