A Brief History of Sound Effects
By Steve Lee for The Hollywood Sound Museum
Nobody knows who created the first sound effect.
It may have happened before there were theaters. Before there were written stories. Before there was even a word for “story.”
Imagine a group of people gathered in a cave thousands of years ago. One of them is describing an animal encountered earlier that day. Maybe there is a drawing of it on the wall.
Words — or whatever passed for words back then — aren’t quite doing the job.
So the storyteller growls.
Or roars.
Or pounds something against the cave floor.
And suddenly everyone listening can hear the animal too.
Pure speculation, of course. But human beings were listening long before they were recording. They had to. The sounds of animals, weather, running water, movement in the darkness — understanding the world by ear could be a matter of survival. Some of those responses remain remarkably deep inside us. A sudden sound can make us jump before we have had time to decide whether we should be frightened.
Eventually we discovered that those responses could be deliberately provoked.
A chant. A drum. A resonant bell. A voice echoing through an enclosed space.
Sound could announce something, summon people, change a mood, create awe — or suggest the presence of something that wasn’t actually there.
And once humans began telling stories for an audience, we started looking for better ways to do exactly that.
Making Thunder
The ancient Greeks and Romans understood theatrical sound effects.
One device sometimes called a bronteion was essentially a thunder machine. Various versions existed, but the principle was wonderfully simple: strike, roll or manipulate something that produces a tremendous rumbling sound and let the audience supply the storm.
The thing making the sound didn’t have to resemble thunder.
It only had to sound enough like thunder to make people believe it.
That principle has never gone away.
Medieval and Renaissance theaters developed their own tricks. Thunder sheets, drums, cannonballs rolled through troughs, machinery backstage. Shakespeare’s plays called for storms, battles, bells, trumpets, ghosts and supernatural apparitions.
The audience saw one thing.
Someone backstage made them hear another.
Sound effects had become part of the machinery of storytelling.
There was only one considerable problem.
Every sound disappeared the instant it was made.
Putting Sound in a Bottle
This is not intended to be a history of sound recording. That would be another article — and a very long one.
But the invention of recording changed the history of sound effects forever.
In the 1850s, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville developed the phonautograph, which could trace the vibrations of sound onto a surface. It couldn’t play them back. Scott had found a way to make sound visible.
More than a century later, some of those traces were digitally reconstructed and heard.
Then, in 1877, Thomas Edison and the people working with him at Menlo Park developed the first practical machine that could both record and reproduce sound. The famous early phonograph scratched vibrations into tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder. Edison devised the concept; machinist John Kruesi built the celebrated first machine.
Later inventors — including Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter — continued improving the technology, particularly with wax recording.
Later came magnetic recording — first on steel wire, and eventually tape — making recorded sound increasingly practical to preserve, copy and transport. Tape would also make it dramatically easier to edit.
Something extraordinary had happened.
For almost the entirety of human history, sound had been temporary.
We have ancient buildings. Paintings. Pottery. Written words. Tools.
But we cannot hear an ordinary street in ancient Rome. We cannot hear Shakespeare speak. We cannot stand in a medieval marketplace and simply listen.
Almost all of humanity’s acoustic history vanished as it happened.
Then, suddenly:
A sound didn’t have to disappear.
It could be kept.
And once you could keep sounds, you could begin doing all sorts of interesting things with them.
Sound at the Silent Movies
Movies were never really silent.
The film itself may not originally have carried a synchronized soundtrack, but theaters certainly weren’t quiet.
There might be a pianist. An orchestra. A theater organ. Percussionists inherited an arsenal of devices from vaudeville and live theater — bells, whistles, slapsticks, drums and all manner of ingenious contraptions.
Some theaters provided live sound effects along with the music.
A gun appeared on the screen.
Someone in the theater supplied the shot.
A horse galloped.
Someone supplied the hooves.
The picture was on the screen.
The soundtrack was in the room.
Radio: The Sound Effect Becomes a Profession
Radio changed everything again.
Now there was no picture at all.
If a character opened a door, the audience had to hear it.
If somebody walked across a room, the footsteps helped create the room.
A storm could exist entirely inside a loudspeaker.
By the 1920s and ’30s, radio sound-effects artists were developing increasingly sophisticated techniques and equipment. Ora Nichols became one of the great pioneers of the field. She and her husband Arthur Nichols helped establish a dedicated sound-effects department at CBS, and Ora became the first woman to head such a department at an American network.
Radio effects were performances.
Doors, footsteps, wind, gunshots, breaking glass, telephones, horses, trains.
And frequently the most convincing way to create a sound wasn’t the literal way.
You used whatever worked.
