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www.postmagazine.com Post • April 2014 37 Admit it. If you used The Six Million Dollar Man sound on-air these days, audiences would say it's cheesy. (Yes, I know it's iconic.) So what do supernatu- ral/sci-fi series sound like today? A lot more subtle and believable. That's almost an oxymoron: believably fantastical. To explain, sound designers aren't beating audiences over the head with super synthy otherworldly sounds. The trend is toward organic, natural sounds with a sci-fi twist. Start with something real, and mutate it beyond what's natu- ral. Come to think of it, isn't that what supernaturalness is all about? These four supernatural/sci-fi series sound out of this world, yet still of this world. Teen Wolf Bryan Parker, at Levels Audio (www.levelsaudio.com) in Hollywood, is the supervising sound editor on Teen Wolf. Levels Audio offers everything from sound supervision and custom sound design, Foley, ADR and dialog editorial, to the final 5.1 mix. They also provide multitrack music mixing. The facility has seven dub stages equipped with Avid ICONs for 5.1 mixing, three sound edi- torial suites, an ADR/Foley stage, two kitchens, and even a loft guest apartment. Levels Audio has received primetime Emmy nominations for their work on TV series like American Idol, The Amazing Race and Whale Wars. Teen Wolf Season 3 is currently airing on MTV, with new episodes every Monday at 10pm EST. Teen Wolf, created by Jeff Davis, is a supernatural TV drama following the life of Scott McCall, a teenager who transforms into a werewolf after being bitten by one. Even though the show involves many supernatural elements, the focus is on the teenagers' lives, and how they deal with the supernatural events happening to them. Parker notes that by remain- ing anchored to the human space, the sound team has room to create huge supernatural sounds when they need to. "Sometimes we want to remain very practical and believable, and some- times, especially for this season, we want to get extremely wet and gross, and reach for that cringey gore factor," explains Parker. Parker and his team keep the supernatural sounds fresh by designing as much as they can ahead of the season's tight schedule. They build a custom library of sounds to draw from for the entire season. "Dealing with fantasy creatures, I don't ever want us to be in a position where we're reaching for 'Werewolf Growl 2' from a sound library," says Parker. Based on the scripts, they were able to design specific creature sounds, like growls, roars and screams for the werewolves, and specifically for Season 3B, the appearance sounds and attack screams for the Oni — demonic Japa- nese warriors that materialized from supernatural firefly-type insects. To cre- ate the Oni appearing sound, Parker used the transient shaper in DMG Audio's Compassion software to enhance the transients of dragonfly and grasshopper sounds. "I've made seven or eight different iterations of that raw 'tut-tut-tut-tut-tut' sound," he explains. "The transient shaper inside Compas- sion has been extremely useful all season long, especially on these fluttering sounds for the Oni." To create the Oni sword swishes, Parker played cricket and locust sounds into a talkbox. A talkbox directs sound from an instrument (or other sound source) into the performer's mouth via a plastic tube. The performer modifies the source sound by changing the shape of his/her mouth. A separate mic is used to record the sound coming out of the performer's mouth. It's what recording artist Peter Frampton used to make his guitar talk. Instead of putting the tube in his mouth, Parker explains, "I swung the tube past a set of stereo microphones. That's how I made the Oni sword swishes. I created them from the sound of bugs using the talkbox." Parker also routed several of the longer werewolf growls through the talk- box. Over the past three seasons, Parker finds he's being asked for longer wolf growls. The longest growl this season was :16, which Parker points out, is way too long for any actor or creature on Earth to physically perform. To create the super-long growls, Parker used the iZotope RX3 Spectral Repair function to extend the sound files. In Pro Tools 10, Parker cut the growl files into chunks and spaced them out. Then he used Spectral Repair to interpolate the data between the gaps he made. Parker also used a software program called SPEAR, created by Michael Klingbeil. It's an audio analysis, editing and synthesis program that allows users to manipulate individual frequencies in a sound. "It's a standalone application that I found to be super useful," he says. As you'd imagine, Teen Wolf requires a large variety of werewolf sounds. Sound pros create out-of-this-world tracks that are grounded in reality. By Jennifer Walden Supernatural Audio for TV: