What is Foley?

When we think of sounds, we think about what we immediately hear. When we analyze sounds, we realize that they are vibrations moving in the air. When we hear music or sound effects, we think of meanings to what sounds we are hearing. The most common and most effective uses of sound effects are in media, more specifically, video games and film. Some notable video games with astounding foley art are God of War, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Horizon Zero Dawn. These video games try to immerse the player in a whole new and different world from our own and the sounds of the world play an important role in that immersion. The sounds of war raging in the distance, rampaging city streets, or the gentle breeze grazing across tall grass all make the world of the video game become alive. Films have extraordinary ways of replicating sounds for their stories. Movies such as A Quiet Place, Avengers Infinity War, or Luca all have unique sounds to portray a variety of things. The sound of an alien using echolocation, the sound of the destruction of a moon, or the sounds of a bike race all define key moments in a film’s story.

Sounds from our favorite media are created through the art of foley, but what is foley? To put it simply, foley is the art of making sound effects using conventional methods or non-conventional methods to create a specified sound for an action in media. The history of foley dates back all the way to the 1920s. In that time period, radio stations hired people to make unique sounds and improvise those sounds live when the radio host would make intros, outs, or even funny jokes or remarks. The one sound artist who pioneered this technique was Jack Foley, that’s where the word foley comes into play! Jack Foley went from being a sound artist for radio stations to making sounds for films and his methods were commonly used for future films as well.

The sounds I mentioned earlier from some movies and video games are all examples of foley art. The foley artist’s job in a project is to create a unique and/or specified sound that can be mixed with the image it correlates with. The ways the foley artist may make such sounds is entirely up to the artist. Sometimes making a natural sound can be replicated a lot more easily than fictional actions. For example: the sounds of bustling city streets can easily be recorded and implemented into the images from a movie or video game displaying a busy street in the background. On the other hand, making the sounds of a giant laser coming from the infinity gauntlet in Avengers: Infinity War, can’t simply be recorded because it is something not of this world. Sampling and mixing of different sounds at different frequencies must be made to portray what the sound of that laser would make.