That ancient thunder-machine principle was alive and well.
But radio also created a market for professional sound-effects records — not novelty albums for the public, but working tools sold directly to broadcasters. Companies including Gennett, Major Records, Speedy Q, Silver Masque and Standard Radio issued libraries of effects on 78 rpm discs: trains, crowds, animals, gunshots, machinery, weather and almost anything else a radio drama might suddenly require.
A sound-effects artist could keep the records organized, cue the proper groove on a turntable and drop an effect into a live broadcast at exactly the right moment, sometimes combining recorded effects with sounds being performed in the studio.
For the first time, a radio station could have an entire acoustic world waiting on a shelf, ready to be played on command.
The Movies Learn to Listen
Film, meanwhile, was learning how to carry its own soundtrack.
Don Juan in 1926 featured a synchronized Vitaphone musical score and effects. A year later, The Jazz Singer famously added synchronized speech and singing to the equation.
And in 1928, a little animated short called Steamboat Willie made everyone believe a Mouse could talk.
Sound was no longer something supplied separately in the theater.
It was becoming part of the film.
That transfer was enormous. All the thinking that had previously been done by musicians, exhibitors, percussionists and live-effects performers now increasingly had to happen during the making of the movie itself.
At Universal, a former stuntman and jack-of-many-trades named Jack Foley became one of the people figuring out how.
Working on films including Show Boat, Foley and his colleagues performed footsteps and other synchronized sounds while watching the picture.
The idea was so useful that Foley’s name became the name of the process.
A Foley artist doesn’t merely record footsteps.
A Foley artist performs to the picture.
Building Monsters
Then sound editors began discovering something even more interesting.
Recorded sounds could be altered.
Murray Spivack was a drummer before becoming one of the pioneers of motion-picture sound effects. At RKO, he worked during the period when effects were moving from devices performed during production into the increasingly flexible world of postproduction.
And then came King Kong in 1933.
Kong obviously couldn’t be recorded.
So Spivack built him.
Animal recordings — including lions and tigers — were slowed, reversed, combined and manipulated. Spivack also contributed his own vocalizations.
None of those individual sounds was King Kong.
Together, they became King Kong.
This was a profound shift.
A sound effect no longer had to reproduce something that already existed.
It could create something that had never existed at all.
Drawing with Sound
Animation took that idea and ran away with it.
At Disney, Jimmy Macdonald brought the instincts of a percussionist to cartoon sound. He accumulated and constructed an extraordinary collection of devices for making sounds.
If the object necessary to produce a particular effect didn’t exist, Macdonald could simply build one.
Again: it didn’t matter what the device looked like.
It mattered what it sounded like.
At Warner Bros., Treg Brown took another wonderfully anarchic approach.
Brown’s genius was often in taking perfectly real recorded sounds and putting them where they had absolutely no logical business being.
A collision didn’t necessarily receive the realistic sound of a collision. A character being flattened, stretched, launched into the air or slammed into something might be accompanied by machinery, musical instruments, vehicles, household objects — or some completely unrelated recording whose juxtaposition made the gag infinitely funnier.
The sound didn’t describe reality.
It completed the joke.
Chuck Jones later summed up Brown’s particular genius beautifully: he never used an “appropriate” sound.
Literally appropriate, perhaps not.
Comically appropriate?
Almost always.
There are two very different questions a sound-effects editor can ask:
What actually makes this sound?
Or:
What sound makes this work?
That second question leads directly toward modern sound design.
The Library
As studios accumulated recordings, another essential tool appeared:
The sound-effects library.
Effects were stored on discs, optical film, magnetic film and eventually quarter-inch tape.
A door recorded for one movie could become a door in another. A gunshot could survive for decades. Horses, crowds, vehicles, animals, machinery and weather accumulated by the thousands.
Sometimes an especially distinctive scream might turn up more than once.
Libraries became more than storage.
They became vocabularies.
An editor who knew the library could search those recordings almost the way a writer searches for words.
And increasingly, sound editors could go out and add new words themselves.
Taking the Recorder Outside
Portable magnetic tape recording changed sound-effects collecting dramatically.
Machines such as the Nagra, developed by Stefan Kudelski, eventually made remarkably high-quality recording equipment practical enough to take into the field.
The recording studio was no longer the center of the universe.
The universe was.
Sound-effects recordists could chase trains, aircraft, animals, machinery, crowds, forests, rivers — anything they could reach with a recorder and microphone.
Natural sound could be deliberately preserved as well as exploited. Researchers and recordists began assembling vast collections of environments and wildlife, including work associated with institutions such as Cornell and people such as Bernie Krause.
In a sense they were beginning to rescue tiny pieces of that acoustic history humanity had always lost.
