BBC Opens Sound Effects Library for Free Use

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) has been around for almost 100 years (founded 18 October 1922). Since then, they have been making comedy and drama for radio, television and cinema. All of which require foley and background sound effects.

Foley (named after sound-effects artist Jack Foley) is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film, video, and radio in post-production. This is a vital element the creation of illusion of reality.

If you’ve ever done any audio design for film, you will be aware of the complexity of the job – especially for narrative work. Foley includes any sound you need – for example, a background ambience of people in a cafe or footsteps.

But it’s more complicated than just finding some cafe ambience online and sticking it over the scene. Or just any old footsteps.

How full is the cafe, for example? Or how full do you want it to feel? Is there music playing (copyright issues)? Are the footsteps on concrete, wood, carpet, sand, gravel… and so on? What pace are they going? Are they male or female, heavy or soft, high heels or trainers? Is the person creeping along or running?

You can see that audio design can be very time consuming and requires a certain attention to detail. And it’s probably a job that doesn’t get too much credit. I remember coming out of the theatre having watched Heat and saying the “sound design was amazing”. My friend looked at me as if I was weird. OK, he was right…

But where do all these sounds come from? Either you have to go with a decent quality microphone and a recorder and capture the sounds yourself. Or you need to find some prerecorded. That’s where the sound effects library comes in.

I remember, when I was a child, my elder brother had bought the BBC “Death & Horror” Sound effects album on vinyl. Should I have been worried?

Rather than worried, I had a lot of fun just listening to the effects, one after the other. Men being throttled, heads being cut off, mad men laughing and gibbering, steaks being smashed through hearts…

And now a confession: on the album there is a cat shrieking sound. We also had a cat… I’m sure you can guess what we thought would be funny.

As you can imagine, the BBC have created quite a library of audio samples since 1922. OK, so I doubt many in this library were recorded before WW2 but still… In fact, they have placed over 16,000 audio samples. The Sound Effects are owned by the BBC, but they’re allowing them to be used for “personal, educational or research” purposes.

To navigate through the library, there is a drop down menu to select different categories. There are no “death” or “horror” categories, unfortunately. However, I notice some of the sounds from the horror album are dispersed through the other categories. For example, some moaning sounds are under the “human effects” category. Stakes being hammered are under the “hammers” category.

There’s a lot of samples under the “London” category (65 sounds in all) which include street sounds, restaurants and more. There’s quite a few atmos sounds from the Royal Albert Hall too (how very BBC).

In general, it seems a lot of the sounds are from the late 60s, 70s and 80s. But I’m sure they can be used for modern productions. Anyway, its fun to listen to these old sounds and image a past time. Or is it just me?

You can find the free BBC Sound Effects here.

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