Transform Random Noises Into Atmospheric Instruments

Noises To Voices

Today, I captured the mechanical noise generated by a free plugin, Vinyl, by iZotope. I turned it into an atmospheric Kontakt instrument that can suit many styles of music, film scores, and video games. The most significant process is filtering. Since the raw material is so noisy, you can subtract a lot of content without weakening the sound, and with a few resonant bands, you have a tone. Furthermore, this processing often leads to vocal-sounding timbres because it emulates characteristic resonances called formants in the vocal tract.

~ Raw Material

~Distant Choir

~ Dark Ambiance

The Process

The first thing I did was load an instance of Vinyl onto the Master. The "Noise" parameters of the plugin generate noise constantly, even when playback is stopped. So, all you have to do to capture the sound is open the Lumit freeze dialogue and freeze any portion of the master track to a new track. I tuned the noise parameters to a mix that I liked and captured it for 8 bars (the "Raw Material" above).

1. Stretch, Pitch, Gain, Fades.

Secondly, I stretched those eight bars of noise into 16 bars of noise. Essentially, the sample plays at half the speed now. I also transposed the sample's pitch down a 5th (-7 semitones) and added about 20 dB of gain. This is one process in sound design where a higher noise floor is better. This is because it prevents the sound from losing power after filtering and gives you more possible tones to emphasize.

~ With DSP

2. EQ, Reverb, Imaging

As you may have guessed, FX is pretty necessary here. Most of what you're hearing in the final product is the results of the FX - as if they were generating the sound. Using the parametric filters, I used the Lumit EQ to drop the low shelf a little and emphasize some harmonic tones. This can be done by ear. Or, if you know the fundamental frequency of the sample, you can multiply that by whole numbers to find the location of harmonic content. You will need at least 7 seconds of decay on the reverb to emulate a convincingly large space. Accordingly, this effect will be applied to the sample. I chose to use the Valhalla Room. It is a great-sounding, easy-to-use, and affordable plugin. I also used the S1 Imager from Waves on a parallel track.

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