I've gotten interested in recording lately, and although i haven't invested in any gear yet, i'd like to soon. However, that's great for sounds you can go out and capture, but for more exotic sounds (laser fire, sci-fi sounds), is there a way to create them from scratch? By scratch i mean like just messing with a wave on the computer or pumping it through some beast of a machine to get some otherworldly sound. Where do these kinds of effects come from and how are they made?

There is no 'magic machine' that can create everything you need in one nice little package. There are lots of ways to create sounds in an artificial enviroment and each one of them is good for different things.

Laser fire and general sci-fi sounds are usually created with some form of synthesis, usually analog (or virtual analog). But it really depends on what you are specifically trying to create. Some times it is better to create things 'from scratch', sometimes it's better to start with a 'real' sound and alter it using post-processing, sometimes both... again, it really depends on what you are trying to create. Have a look in the sticky thread about sound software and try some of them out.

If you are really interested in this sort of thing learn Reaktor http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?reaktor4_us it will open you up to a whole new world of sound creation and is also an excellent way of learning how sound 'works' too. It is incredibly complicated and you have to spend some time with it but it is definately worth it in my opinion, i've used it on a great deal of sound design for both film and games. It still isn't a 'magic machine' that'll do everything.... but it is open ended unlike most synthesis programs so you can get a lot more out of it. Just my 2 cents

R

I know you're a programmer, so you may be interested in things like csound and SuperCollider, which are synthesis programming languages. Can make pretty much any synthesizable sound with them, but they aren't quite as 'user friendly' as Reaktor et al.

-bodisiw

You can start with broad-spectrum noise (white noise or pink noise) and shape it into sounds by running it through very narrow, peaking filters. If you can animate the parameters of the filter (center and resonance for example) over time, using some envelope, then the sound will evolve as such.

You can actually download Audacity (open source sound editor) and create sounds like this right now! No purchase necessary.

After that, you probably want to look into virtual synthesis. There are a number of VST instruments you can download that are fairly reasonable; there's also synths to buy. With the right knob tweaking, any synth can be made to sound like a laser gun; that's one of the easier sounds :-)

Two links for your enjoyment.

Thanks for all the feedback. I will look into all those links.

I actually have Audacity already and it's very nice. In fact, it's what got me interested in audio in the first place. However, there are a gajillion pluggins for it, and i'm not sure what i want. They all use terms i'm not even familiar with.

Reaktor

SynthEdit comes to mind as well. A lot of VST sound effects use it.