When you need crowd noise, but don’t have a crowd.

I was recently working on a project that had a game show kind of vibe to it. For the title page animation I really wanted to mimic the sound of a studio audience yelling out the name, kind of like the Wheel of Fortune opening credits. You know the one…

The graphics and theme song have changed over the years but the one constant has always been the audience collectively shouting out the name of the show. With limited resources (no large crowd of people) and a quick turnaround time, how was I going to achieve this same effect?

A crowd of one.

The title of the segment is “What is he doing?” Here’s my result…

The crowd chanting? It’s a crowd of one. Just me. Well mostly just me. Let’s dive in a bit to see how it was done.

What you’ll need:

A single voice. (This should be a person. Your dog, cat, or turtle won’t work well here)
A device to record that voice. (No need to be fancy here. I just used the voice memo app on my iPhone)
Software to edit that voice. (Most DAWs¹will work. I used Adobe Audition)
1 or 2 generic audience/crowd chanting stock audio files. (This is optional, but will help round out the final effect)

Creating the crowd

Disclaimer: This isn’t a tutorial in the traditional sense. Because this effect can be created with a variety of tools, I didn’t want to single out a specific one. Some of the software plugins/effects I mention may not be available or named the same in the DAW you use, but they all have similar features so the overall process will be the same.

Record your voice

As mentioned above, there’s no need to get fancy here. I could have used a microphone plugged into my computer’s audio interface and recorded it that way, but it was easier to just pull out my iPhone and use the voice memo app.

Sound quality isn’t important here and natural reverb is welcome. Just try to avoid any additional sounds other than your voice (television, pets, lawnmowers, car horns, helicopters, live music, alien invasions, etc.). Just find a somewhat quiet room and record there.

Now that you’re ready to record, a little acting is required. Record yourself saying the lines in the cadence and volume you desire. If your goal is for the crowd to sound like a large sports arena then imagine yourself in that scenario and yell away. If it’s a smaller studio crowd, dial it back a little. But again, imagine yourself in that situation and yell accordingly. If your volume is loud, be careful to not spike the audio levels by being too close to your recording device/microphone.

Give yourself some options. We’ll be doing some audio processing later, but to make things easier, you don’t want to start with a bunch of voices that all sound the same. We’re going for a diverse crowd here. Here’s what one of my audio recordings sounds like:

“What is he doing?” options

You’ll notice I changed the pitch of my voice slightly with each line reading. I even tried a “lady” voice…

My lady voice.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous. If you’re easily embarrassed, I suggest recording when no one else is within hearing range.

Import your recording into your DAW

Open a new audio project in your DAW, import your recording, and then place it on an empty track. Looking at the waveform you should be able to tell where each reading of the line is. Now we want to cut these into separate voices, so isolate each read and place them on a new track.

Separate the voices

Each voice gets its own track.
Adjust timing and spacing as necessary.

You will likely have to adjust the placement and timing of your reads in order for the cadence to be somewhat uniform. They don’t have to be perfectly lined up since naturally everyone in a crowd won’t be in sync² but you want to avoid one particular voice standing out from the others. In the example above I have 6 voices layered. Let’s see how that sounds…

6 raw voices

Ok, it’s a start. This is where you’re going to have to play around a bit to see what you like. Try duplicating the tracks and shifting the timing of those slightly. You can also play around with your DAWs pitch shifting effects to get more range in your voices. Just don’t go too crazy because if you go overboard with the number of tracks and effects, it’ll start to sound over processed. My original project ended up using 12 voice tracks, with a slight pitch shift applied to 3 of them.

At this point we’re just looking for it to sound somewhat like a crowd. We will be polishing it all up in the subsequent steps, so once you’re satisfied with the result here, mix everything down to one track.

Add a little ‘verb

The crowd is starting to sound like a crowd, but we need to sell the essence of these voices being in a large studio (or arena if that’s what you’re going for). We’ll do that with some reverb. Since all DAWs have different reverb effects, you will have to experiment here to find one or two that you like. For Adobe Audition users, I used two instances of the Full Reverb effect.

The first instance used the “Vocal Double” preset, which made the crowd sound a bit larger. The second instance used the “Lecture Hall” preset which gave us our “studio.”

Vocal double reverb effect
lecture hall reverb

I also added a 10 Band Graphic Equalizer effect in order to adjust some levels. At this point your crowd should definitely be sounding more crowd-like.

A crowd of just me.

With a little help from our (stock audio) friends

Now here comes the finishing touch that puts it over the top. So far we’ve only been using our recorded voice. However, I found that if we layer some real crowd noise underneath, then it really helps sell the effect. This is where the optional stock audio comes in to play.

There are many free and paid stock audio sites and I will list several options at the bottom of this page. We’d be incredibly lucky to find a stock clip of a crowd specifically yelling “What is he doing?” but that is highly unlikely and would make this whole tutorial pointless. Instead I searched for some generic crowd chants and settled on one that mimics a sporting event crowd counting down to zero.

Countdown

Since we’re using this as background to our fake crowd, this is perfect for our project. I can isolate specific word sounds from this and layer them under similar sounds in our recording. For example, I can take the crowd chanting “TWO” and layer it under the “DO” part of the word “DOING.” This is what that looks like.

Original recording on top, real crowd noise below.

This is what my edited stock audio clip sounds like as displayed in the image above:

stock audio edit

Sounds pretty weird on its own. But now take a listen when it’s mixed with our recording:

Recording and Stock Clip mixed.

We have our crowd. A crowd of one, with a little help from stock audio. Feel free to comment below with any questions or post your own crowd creations.