Creating Sound Effects

Creating effects with sound is easy in Flash ^®. You can create stereo effects from mono files for example by placing the same sound file you wish to affect in proximity on separate layers. In the diagrams below, we took one sound file and placed it on two separate layers in the timeline (1). The two instances of the same sound are separated by one frame. Depending on the delay in the stereo effect that you wish to create, you can separate the sound files by more than one frame.

In the Edit window of the sound, you will see two "windows" representing two channels, left and right. You will also see in each channel, at the beginning of the sound wave a little square (3). This square represents an envelope point or handle. Clicking and dragging this square allows you to move it in different directions to affect volume and fade. In this particular example, one channel on one layer was muted completely while the other channel in the other layer was muted. You can see that the envelope point for the left channel has been moved all the way down to the bottom. This sets the volume level in the left channel all the way to zero, effectively muting the left channel. The exact opposite was done in the sound that is found in the other layer. The right channel was muted while leaving the left channel intact. The effect is that the sound will play almost simultaneously. The small delay gives a stereo effect even though the sound can be in mono format.

As shown in the diagram, you can choose from preset effects (4). You can choose to play your sound in the left channel only or right channel only. You can pan your sound or fade it in. You can also customize these effects by clicking and dragging the envelope points yourself. If you choose to loop your sound several times, you can create these effects over the loops that you set. Keep in mind though that you are limited to 8 envelope points once you attach a sound to a frame.

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Finally, you should test the playback to listen to the exact result. If the sounds are playing in frames that are heavy with animation or graphics, the playback may be slow, depending on the processor speed of the computer. If the playback is too slow, the desired effect may be lost; therefore, it is always important to test your movie and take into account the graphical elements that are on the screen in those frames.