Here’s how SoundFuse created a huge European Emergency Siren sound effect library

Hi Giel, what made you go for a European siren sound library?

I think every European sound designer knows too well that there are few European siren collections around. American sirens are covered very well. You’re forced to use the few commercial ones or the ones you’ve collected over the years – which most of the time never cover different simultaneous perspectives. There’s simply not a lot of choice. Nowadays local authorities don’t allow police prop cars to use their sirens anymore. So no sirens are recorded on set anymore, at least here in the Netherlands.

For the Sirens library, I teamed up with Antoin Cox, production sound recordist and Jan Wijnakkers who has a special vehicles rental company for film.

We informed local police and residents about our upcoming recording session. Sirens all day long could imply a quite severe emergency…

We informed local police and residents about our upcoming recording session. Sirens all day long could imply a quite severe emergency…
We had two simultaneous recording locations which were a kilometer apart – this way we were able to record a driveby and arrival in one take.
 

How did you figure out which sirens to include – and how did you get hold of the sounds?

Jarno Faro is a young guy who has been collecting the siren pre-amps for years. We recorded his complete collection in a full day to cover all drive-by’s, arrivals and aways of each setup.
 

From your video, it looks like a lot of effort went into capturing these siren sounds. How did you go about it? And what’s that rig on top of the car in the video?

We rigged a relative quiet car up with different speakers and horns to be able to switch quickly between setups. Historically certain pre-amps go together with certain speakers/horns, something Jarno knows all about.

He provided 14 different siren setups and operated them all day long. They cover current sirens all the way back to the sixties.
 

What countries are the siren sounds from?

All sirens are confirmed Dutch but each and every pre-amp is or was also used in other European countries in certain periods. It appeared impossible to figure out which countries and which years. So I added the Dutch metadata to the sound files of which I know is authentic. I welcome other Europeans to contact me about use of these library sirens in their countries. I will then release meta data updates adding countries.
 

Any tips and tricks for users to make the most of the library?

I think the library is extremely useful because of the simultaneous perspective recordings. You can easily cut sound perspective to picture which makes for a more natural, authentic and dynamic feel. Most recordings have extreme long approaches and tails. It’s recorded 24 bit 96K so you can perfectly pitch and stretch the material any way you like.
 

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