Following with the seal creature posts, here is the second, called: Tuk.
The Story
Tuk is an ancient race of bird with a dubious origin. Nobody knows where they come from, nobody knows exactly what they want. The only certainty is that we all fear their sound and their ferocious attacks. The Tuk are similar to the prehistoric pterodactylus, but smaller, and with a strange paranoid behavior.
Tuks don’t like other species, except when they are going to eat them. Nobody knows what is the purpose of their life life beyond going out to prowl the jungles to hunt and obtain food killing other live beings. They live in hot areas near volcanoes because it is a little visited by other species.
The Tuks kill their prey after paralyze them with their sharp sonic powers. The only people who can resist the sounds of Tuks are humans, who have chased these birds for years, unable to get any results, because the flight of these is so complex and fast that it is very difficult to follow.
Sound Interpretation
Analyzing the story we can easily find some key features, so I decided to make two different kind of sounds. One sound for the Tuk’s screams, reflecting his paranoid and crazy behavior.
Also, Tuks have a special power that they use to paralyze their preys. I wanted to also make some sonic prototypes of how this paralyzing attack could sound. For that I took some different cuts of the screams and seal growls.
Use of Seal Vocals and Processing
For this creature I used mostly the junior seal sounds, including some growls, breaths and those great and weird frenzy moments in the recordings. The process was done combining different parts of the library, and also processing them.
For the screams I used a lot of pitch/time up processes and also some EQ and compression. The paralyzing sounds were created with heavy effects chains, combining granular processes, delays, some extra modulation and convolution. Some of the sounds are natural delay repetitions, an other are looped versions of the samples I cut.
[soundcloud width=”100%” height=”81″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false” url=”http://soundcloud.com/misazam/seal-creature-2-tuk-screams”]
[Notes: Played in no particular order. Each one is a different example of how Tuk’s scream could sound like]
[soundcloud width=”100%” height=”81″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false” url=”http://soundcloud.com/misazam/seal-creature-2-tuk-paralyzing-sound”]
[Notes: Played in no particular order. Each one is a different example of how the paralyzing effect could sound like]
Image credit: Pterodactylus at Wikimedia
