Sky: CotL Sound Effects + Ambience

Special thanks to Piper for recording and submitting these calls!

Too long; don't wanna read

• Pause between every action (everything makes a noise).

• Record in an area with minimal (or ideally, zero) background noise.

• Get rid of other players in the area if possible.

• Constant background noise (like the sound of wind) is easier to edit out than intermittent background noise (like the sound of birds).

• Include 5-10 seconds of "silence" at the start of your clip. Do not move or make additional noise.

• It is preferred if you turn in a video clip.

Each of these points is covered in more detail in the following paragraphs.

Pauses

When recording things like sound effects, but especially things like player calls, it makes things easier for me to pause between actions. Every action has some sort of sound effect which will be recorded, so leaving gaps of silence makes it easier for me to cut apart clips and get at the sounds I really want.

Waveforms like this are the easiest to work with. Something like this shows that there are little to no overlapping sound effects which I'll have to try to separate.

If you want an idea of how long I pause between actions, you can watch this video.

Getting rid of other players

This tip was given to me by a sound contributor. Other players pose the greatest obstacle to recording sounds since they're chaotic, noisy, and frequent certain places, reducing the amount of areas you can peacefully record in.

To get rid of other players, head to the area you want to record in and then disconnect your device from the Internet. I have been told that as long as you don't move around too much, you'll be able to record sounds by yourself. I assume this limitation applies to other things that need an Internet connection — so you can't teleport to other areas, obtain items, interact with player creations, and the like.

Background noise

Obviously it's ideal to record sound effects in an area with no noise, but for various reasons this may not be possible. Depending on the sound effect being recorded, it's possible to get away with a little bit of background noise.

To get rid of background noise, the tools I rely on are mainly a high pass filter, noise profiling, and some keyframe-based sound editing.

High pass filter

The high pass filter is very good at cleaning up noises with low frequency / quiet background noises — an example being skybgn-chimes001. Depending on the frequency of the recorded sound effect, a high pass filter can be used on clips with louder background noise, such as skybgn-birds001. The background noise in skybgn-birds001 is comparatively louder than the background noise in skybgn-chimes002, but because the chirping of the birds is quite high pitched, a high pass filter can still be used on it to isolate the sounds of the birds. A high pass filter generally won't work well on sound clips with sound effects whose background noises are of a higher or equal loudness.

Keyframe-based sound editing

For sound effects that are quite loud, you can get away with a little more background noise since its easier to cut away what is and isn't background noise. An example of this is skysfx-wingdrop002. This clip was recorded in the Aviary where there is a fair amount of wind everywhere. A high pass filter would have worked poorly on this clip, but because the sound effect is so loud, it was easier to cut out / blend away some of the background noise. It's almost like the loudness distracts from any background noise that would be in the clip. One should still be mindful. Ambience like wind is easier to dismiss / blend out because it's almost like static, but if the sound of birds chirping made it into the clip, I likely would have had to discard it.

Noise profiling

This is a relatively new method I've learned for minimizing background noise. My understanding of how it works is by feeding the audio program (in this case, Audacity) a clip of the ambient background noise in a recording, it can build a profile that reduces that noise while keeping other sounds relatively untouched. This method works best on clips with quiet background noise.

Home is the easiest area to access with minimal (but not zero) background noise, all you have to do is fly high up into the sky and place a prop. If you need to record somewhere else, I can probably work with clips with background noise of less than or equal volume to this clip.

For this method to work best, you should include a few seconds of silence at the beginning of your recording. This is also demonstrated in the clip linked right before. You only need to include around 5-10 seconds of silence.

This method might also work best if you record in an area with more "constant" background noises. For example, ambient wind and water noises might be better than ambient bird noises, since bird noises don't always play constantly.

Should I turn in an audio or video file?

When recording clips by myself, I am usually working with video clips and I find these easier to work with due to timing. For video clips, its easier for me to discern where a sound effect starts and stops using both the waveform and the video. For pure audio clips, discerning the beginning of a sound is easiest when the waveform is very clean, which is a rarity at times.

(Crab pulled from the Sky wiki)