Here, late at night in the Tooting sound laboratory, Dan searches for the ideal means of creating the sound of splashing in puddles after a hard day in the studio.
The art of Foley has fascinated me ever since I met an entertainer on a cruise ship whose day-job was making the sound of beer being poured into glasses for TV adverts. Until I met him, I had always assumed that you’d just pour beer into a glass, but no, in fact this doesn’t sound like beer at all. After years of this, the poor guy couldn’t speak normally any more; worse still, his act bombed, so to speak, when he decided to finish his show to the mainly American passengers with a re-enactment of Pearl Harbour using only his mouth and a microphone.
It was a revelation to me that the art of sounding real was to use anything but the actual object you were trying to recreate. Ray Brunelle’s history of sound effects makes you realise how many comedy shows you heard on the radio without ever questioning that the sound of canaries meant that you’d banged your head, or that everyone makes the sound of a slide-whistle when they fall down a wall. But the real find was this ‘how to’ guide for radio sound effects. The answer, it seems, to making the perfect splash, is to make an x-shape with two bits of plywood on the end of a stick, and pull it out of a bucket of water, not plunge it in.
