Honours Project Development: Death/Fail Sound

For Fail/Death I wanted to have electric shock effect, but I was not able to create Particle Effect that would look like it. I used Particle Effect from free asset pack from Paragon Game and I modified it to my liking with my next to none knowledge about creating Particle Effects. It’s a bit like electric shock effect.

I took a short video of this effect and I was working on sound that can match visuals. For this task I used Induction Coil Pick-up Microphone - which record inductance of electromagnetic waves that are generated by coils with magnet wires:

https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk/coil-pick-ups.php - to record sound of electricity. I recorded two signal sources: AC power from electrical outlet powering most of my studio equipment:

and Water Boiler:

Recorded electric current is buzzy mid-hi/hi frequency range sound that most of us would recognize as ‘electricity sound’. Water boiler is a bit different and it’s like square wave buzz. I was moving microphone rapidly in different directions to give impression of movement of electrical surges. Actually, every electricity source that I tried at home have a different sound. Chargers make for example a lot of sound like filtered white noise.

Both recordings were edited and matched to video timing. Water boiler has been doubled where a copy has additional frequency shifter effect on it to alter the timbre. All three sound have tremolo effect with randomized LFO wave to add even more movement:

In similar fashion auto-pan effect was used with also randomised fast LFO. Together the three layers created rapid electric sound.

To match visual effect of wavy big rings another layer was created: synthesized (phase modulation) sound with tremolo. For the impact ‘kick drum’ sound was synthesized from sine wave and very fast pitch amplitude. Then I decided to add more high frequencies to push impact sound even more and from previous sound I created high frequency oriented ‘zap’ sound. Something was still missing. I ended up with female choir staccato playing Bbm6 (Minor 6th) chord multiplied by three which gives ominous sound. Everything has been soaked in huge hall reverb.

Final project: