If you're working on a video game or another multimedia project, sooner or later you'll need sounds to enrich the experience. The Web offers many free and unrestricted resources that don't bring copyright conflicts, but it's never a bad idea to experiment and try to create your own sounds. If you're interested, start by downloading a copy of the small tool LabChirp, and play with its parameters until you find the ideal effect, or press the randomizer button and let luck decide.
Many sound experts have revealed that their 'sources' are not very sophisticated. In July of this year we studied creating sounds for zombie movies, and the basis comes down to meat, fruit, or wet towels. Another case frequently cited is that of legendary Ben Burtt, who used television interference and old projector motors to shape the lightsabers in Star Wars.
Even the most casual noise can be transformed into an exemplary sound, as long as it is processed and applied correctly. However, that doesn't mean you'll find the effect of a lifetime inside a refrigerator or a malfunctioning lawnmower. Sometimes, you must create the sound you need by other means, including artificial generation via computer. That's when LabChirp comes in.
How to create your own sounds with LabChirp
LabChirp is a program that lets you create all kinds of sounds for videos, games, music, and much more. The official site offers an online manual, but the interface is very intuitive. LabChirp supports up to eight channels, combining frequencies, volume, amplitude, and waveform.
The program can also apply up to six global effects reaching all channels (or not, depending on what you want), but the best options are mutation and the randomizer.
With the randomizer we can press the 'Randomize!' button until we find a good sound, or activate one of the presets and 'steer' the final results to a certain extent. Mutation, on the other hand, modifies parameters of an already established sound, extending its influence to one or all channels.
LabChirp is completely free (donationware, really), and its only major requirement is version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, but everything seems to indicate that Linux users will be able to use Mono as a replacement. Its most recent version was released at the end of 2019, and it works very well on all Windows distributions.
