Finding Sounds In Humble Places

I have a terribly old fridge with a busted light that probably chews up more than its fair share of power, but its unexpected worth lies in the freezer.  Specifically, the lack of 'frost free' capabilities.

After six months without defrosting, I have a winter sound wonderland ready for recording in my kitchen.  Northern counterparts might scoff, but it's extremely difficult to get snow or ice sounds in Australia, even in the dead of winter.  It's simply not economically feasible to cart yourself and a recording rig up to a ski resort in the remote reaches of Victoria and New South Wales - or waiting until Winter to do it.

This is typically what sound libraries are for - the sounds you can't go record yourself.  And certainly sound libraries do a good job of covering a wide variety of snow types with footsteps, but we've all heard those sounds a hundred times, and even if you dress them up differently, in the end you're just skinning the same cat in a hundred different ways.  And while the standard footsteps and snow sports are covered fairly well, they can't cover everything.  Human footsteps, certainly - what about a fox?  Or a horse?  A Yeti?  Or the sound of a hand brushing away frost from a frozen metal nameplate?  And even if you can create these sounds by hodge-podging something that sounds right out of what you have, you'll often wind up turning that nice clean high-end crackle we associate with ice and frost into a mash of white noise.

This is where the freezer came in.  After a bit of experimentation with microphone placement, I discovered stabbing a butter knife into a centimetre of hard frost can sound just a convincing as a stock ice pick recording.  Maybe even better, in some cases.  In such a small space, you can't get particularly large scrapes and impacts, but I came away with some lovely high end ingredients to layer on top of those staid library ice sounds, and a good collection of smaller icy foley that work well on their own.

Moments of discovery like these, the sound equivalent of smoke and mirrors, are some of the most rewarding and satisfying for a sound designer.  It reminds me of back when I was a kid at Movie World, and seeing the foley artists running around a sound stage, occasionally using the most unexpected of surfaces to create the desired effect.