Foley#1

How to play

Foley is a daily listening game named after the film-studio artists who make everyday sounds by hand: coconut halves for hooves, celery for snapping bones. Each day there's one ordinary sound, from a zipper to a dial-up modem. You start with half a second of it, heavily muffled.

1. Tap play and listen. Turn your volume up; headphones help.
2. Type what you think it is and pick it from the list. Only names on the list count, so a typo never costs you a guess.
3. A wrong guess, or a skip, plays a longer and clearer stretch: 0.5 s, 1 s, 2 s, 4 s, the full clip, and finally the full clip with no muffling at all.
4. You have 6 guesses. The VU meter shows the level while it plays.

The muffling is a low-pass filter, the same trick that makes music sound like it's coming from the next room. It keeps the low thumps and rhythm of a sound and hides the bright detail, so listen for timing and texture first.

Every recording comes from Freesound and was released into the public domain under Creative Commons 0. Each sound's author and original recording are credited at the end of its round.