But professional equipment wasn’t the whole story.
Smaller consumer formats opened another door. Compact cassette recorders were hardly the last word in fidelity, but they were inexpensive, portable and accessible. For students and aspiring sound people, that mattered enormously.
You could carry one around, record whatever caught your ear and begin building a personal library long before you ever had access to professional equipment.
That was how a lot of us started.
By the late 1980s and ’90s, DAT — Digital Audio Tape — gave professional sound-effects recordists a compact digital recording format. Eventually solid-state handheld digital recorders largely displaced tape.
And the equipment kept shrinking.
Today a sound editor can carry a remarkably sophisticated recorder in one hand.
For that matter, almost everybody walks around with a recording device already in their pocket.
Pull out your phone.
Push a button.
Keep a sound.
Scott and Edison might have found that mildly impressive.
Sound You Could Take Home
Meanwhile, another evolution was taking place on the library shelf.
The professional effects records used by broadcasters had been working tools. But by the 1960s, sound effects were increasingly available to ordinary consumers as well.
Commercial sound-effects LPs offered trains, animals, vehicles, guns, storms, machinery and other collections for filmmakers, hobbyists, theatrical productions — or anybody who simply wanted a record full of interesting sounds.
Halloween albums became a genre unto themselves: screams, rattling chains, creaking doors, thunder, monsters and assorted supernatural unpleasantness ready to transform somebody’s living room into a haunted house.
For generations raised before enormous online sound libraries, these records offered something rather magical.
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A library of sounds could now live on your shelf.
The Sound of Nothing
Once sound could be recorded, synchronized and placed almost anywhere filmmakers wanted it, they discovered one of the most powerful sound effects imaginable.
Nothing.
Silence.
Before synchronized sound, silence wasn’t necessarily a creative decision. It was simply part of the technological condition of cinema.
Once sound existed on the soundtrack, not putting something there became a choice.
Filmmaker Robert Bresson put it memorably:
“The soundtrack invented silence.”
Silence can create tension, isolation, shock, awe.
And occasionally it can tell the truth.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick famously allows exterior sequences in the vacuum of space to occur without the explosions and roaring spacecraft that generations of science-fiction movies had trained audiences to expect.
Space has no atmosphere to carry ordinary sound.
So Kubrick gives us none of the expected exterior sound effects.
Contact used silence differently. Its extraordinary opening begins amid the accumulating broadcasts of Earth and travels outward until those human transmissions recede.
Eventually we are left with the immense quiet.
Sometimes the most powerful sound effect is the one you don’t use.
Sound Becomes Plastic
Magnetic recording made sounds increasingly easy to cut apart, reverse, slow down, speed up and combine.
Electronic technology expanded the possibilities further.
Louis and Bebe Barron created the extraordinary electronic tonalities of Forbidden Planet — so difficult to categorize at the time that the credit famously called them Electronic Tonalities rather than conventional music.
In Britain, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, founded in 1958, explored tape manipulation, oscillators and electronic techniques for radio and television.
The boundaries became increasingly fuzzy.
Was something a sound effect?
Music?
Electronic sound?
Atmosphere?
Sometimes the answer was simply:
Yes.
By the time Walter Murch was working on films such as Apocalypse Now, the term sound designer could describe something larger than editing individual effects.
The entire sonic experience of the movie — including the physical space around the audience — could be designed.
Making Room for Detail
Multichannel movie sound existed long before Dolby. Disney’s Fantasia experimented with directional sound in 1940, and magnetic multichannel formats appeared during the widescreen era of the 1950s.
But sophisticated multichannel exhibition was expensive and inconsistent.
Dolby changed the practical equation.
Beginning with its noise-reduction technology and continuing with Dolby Stereo in the mid-1970s, filmmakers gained a theatrical system capable of carrying clearer, wider-range sound and practical left-center-right-surround playback within the ordinary 35mm optical release format.
That mattered enormously to sound effects.
Tiny details could survive the trip to the theater.
Quiet sounds could remain quiet.
Powerful sounds could hit hard.
Individual elements could occupy space.
The soundtrack had room to breathe.
And then a galaxy far, far away changed the way we listened.
Creating Worlds
Ben Burtt approached Star Wars with a philosophy that, in retrospect, connects him to almost everyone we’ve met in this story.
He went looking for sounds.
Real sounds.
Then he gave them new identities.
Part of the lightsaber’s famous tone came from the motor of an old interlock projector. Electrical interference from a TV tube contributed another component.
Animal voices could become creatures.
Or spaceships.
Machinery, aircraft, motors, radio interference and human performance could be recorded, combined and transformed into an entire universe.
