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Designing a cinematic environment through sound can be an exciting and engaging endeavour. Yet, it can also be a bit underwhelming if you don’t have the right audio files and tools, or if you’re completely new to sound design at the start of your audio editing journey.
Our goal with this article is to provide you with more than enough info and starting points to kick your environmental sound design practice into gear. In this article, you’ll find a FREE download link to 13 professionally recorded environmental sound effects, for building ambience and atmosphere in your scenes/skits. You can also find some industry-grade tips and insights for environmental sound design in the further paragraphs.
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These sounds are royalty-free so can be used without needing to pay a license fee. All these downloadable rain sound effects are presented as high-quality 24-bit WAV files at a sampling rate of 48kHz.
Krotos Studio is a powerful sound design tool for filmmakers and sound designers. You can think of it as a Foley studio in your computer. It enables you to design and perform original sound effects without any need for expensive microphones, or a recording studio. Krotos Studio has a diverse range of outdoor ambience sound, and the pack above was actually made using it! When you want to create a longer, shorter, custom or changing rain sound to exactly match a scene, Krotos Studio is a great solution.
If you’re going to be working on environmental sound design as part of your workflow regularly, it’s probably in your best interests to collate a library of sounds. And, naturally, you’re going to want to opt for building a library based on the environment types you’re likely to be working with.
For instance, maybe sci-fi is your specialty. Then, searching for space sound effects, spacecraft sound effects, alien sound effects, laser gun sound effects, or similar things will be of use to you. Alternatively, you might be in the business of building meditative nature soundscapes. In which case, peaceful elemental sound effects like waterfall sounds, stream sound effects, birds singing sound effects, rain sound effects, and other weather sound effects will be of use to you.
Whatever the case, think about your specific needs and aim to build a sound library based on that. Ask questions like, ‘Do I need outdoors sound effects? Or, do I need indoors sound effects?’ You should narrow things down soon enough.
When we design sound environments artificially, we can sculpt the listening experience beyond what the natural world would provide. We can do this cleverly to invoke emotional responses through implementing ambience.
Did you know, the human brain cannot distinguish well beyond three different pairs of footsteps at once? So, if you want to build an environment scene of a busy high street with 100+ people walking, you should only add three to four pairs of footsteps. That will already sound chaotic enough to the listener. You can then add a handful of background conversations, some coins rattling in someone’s wallet, perhaps a street busker and a dog barking, and voila, your job is nearly done!
We can use little tricks like that to minimize our workload, whilst still producing an effective cinematic scene that makes the listener feel like they’re really there. Additional tricks is to use ambient sounds or even music to compliment your sound design with the intention of provoking a certain emotional response in your listener. Perhaps you’re building a horror environment. Then, adding some spooky whispers and a tense minor-key music loop can go a long way.
Throughout the last decades, there have been abundant examples of outstanding environmental sound design in cinema and film (as well as some with terrible sound design). Take a look at some of the good examples below.
This is an excellent example of outdoors environmental sound design done right, with audio that truly teleports the listener/viewer into the dreadful, yet immersive scene of the Omaha Beach landing during WW2. From the waves crashing on the shore, to the roaring engine of the military boats, to the gunfire and explosions, each sound was added with professional intent.
Denis Villeneuve’s sound team took an empty, orange wasteland and made it vibrate. The air hums like radiation itself. There’s no traditional “ambience”—just mechanical groans, faint echoes of drones, and this low, physical hum that feels like decay. You sense that the environment is toxic even without dialogue or music telling you so.
The scene kicks off with indoors dialogue in a car. You can hear the ambient sound of the outside air passing the moving vehicle, plus the filtered radio playing. When the car ambush happens, you hear the world closing in: gravel, panicked breathing, bullets snapping through glass, tires skidding on dirt. What makes it hit harder is that everything is diegetic. There’s no score, just the sound of your own panic mirrored in the screenplay.
Environmental sounds are really anything you can think of that contribute to building an evocative scene through the use of sound. This includes natural scenes, like forests, mountains, caves, storms, the seaside, and more. Yet, environmental sounds also encapsulate many environments you’ve likely encountered in your day-to-day, hustle-and-bustle life as a human, such as a library, a cafe, a cinema, a busy workplace, and many more.
If building natural scenes, you may opt for environmental sound effects like thunder, wind, animal noises, running water, etc. If building man-made scenes, you may consider the time period you’re designing and build based on that. Modern scenes might include, keyboard chatter sound effects, coffee sipping, background conversations, or busy traffic.
Ambience is a vital part of environmental sound design. Ambience is often thought of as building space, through the background noise of your environmental scene. This can be achieved through a subtle electrical hum or an airplane cabin, or a reverberous background drip sound effect in an ambient cave space. It can also include a light breeze on a mountainside.
All of the above examples are ambient because they provide depth to the scene as background sound effects, not at the forefront.
When categorising environmental sounds, we typically break them into three distinct categories: biophonic sounds, geophonic sounds, and anthropophonic sounds.
Biophonic sounds are naturally occurring sounds created by biological organisms, such as bird chirping or other animal noises. Geophonic sounds are also naturally occurring sounds, however, these are ones caused by environmental elements (not from biological organisms), like wind, fire, water, etc. Anthropophonic sounds are any sounds produced by humans or human interaction with the environment. This ranges from cafe conversations to roadwork machinery.