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[Poya]

I'm trying to add a stretching rubber band sound to what I'm calling "connectors" in my game. Basically you click an item and drag the mouse which creates an arrow coming out of the item and ending where the mouse cursor is. Obviously as the arrow gets longer the sound needs to change somehow. And when the mouse is not moving the sound should stop.

I'm having a hard time trying to figure out how to achieve this.  I found a sound clip which I tried to loop and raise the pitch as the arrow grows in length. It doesn't really sound right though. I am thinking I need to have short stretch "bursts" which decrease in looping frequency as you stretch... but the looping seems to become very obvious.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestion as to how I can approach this? Am I even making any sense?

[Theophilus]

Balloons. Squeezing, but not popping, might give you the sound you like. You could try picthing it down a hair.

EDIT: wait. I thought you were asking what you can use to create a stretching sound.

[Poya]

That's a good point, I mean if I need to record it myself I can do that.

The bigger problem is, how do I make whatever sound I find or record, play flexibly over the duration of the arrow stretching in the game.

[John Nesky]

That's a pretty awesome question!

So I'm playing around with an LFO and a sine wave oscillator right now. The LFO modulates the volume of the sine wave with a repeating pulse that looks kind of like this:

/\____

So that's a burst of energy, followed by a period of silence, representing the buildup and release of tension as tiny connections in the fabric snap. This LFO repeats very quickly, like maybe 20 Hz or so. Meanwhile the underlying sine wave rises in pitch gradually. After five or so seconds I end the recording, and then I apply an envelope to fade in the recording at the beginning and fade out at the end.

Then I take this sound effect, and mix it in with several copies of itself with a delay between each so that they're not synchronized. I can keep fading in more copies as others fade out to prolong the sound of stretching.

It would take some tweaking to get it to sound like whatever material you're going for but I like it and would be happy to share my results if you're having trouble reproducing it.

[Poya]

Thanks for that thorough description! And anything you can share would be awesome.

I have to play around with this. Right now I'm thinking that I shouldn't be applying a sine wave during the recording of the sound. Rather I need to do that at runtime in the game so that the pitch corresponds to the actual length of the arrow (i.e. it might increase or decrease).

I think the key thing you mentioned here is having multiple copies of the pulsing sound mixed-in to give some form of randomness and make it sound more natural.

[MoritzPGKatz]

Hey there,

Which wave editor or DAW are you using?

Cheers,
Moritz

[JigxorAndy]

This balloon stretching sound is really good, if you're looking for just that: http://www.freesound.org/people/soundstack/sounds/77082/