A film I’ve recently worked on required some tension during a scene that had little happening other than dialogue. So, I did a little research on how Ambience has been used to achieve this.
The film had a certain David Lynch vibe amongst others. Lynch and his sound designers have done very interesting things with Ambiences (Alan Splet/Skip Lievsay/Dean Hurley). There’s a reason why Lynch gets the Sound Designer credit on his films and that’s because he’s famously as much involved in the creative process as the sound designer themselves.
Lynch has used room-tones and wind differently throughout most of his films. He manipulates them to create a tonal eerie ambience that has musicality and disharmony. Dean Hurley describes how to achieve the unique sound by using Comb Filtering.
Comb filtering occurs irl when say for example you’re recording a snare drum. You’ll put one mic at the top and one underneath it. The sound from the snare will reach the each microphone at slightly different times. This tiny difference in time may mean that when listening to both mic recordings together they are ‘out of phase’ and will create an audible effect called comb filtering.
Apply this as a sound design trick and you can make organic sounds have a very odd character.
Creating a Comb filter effect in your DAW can be done with a stereo delay. Have a very short but slightly different delay time on each channel and increase the feedback
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Jason Pinches 