Noise makers: How foley artists make films and ads sound good
Foley artists are finally sharing their sound-effects secrets on Insta. Blood splash? It’s a watermelon getting slashed. Punches? Someone hit a goat carcass. Listen up
If you’ve spent any time on Instagram, you’ve probably seen Professor Puth, singer Charlie Puth’s series that breaks down the basics of music. In episode 10, he explains how the human heart beats like a music track, its rhythm tied to music through life. “A baby’s heartbeat is twice as fast as an adult’s before birth — about 140 to 160 bpm — quick and urgent. You know what else is urgent and primal? Dance music,” he says. As we age and our heartbeat slows, the music we connect with changes too. Even film and ad scores are often composed to match that pulse, literally pulling on our heartstrings.
The right soundscape can make you buy something you don’t need, convince you that a horrific scene has a comic side, and question what you’re seeing. “It’s what makes Tom Cruise hanging off a plane seem even more believable,” says Ganesh Gangadharan, 47, a Mumbai-based sound designer. “You take in the heavy breathing, the scrape of his hands against metal, the rush of wind, and the roar of the plane.” More and more sound artists are sharing their secrets on Reels and quick clips. And, judging by the Likes, we’re all in awe.
The sound brew
India makes the job especially complicated. We’re a noisy nation. Even indoor ambient sounds include the traffic jam filtering in, Alexa mishearing a command, and the ASMR of the cook preparing dinner. We take in and tune out more than we realise: The couple bickering at the next restaurant table, elevator dings carrying through the office floor, the cat covering its business in the adjoining bathroom.
So, when shows on streaming platforms such as Netflix follow global standards, it might sound too quiet in Indian homes. And when your home TV plays the hero’s whisper and an explosion at the same volume, it’s often because sound engineers have a tougher time squeezing sounds into an OTT platform than a cinema hall.
Movie audio transformed in the 2000s, when Dolby Digital 5.1 made its way into Indian cinemas. “Before this, Indian films were mixed in mono, in which dialogues, music, and effects all sat on a single track. There was no depth or spatial direction,” says Karan Arjun Singh, 53, a longtime foley artist. The new tech allowed audio to be adapted to a specific space. Someone watching the first X-Men movies, for instance, could hear the intimate schwing of Wolverine’s adamantium claws coming out for the first time, hear a helicopter overhead, or a low atmospheric rumble as Magneto rattles all the metal in the room.
Updates came with Dolby Atmos in 2012 and 7.1 surround in 2014, allowing sound to now move freely from ceiling to floor, and front to back, a 3-D audio experience. If you’ve watched a Christopher Nolan movie on the big screen, you know exactly how sound rushes past like an arrow, crashes into you like a wave, or floats across the cinema like a cloud. If Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a mood, it’s because Richard King picks every sound with care, no two thuds sound the same. Even Bruce Wayne’s footsteps sound different from Batman’s.
Layering the feels
These days, each sound is recorded separately and placed precisely to match the moment on screen. What once took a day or two to complete now takes almost a fortnight. “In Krrish 3, there was a character who could extend his tongue,” recalls Arjun Singh. “To create that effect, we used a thick nylon rope, spun it like a lasso, and matched the sound to the tongue’s movement. When a film has so many distinctive elements, recording the sound work alone can take up to 500 hours.”
Many engineers work closely with foley artists to recreate everyday sounds in the studio, for greater realism and emotional impact. Some are literal clips – for HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, composer Hildur Guonadottir used actual sounds from the power plant, like machinery, to build the score. For action sequences, however, the teams have had to get creative. The sound of blood splashing? Likely created by cutting into watermelon with a thick, sharp piece of wood. Punches? Likely recorded by wrapping a fist in a wet cloth and hitting a goat carcass. Gunfire? Legit recordings of specific guns are available in sound-effect libraries, but the click of the trigger – that’s actually the sound of a door latch .
It’s why those BTS Reels, breaking down a tense scene through audio, are so hilarious. Would you ever be afraid of The Hulk after you knew that the sound of his victims’ bones cracking are just stalks of celery being snapped in two?
Ear and now
As more and more of us expect the big-screen experience from the 3am binge watch on the flat screen in the living room (or on AirPod and the cellphone), sound experts are working harder. And through it all, one genre poses the biggest challenge: How to make advertisements pop… in your ear.
Aditya Arya, 36, music director, sound engineer, and founder of The Indian Audio Company, says that ads are built on sounds that don’t exist in real life but are crafted to grab attention: The fizz of a cola, the sparkle when a logo appears, the ting-ting-ti-ting at the end of a Britannia ad. A sleek, accented voiceover instantly codes a product as ‘international’. A folksy jingle, sung in a raw Rekha Bhardwaj-like voice, grounds it in small-town India. And every 30-second spot ends with the familiar window in which sound, not sight, carries the message home.
Arya worked on an ad for JK Tyres in 2020, featuring an Indian Formula One driver and a theme of alien transformers. “Every sound was created organically: Metal rods, plates, spoons and random studio objects were struck, scraped and layered to simulate other-worldly machinery,” he says.
And, as ads hop over to Insta, their sounds must match the faux-authenticity of the platform too. Foley and engineering teams have swapped heavy layering for clean on-set audio. Music and effects are deliberately toned down, live instrumentation feels more real to the ear. The next time an ad interrupts your doom scroll, or a scene on a show gives you the chills, close your eyes and listen – art, tech and trends are at it again.
From HT Brunch, November 29, 2025
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