A COLLABORATIVE POST BY PETER KAY
SOUND EFFECTS EDITOR, BOOM BOX POST
Sound Particles is a 3D audio software that uses particles. Each particle corresponds to a 3D audio object which is then captured using a virtual microphone. This allows for very interesting and creative sound design as we can place the audio source anywhere in a 3D virtual space. Instead of working on a linear workflow, Sound Particles allows us to visualize and place each sound in a 3D space. Check out a few cool designs we did below!
When you open up an empty project in Sound Particles, you are introduced to two different views that can be customized to show a 3D view of the particles that you create. Below the views is a time editor line where we can create tracks such as particle, audio, microphone and video tracks. Sound Particles also allows you to import video files as well.
To create particles, you first need to create a particle group track or particle emitter track. A particle group track is a set number particles that are in a space. A particle emitter track creates particles over time. For this sample, I decided to create a particle group track with 200 particles. I chose some simple ice cracking sounds. You can set the starting point on the 3D plane and set where the particles are created. For example, if you choose a sphere shape, then all of the particles are created inside the sphere. You can also determine how big you want the shape to be by setting parameters for the main radius. I set the radius to 30 meters because I wanted the cracking sounds to fill out the whole space. To add some movement, you can set parameters for movement modifiers. This way you can create the shape of your particle group as you wish.
To give some randomness to the sounds that are played, there are five audio modifiers that you can customize: gain, delay, EQ, granular, time/pitch. You can change the random settings of the modifiers as well.
By adding movement and audio modifiers, you can get interesting results. You can see the particles move in real time by looking at the viewer window. The little dots represent each 3D sound source.
Below is one of the original ice cracking sounds that was imported into the particle group. The next sound is the rendered result.
You can also automate the parameters so the sounds can change over time. I added some chimes and automated the emitter rate so as time passes, there are more and more chime particles that are added to the space.
The result sounds are below:
Next, I added a particle emitter group with water splashes that was programmed to rotate around the microphone. This resulted in sounding like waves that we could hear around!
Lastly, I wanted to add some whooshes to a particle group to create a vortex of some sort.
You can render the scene and have it recorded using a virtual microphone. They can be mono, stereo, ambisonics, and multichannel. Check out the render all together: