Sound Design and Foley Direction

Use this skill to make generated media sound intentional instead of merely accompanied by music. Treat sound as story, timing, texture, space, and information. The goal is not to fill every frame with effects; it is to decide what the audience must feel, notice, understand, or believe at each moment, then design sounds that support that job.

Evidence stance

Documented facts below are drawn from professional and standards sources verified on 2026-07-10:

• Berklee describes Foley artists as devising and recording everyday sounds for films, television, and video games, and notes that Foley work begins with a spotting session that catalogs needed effects before recording to picture.
• ITU-R BS.1770-5 specifies algorithms for measuring programme loudness and true-peak audio level; many platform specs derive from or reference ITU loudness methods.
• EBU R 128 recommends -23 LUFS for broadcast normalization in its domain, with EBU Mode momentary, short-term, and integrated metering.
• W3C WCAG guidance for prerecorded captions says captions include dialogue plus meaningful non-speech sound information.
• Section508.gov similarly says sounds needed to understand and enjoy synchronized media should be captioned, and that caption style should be consistent.
• Creative Commons licenses can permit reuse under defined conditions such as attribution, noncommercial limits, share-alike, or no-derivatives. These conditions must be checked per asset.
• YouTube Audio Library terms, verified on 2026-07-10, describe its music and sound effects as copyright-safe for YouTube use, while warning that only Audio Library assets are known to YouTube to be copyright-safe and that YouTube does not provide legal guidance for off-platform use.
• Freesound, verified on 2026-07-10, hosts Creative Commons-licensed sounds; some sounds cannot be used commercially and many require attribution.

Empirical observations are practical listening checks and workflow tests an agent can perform on the actual cut: muting layers, playing small speakers, measuring peaks, checking sync frame by frame, and comparing against references.