Perhaps visual effects are easier to learn than audio effects, which might cause us to be more familiar with those. DeluxeFX App brings you a bit of a comprehensive guide about audio effects and why you should use them in your educational projects.
Defining and Understanding Audio Effects
You can say that audio effects are all those devices that you use to manage and alter what audio tracks sound like. These devices can be hardware or can be software, and they comprise a few different types of effects.
Panning
This sound effect is used to manipulate the way the signal travels through a multi-channel field, creating the effect that the sound is moving from one place to the other. This happens because panning manages the amount of signal that is going to be sent to each speaker.
Panning is commonly used to give the impression of moving sources in movies and short-films alike, but it can be used to give a boost to engaging learning-games. It can also be used as a tool to avoid muddiness and keep sounds from covering each other.
Delay
Just like the name implies this sound effect basically playbacks the audio signal a set period after it was recorded, delayed. This is used to create echoes or repeated doubled sounds, a bit of a more pronounced echo if you will. You can hear it used commonly in reggae songs and other genres that want a more psychedelic effect.
Reverb
Another effect that has a self-explanatory name, short for reverberation which consists of emulating the way different echoes can be heard at the same time in places like caves. The software used for creating reverb calculates and generates all the echoes automatically including the level, frequency response, and delay needed.
In the end, the listener can hear a sound that resembles that of being in environments such as cathedrals, with the result being a fuller and bigger overall sound.
Chorus
This is an effect that is created by overlapping similar sounds after changing each of their tuning and timing qualities. It has this name because the concept is to bring out the sounds like it would happen on a choir with all the different voices and octaves coming together in a single audio signal.
Chorus is typically used to give the tracks a fuller sound, help it fill the track to give the listener the impression of hearing a bigger sound mix. It can be applied to vocals or instruments like organs and synthesizers.
Distortion
When people think about distortion, they usually place it in the context of heavy rock music and bands like Nirvana, but this effect has plenty of different uses. It works by taking your audio track and pushing the sign to compress and the result significantly varies according to the level of distortion you use.
It is commonly used in videogames and background music for learning-games as it gives your audio more body and makes it sound more imposing, catching attention quickly.
Why Use Audio Effects
If you are not a musician, you might be wondering why you should use these effects at all and what the point is in you knowing them. But it is as simple as giving your sounds better quality, making them more engaging, and polishing a track that can be narration or background music for an educational game.
Audio effects save you the trouble of having to record and re-record a track of any kind until you get the desired sound, or even having to go to a cave to achieve an effect.
