What if I told you that I'd been hearing a single sound, everywhere, for 22 years? I’ve heard it in countless movies, tons of television shows, video games and even pop music. I can almost guarantee that you have too.
It's a short, 3 second sound effect of something that’s really quite inoffensive, but still manages to register with me every time I hear it. It's very simple, and there are a lot of sounds like it, but it cuts through the noise of anything I'm watching or listening to whenever it plays and I've become obsessed with it.
Dale Driver · Resident Evil 2 - Lab Door Sound EffectIt's most often used as the effect of a futuristic lab door opening. I don't know why, but for decades it's been burrowed into my brain. This innocuous noise has been in and around practically everything I enjoy and, every time it plays, it forces two simple questions into my brain: How was it made, and who made it?
It’s been 22 years now, it’s time to get those answers.
It’s hard to pinpoint when I first started noticing this sound effect, but as an educated guess I want to say it was its prominent use in the Jean Claude Van Damme masterpiece, Universal Soldier. As a teenager, I spent a good chunk of my youth watching and re-watching every cheesy 90s sci-fi action movie you can imagine, and Universal Soldier was certainly in rotation. But since then (and especially since starting this journey) I’ve found and documented it all over the place. From the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies to Scooby Doo. From Tomorrowland to The Venture Bros. From ‘90s children’s TV shows, to a trailer for 2021’s latest looter-shooter, Outriders. The application of this simple sound effect is everywhere, and its endless uses are way beyond what any one person could track (but if you have heard it somewhere please let me know!).
But my journey with this sound actually started quite a bit earlier.
1998. There I was, a fresh faced 15 year old excited about being able to purchase my first ever 15-rated video game myself. It's not that my parents were ever particularly strict about age ratings, but the idea of being able to walk into a store and buy a game about zombies and blood myself was liberating.
During my playthroughs of what I still consider to be an all-time classic, I was constantly aware of how descriptive the use of sound was. Whether it was the shambling groans of the zombies, or the clickety clack of the typewriters, the use of sound in the series as a whole is something that’s stayed with me ever since. Little did I know though that one of the more passive sounds, a simple opening of a laboratory door, would be the one I’m still obsessing about over 20 years later.
So what is it about this sound? Why has it become stuck in my head so firmly? This is an answer I’ve really struggled with because I’ve found it hard to quantify why I find it so satisfying. Perhaps it’s the almighty clunk, or the winding motors that pan left to right, but the more I dissect it, the more I believe it’s this simple sound’s ability to be completely diegetic yet almost otherworldly. I’ve certainly never heard a door like it, but it always feels like it belongs, despite the situation.
Unfortunately, tracking a sound effect’s origin is not that easy. My first hurdle was simple; how do you google a sound? Typing in ‘Lab door’ or ‘sci-fi door’ understandably brings back thousands of results that could take forever to wade through. And it’s not as if there’s a Shazam-type app for sound effects - although I really wish there was. I was off to a bad start, so I decided to pull back and start simpler: asking a friend.
My first port of call was my immediate connections in the IGN UK office, specifically my colleague Jesse, who, like me, is a huge Resident Evil fan. Although also extremely familiar with the sound, knowing how to find it was also a mystery to him. Thankfully, Jesse has a friend called John. John is not only also a huge Resident Evil fan, but has also been involved in the Resident Evil modding scene, specifically working on sound effects and voiceover. As such, he knows more than a little about the original source files. This was my guy to set me on my way, and he kindly agreed to chat to me.
Dale Driver: So we've got a mutual friend in Jesse, and he's mentioned that you've done work with Resident Evil modding in the past, is that right?
John: That's correct. I would do a few little mods here and there, and a few little fan projects, and I'd usually tout myself as the “sound designer”. I say that with air quotes because I'm not a professional by any means. It's just a hobby of mine.
Dale Driver: I've been chasing this sound from Resident Evil 2, of the lab door, now for a long time, and it turns out you can't really Google what the sound effect is. So I was hoping that you might be able to help me out with this?
Being familiar with the original Resident Evil sound files, John knew that a bunch of them could be sourced legally, specifically from a sound repository called Sound Dogs. What the average person might not know is that recycling sound files is and was quite common practice. It turned out Capcom had done a significant amount of this with Resident Evil, thus spending a fraction of the cost of original sound creation on a license instead. It’s something they’re less likely to do these days - preferring to create original sounds in house - but back in 1998, it made all the sense in the world.
With this knowledge (and now a hint of my obsession) John and Jesse began combing through every potentially relevant search term they could imagine, until...
John: ....about 30 or 40 sound effects in I hear the sound. It doesn't take too long. You hear the door open, hear it close and I'm like, ‘That's it. That's the one, it has to be.’
So thanks to John, Jesse and some internet sleuthing I now had a file and a link to a sound library. Logic would suggest the reason I’d heard it in so many places was due to how accessible this library was to sound designers. But in my quest to find its origins, the next question was: how did it get onto this library in the first place? In an attempt to understand this procedure more I got in touch with one of the few sound connections I have in the professional world, someone I knew from my younger days while playing in a band. Chris Mock is a sound designer, who, since the humble beginnings of mixing my audio in local UK music venues, had gone on to do much greater things in the world of live events and television. I was hopeful that not only could Chris give me more insight, but that he might also have some theories on how the sound itself had been made.
After giving Chris a quick rundown of my obsession and all my progress so far, and despite being slightly perplexed by the situation, he kindly agreed to help and we dove straight into discussing sound libraries.
Dale Driver: Are there people out there that specialize in just creating [sound effects] for stock libraries? Or would they create them for a project, and because they're very malleable sound effects, they become part of a stock library?
Chris Mock: Yeah, there are both. I mean, there are people that just record sound effects and put them onto a stock library, whether that's their own website, or they put them on places like Sound Ideas, or Sound Dogs. What [people] might do is start with a sound effect from a stock library and then add things to it in order to make it sound bigger or, you know, more haunting, or more descriptive in a way. You can also manipulate them and - like they do in films - they sometimes [use] stock sound effects, [which is why] there are so many over the years that are familiar. Sound designers even try to slip them into a film on purpose. I'm sure you know which sound effect I'm talking about.