Burtt sometimes referred to the value of discovering sounds out of context — hearing something and realizing it could become something completely different.
But that instinct wasn’t entirely new.
The Greek technician making thunder understood it.
The vaudeville percussionist understood it.
Jimmy Macdonald understood it.
Treg Brown certainly understood it.
Murray Spivack understood it.
The tools had changed.
The trick hadn’t.
Find a sound. Change its context. Convince the audience.
Hearing the Unheard
Recording technology eventually allowed sound designers to listen in places ordinary ears couldn’t.
A contact microphone can retrieve vibration directly from an object rather than simply recording the air around it.
A hydrophone takes the microphone underwater.
Other technologies can detect vibrations and physical phenomena that human hearing alone cannot directly perceive.
Sound designers began finding entirely new raw material inside familiar objects and environments.
Even space presents an intriguing paradox.
There is no ordinary acoustic sound traveling through the vacuum.
Usually.
But spacecraft and scientific instruments can detect electromagnetic activity, plasma waves and other phenomena whose data can be shifted, translated or sonified into frequencies we can hear.
We learned that there is no sound in space.
Then we found ways of listening to it anyway.
The Digital Toolbox
Eventually the physical sound library began migrating into computers.
But there were some intermediate stops along the way.
Sound-effects collections that had once occupied shelves of records and tape increasingly appeared on CDs and CD-ROMs, putting large, cleanly organized libraries into a fraction of the physical space.
Then came hard drives.
Servers.
Online libraries and downloads.
Editing that once required grease pencils, razor blades and enormous lengths of film or tape could happen on a screen.
Sounds could be layered by the dozens — or hundreds.
Pitch, timing, frequency, dynamics and spatial position could be manipulated with extraordinary precision.
And yet the essential job remained strangely familiar.
Listen.
Choose.
Manipulate.
Perform.
Convince.
When Sounds Started Talking Back
Sound effects acquired another job as computers became part of everyday life.
They began communicating directly with us.
A click confirms an action.
A chime says something has arrived.
A warning tone says something has gone wrong.
Startup sounds, interface cues and audio logos can identify a product or company in a fraction of a second.
The sound isn’t accompanying the information.
The sound is the information.
That may seem far removed from theatrical thunder.
It isn’t.
Someone chooses a sound specifically because they want another human being to understand — or feel — something when they hear it.
The Audience Takes Control
Video games changed the relationship again.
In a movie, the editor knows exactly when the door will open.
In a game, the player decides when the door opens.
Early games such as Pong demonstrated how even tiny electronic sounds could define actions.
Space Invaders went further. Its accelerating pulse responded to the progress of the game itself, increasing tension as the invaders descended.
Sound was no longer merely synchronized.
It was interactive.
And game sound quickly evolved beyond electronic beeps and tones to incorporate actual recordings: character voices, sound effects and music.
Modern game audio can consist of enormous systems assembled from thousands of these sound files, often with multiple alternate versions that can be randomized or selected according to what is happening in the game. The result is a soundtrack responding constantly to what the player does.
The sound designer isn’t necessarily creating one soundtrack.
The designer is creating the rules by which a soundtrack creates itself.
And Here We Are
Sound effects are everywhere.
Movies.
Television.
Games.
Podcasts.
Theme parks.
Virtual reality.
Phones.
Cars.
Toys.
Museums.
Theater.
Apps.
We have microphones capable of capturing almost unimaginable detail.
Libraries containing millions of recordings.
Immersive systems capable of positioning sound almost anywhere around an audience.
Procedural systems capable of changing sound in real time.
And now generative artificial intelligence is beginning to create sound effects without necessarily starting from a conventional recording at all.
At the moment, the results vary considerably.
Where that technology eventually leads is anybody’s guess.
But that has been true at nearly every stop in this story.
We learned to make sounds.
Then to keep them.
Synchronize them.
Transform them.
Collect them.
Move them through space.
Use them to create things that never existed.
Use them to hear things we ordinarily couldn’t hear.
Make them react to us.
And now, perhaps, teach machines to make new ones.
But underneath all that technology is something wonderfully primitive.
Somewhere, thousands of years ago, somebody wanted to tell another person about something that wasn’t there.
Maybe it was an animal.
Maybe it was a storm.
Maybe it was something imaginary.
And at some point during the story, words weren’t quite enough.
So they made a sound.
And suddenly everyone could hear it too.
Keep Listening.
AI Assistance Disclosure: AI tools may have been used during the editorial process for research assistance, fact-checking, grammar, punctuation, and suggestions regarding wording and structure. All material was reviewed and approved by the author, who takes responsibility for the final text.
