Podcasting Hacks

Record and Add Background Ambience

Using background ambience can add a sense of place and time to your podcasts. Learn to record these sounds and mix them effectively into your sonic landscape.

You can talk about the rain, or the howl of the wind, but to hear it brings the listening experience to a whole new level. These sounds, which can be the muted conversation in a restaurant, the wails from a crowd, or the chirps of birds in trees, are lumped into the term ambience.

Tip

It’s a joke among sound engineers in the broadcast industry that any noise in shoddy recordings that can’t be removed is ambience.

Creating the ambient sound you hear in well-produced radio shows is a real art. Knowing how to create quality ambient sound can mean the difference between a show that draws you into a theatre of the mind, and one that feels flat, like a voice in a can. The technical aspects involve choosing the right microphone and finding the right location to get the sound. But the real art is in knowing what you want and having the time and patience to find it. Atmospheric effects, such as thunder, you simply have to wait for; when it’s so loud that it clips, or so soft that it’s indistinguishable from noise, you will just have to wait some more.

Ambient sounds serve two main purposes. The first is to provide background material for the story. An example is the crunch of leaves underfoot accompanying the voice of the narrator telling listeners about a recent hike. The second purpose for ambient ...