Sound Effect Generator
Sound Effect Generator is a free online tool that creates sound effects for your games, videos, apps and presentations, and lets you download each one as a WAV file. Choose between lasers, explosions, coins, power ups, beeps, clicks, chimes, teleports, sirens, whooshes, thunder, drums and many more. Customize each sound by changing waveform, pitch, length, filters, envelope, vibrato, flanger and more.
Sound effect
Game
Interface
Sci-fi
Nature and impact
Percussion
Parameters
Waveform
The shape of the wave, from the soft sine to the harsh square.
Pitchsemitones
Moves the effect up or down in semitones.
Length%
Makes the whole effect shorter or longer.
Low-pass filter20 kHz
Cuts the treble: a darker, duller sound.
High-pass filter20 Hz
Cuts the bass: a thinner sound.
Laser shot
The classic arcade laser: a bright sawtooth wave diving from the top of the spectrum down to the bass in a few milliseconds.
Waveform of the generated sound — duration: 0.50 seconds
Volume%
Sets the level of the playback and of the downloaded file.
Download the laser shot sound effect in the wav format.
How to use this online tool?
Pick a sound effect from the list and it plays immediately. Then shape it with the parameters: the waveform swaps the shape of the wave the sound is built on (sine, triangle, sawtooth or square), pitch and length move the effect up or down in semitones and make it shorter or longer, the low-pass and high-pass filters cut the treble and the bass, the envelope tab redraws the volume of the sound over time (attack, decay, sustain and release), and the effects tab adds vibrato, flanger and drive. Click on "Play" to hear the result again, and on "Reset" to bring every parameter back to its default.
Some effects, like the thunder, the wind and the robot, are built from random values, so the button "New variation" generates a different take of the same sound every time you press it. When you are happy with what you hear, click on "Download" to save the audio as a WAV file.
Nothing is recorded and nothing is uploaded: every sound is synthesized from scratch inside your browser, with oscillators, noise and filters, exactly like the sound chips of the old arcade machines used to do.
All the sound effects
Every effect is a small recipe of oscillators, noise, filters and envelopes. The table below shows what each one is made of, and the parameters let you take any of them far away from the original sound.
Game
The classic 8 bit sounds of arcade and retro games: lasers, coins, jumps, explosions and game over jingles.
| Sound effect | How it is made |
|---|---|
| Laser shot | The classic arcade laser: a bright sawtooth wave diving from the top of the spectrum down to the bass in a few milliseconds. |
| Explosion | Brown noise pushed through a low pass filter that closes down over time, layered with a deep sub bass thump for the weight of the blast. |
| Coin pickup | Two square wave notes a fourth apart, the second one held while it fades. The sound of collecting a coin in a platform game. |
| Power up | A square wave climbing a major arpeggio across two octaves, the reward sound of picking up an upgrade. |
| Power down | The power up played backwards: a square wave tumbling down the arpeggio while the volume drains away. |
| Jump | A quick upward pitch bend on a square wave, the hop of a retro platform hero. |
| Hurt | A square wave falling fast with a burst of noise on top: the sound of losing a life. |
| Game over | Four square wave notes walking down a minor melody, the little jingle that tells you the run is finished. |
Interface
Short sounds for apps, websites and notifications: beeps, clicks, pops, chimes and success or error feedback.
| Sound effect | How it is made |
|---|---|
| Beep | A clean sine wave beep with a soft attack and release, so it never clicks. The most neutral notification sound there is. |
| Click | A tiny burst of high passed noise, a handful of milliseconds long. The tactile click of a button or a switch. |
| Pop | A sine wave snapping upwards in pitch, like a bubble bursting. Good for messages arriving and menus opening. |
| Chime | Two bell strikes a fifth apart, each one built from four harmonic partials that decay at different speeds, the way a real bell rings. |
| Success | A rising major arpeggio on a triangle wave with a short echo: the sound of something finishing the way it should. |
| Error | Two short buzzes of a low square wave, the second one a little flatter than the first. Unmistakably a refusal. |
Sci-fi
Futuristic sounds: teleports, alarms, robot voices and spaceship engines.
| Sound effect | How it is made |
|---|---|
| Teleport | A sawtooth wave sweeping up through five octaves, shaken by a fast vibrato and smeared by an echo. Beaming up. |
| Alarm siren | A square wave jumping back and forth between two notes, the two tone siren of a red alert. |
| Robot talk | A square wave hopping between random pitches through a narrow band pass filter, the chattering of a small robot. Every take is different. |
| Spaceship engine | Two sawtooth waves slightly out of tune beating against each other over a bed of brown noise, with the filter slowly wobbling. A ship idling in orbit. |
Nature and impact
Sounds of the physical world: whooshes, thunder, water drops, wind and heartbeats.
