Sound Effects with ARSS and Gimp
What do sounds look like? The command-line tool ARSS allows you to convert sound spectrographic images into the sounds that would create them. It's an interesting tool for making unusual sound effects.
Painting Sound
Many of the sound effects in "Lunatics" will be found, or specially-recorded real sounds taken from various kinds of ambient recordings. But every once in awhile, we're going to be confronted with things that it's hard for us to record. What then? Well, there's a variety of techniques, including some good old fashion radio play tricks, making silly noises verbally, mixing everyday sounds, and so on. But there's a real appeal to just being able to "paint" a sound into existence from the imagination, and with a bitmap editor and a clever little utility called "ARSS", we can do that. I experimented with this in 2010, and documented it in my Free Software Magazine column as "Painting Sound with ARSS and Gimp". Here's the result:
