The End of Auditory Occlusion

Sound design is an increasingly specialized field, except for the fact that every designer, even a game designer, is required to to make some amount of sound design decisions in the course of that designer's career. Breaking the types of sounds required out into functional categories is foundational to the ongoing process of archive building.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

* Hard sound effects are common sounds that appear on screen, such as door slams, weapons firing, and cars driving by.
* Background (or BG) sound effects are sounds that do not explicitly synchronize with the picture, but indicate setting to the audience, such as forest sounds, the buzzing of fluorescent lights, and car interiors. The sound of people talking in the background is also considered a "BG," but only if the speaker is unintelligible and the language is unrecognizable (this is known as walla). These background noises are also called ambience or atmos ("atmosphere").
* Foley sound effects are sounds that synchronize on screen, and require the expertise of a foley artist to record properly. Footsteps, the movement of hand props, and the rustling of cloth are common foley units.
* Design sound effects are sounds that do not normally occur in nature, or are impossible to record in nature. These sounds are used to suggest futuristic technology, or are used in a musical fashion to create an emotional mood.

The Foley artist on a film crew is the person who creates many of the natural, everyday sound effects in a film, which are recorded during a session with a recording engineer. Before the session, a project will be "cued", with notes kept about what sounds need to be created during the foley session. Often, the project will have a sound supervisor who will dictate what sounds need to be covered in a foley session, and what needs to be created by special (audio) effects, which is generally left to the sound designer. The roles of Foley artists, sound designers, editors, and supervisors are highly specialized and are essential to producing a professional-sounding soundtrack that is suitable for distribution and exhibition.

Sound effects and foley are added during post-production to dialog and real effects which were picked up by microphones on set. Sometimes (especially in the case of cartoons) there is no additional sound, and all the sounds need to be added by the foley artist and sound designer. The Foley artist may also accent existing sounds to make them more effective; enhancing the sounds of a fistfight may require thumping watermelons or cracking bamboo. Many Foley artists take pride in devising their own sound effects apparati, often using simple, commonly-found materials. Some "making-of" featurettes show Foley artists at work.

The term "Foley artist" is named after Jack Foley, one of the earliest and best-known Hollywood practitioners of the art. Foley began his career in the film industry as a stand-in and screenwriter during the silent era, and later helped Universal make the transition from silent movies to "talkies".