# Need Suggestions - Silence to Sound Ratio



## aelfric5578 (Aug 23, 2011)

Hello all,

I direct a partially outdoors haunt at a nature preserve. I've been told this year we can pipe sound through the woods as longs the sounds don't need to be localized.

I would like to have a voice-over on loop, but I don't want the sound to be too distracting. Silence can be scary and I don't want to run over the actors' lines. 

I was planning on recording several 10 to 20 second audio clips with silence in between, but I can't decide how much silence to put between each clip. Has anyone done something like this? Any suggestion?

Thanks in advance.


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## austenandrews (Aug 22, 2010)

Depends on what mood you're after for the haunt, I would think. Longer spans of silence than the length of the clips would obviously give you more quiet than noise. You could also pipe out some low-level creepy ambient music, which probably wouldn't be very audible on the far side of a bunch of trees.


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## corey872 (Jan 10, 2010)

Guess it depends what the voice over is and how loud it is. I have a 'background' sound track with loud lightning strikes, witch cackles, wolf howls, etc happening every 20 seconds or so.

I figure the average ToT is only around for a minute or so. So if the interval is much longer they might only hear one effect. If it's much shorter, its just a never ending barrage of sounds.


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## Lambchop (Jan 28, 2011)

You could always just add a sound effect that repeats. Something like creeky trees, or rustling bushes, or owls hooting. Or a animal groan. Those things set and the proper distance and at correct volume should add to a creepy ambiance yet not take away from actors.


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## Saturday8pm (Sep 5, 2012)

Lamb, depending on your spare time, check out Audacity and play with it ... it's free and you can make your own ambient bits. I combined outdoor tracks from the BBC Sound Effects Library, such as night birds, wind and blown brush and mixed in creepy harpsichord and piano low in one channel, making it sound as if the music comes from a distance. You can try the same with church bells and other things that make the flesh crawl. I think that would be safest depending on children in attendance. Make a 15 -30 audio CD out of that and set playback to repeat, with barely a pause in between tracks when you burn it.


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