Does a falling tree in a forest make a sound if no one is there to hear it? How does a single hand clap sound? What about magically placed hardwood flooring?
Sound designers wrestle with these types of scenarios on a regular basis. How do you create a sound for something that doesn’t exist in the real world but that has real world properties?
In the Hurricane Builders’ spots we did recently, we had such a task before us. The spot below was shot MOS(without sound). We had a blank, silent slate and had to create all of the sound you hear.
For the hardwood floor shots, we tried using wooden planks being locked in place, but it just wasn’t conveying effectively. We instead went in a more conceptual direction and used a mix of 2 inch wooden blocks dumped out of a cardboard box and empty wooden drawers opening and closing. A pitch bend here and a dash of reverb there and we had an effect that felt more in keeping with sentiment of the scene.
We tried a similar approach on other elements but it just didn’t work. We designed a really cool (cutting-room floor victim #3) nail suction effect using a reversed soda bottle fizzing and a Zippo lighter click. While it sounded neat, it just didn’t read well enough, so we went in a more realistic direction and used a nail gun and suppressed it down into the mix.
So to answer the age old riddle, a tree falling in the forest does make a sound- and it sounds like one hand clapping.