| Sound effect | How it is made |
|---|---|
| Whoosh | White noise through a band pass filter that sweeps up and then back down, the air displaced by something passing very close. |
| Thunder | The high crack of the strike followed by a long rumble of brown noise rolling away in random swells. Every take is different. |
| Water drop | A sine wave darting upwards in pitch with a wet echo behind it, the plop of a single drop falling into still water. |
| Wind | Noise filtered into a narrow moving band, gusting up and down at random. Every take is different. |
| Heartbeat | Two deep sine thumps, the strong one followed by the weaker one. A single beat of a heart, close to the chest. |
Percussion
The core of a drum kit, synthesized from scratch: kick, snare, hi-hat and crash cymbal.
| Sound effect | How it is made |
|---|---|
| Kick drum | A synthesized bass drum: the Tone.js membrane synth, whose pitch drops sharply at the moment of the hit. |
| Snare drum | High passed noise for the rattle of the wires, plus a short tuned body underneath for the skin of the drum. |
| Hi-hat | A very short burst of noise squeezed into the top of the spectrum by a high pass and a band pass filter. A closed hi-hat. |
| Cymbal crash | The Tone.js metal synth, whose clashing frequency modulated partials imitate metal, over a long tail of high passed noise. |
How are the sound effects generated?
Each effect is a little synthesizer patch, written with the Tone.js audio library. A laser, for example, is a sawtooth oscillator whose frequency dives from 2.4 kHz down to the bass in half a second, while an explosion is brown noise pushed through a low pass filter that keeps closing, with a sub bass thump underneath.
The audio is rendered offline, which means your browser calculates the whole sound at once instead of recording it while it plays. That is much faster than real time, it is not affected by anything else happening on your computer, and it guarantees that the WAV file you download is exactly the sound you just heard. Before the file is written, the level is normalized and the silence left at the end is trimmed away.
The parameters
The sliders act on the recipe itself, not on a finished recording, which is why a sound can be pushed so far without falling apart. They are grouped in three tabs.
Sound
- Waveform replaces the shape of the wave that the effect is built on, from the soft and hollow sine, through the triangle and the buzzing sawtooth, up to the hard square of the old 8 bit sound chips. A sine laser is a soft "pew" and a square laser is a harsh zap, while the same square that makes the coin sound like an arcade turns into a gentle notification as a sine. Leave it on Original to keep the wave that each effect was designed with.
- Pitch transposes every frequency of the effect, in semitones, up to two octaves in each direction.
- Length stretches or squeezes the whole effect, including the envelopes and the filter sweeps inside it.
- Low-pass filter cuts the treble, from wide open at the top down to a muffled 300 Hz.
- High-pass filter cuts the bass, from 20 Hz (which leaves everything untouched) up to 8 kHz, where only a thin whistle survives.
Not every sound effect has a wave to replace, and the control says so when that is the case. The ones made of noise (the click, the whoosh, the thunder, the wind and the hi-hat) and the two drums that are physical models (the kick and the crash cymbal) have no oscillator at all. A few others do have one, but it is part of what makes the sound what it is, so it is left alone: the harmonic partials of the chime, the deep sine thump under the explosion and the heartbeat, the sweep of the water drop and the body of the snare.
Envelope
The envelope draws the volume of the sound over time. Each effect already has its own envelopes inside it — that is what makes a click short and a cymbal long — and this one is applied on top, over the whole sound. The three times are percentages of the duration, so they follow the effect when you stretch it.
- Attack fades the sound in from silence. A sharp hit becomes a swell.
- Decay is the time it takes to fall from the full level down to the sustain level.
- Sustain is the level held after the decay. At 100% there is nothing to fall to, so the decay does nothing.
- Release fades the sound out at the end, which shortens the tail.
Effects
- Vibrato wobbles the pitch up and down. The depth sets how far it goes and the rate how fast, from a slow seasick drift to a fast ring modulator buzz.
- Flanger mixes the sound with a copy of itself delayed by a few milliseconds, and keeps moving that delay. The two copies cancel and reinforce each other as it moves, which produces the metallic "jet plane" sweep.
- Drive saturates the waveform, clipping its peaks. It adds harmonics and makes the sound dirtier, louder and more aggressive.
The chain is applied in this order: drive, then vibrato, then flanger, then the two filters, and finally the envelope. The level is normalized before the envelope, so a quiet sustain really does come out quieter.
Volume
The volume slider, next to the play button, is the last step of all. Every effect is normalized to the same level when it is generated, so that a hi-hat and an explosion are equally loud, and the volume then sets how loud the result is — both in the preview and in the WAV file you download, which come out at exactly the same level. The waveform above the slider follows it, so you can see what is going into the file.
Can I use these sounds in my own projects?
Yes. The sounds are not samples taken from a library, they are calculated from scratch by your browser every time you press play, so there is no recording and no third party audio involved. Use the WAV files in your games, videos, apps, podcasts and presentations, commercial or not.
The WAV format is uncompressed and is accepted by every game engine and video editor. If your project needs a smaller file, convert it to MP3 or OGG after downloading it.