Synthesising a Phone Ringing Sound 📞
A phone ringing is a familiar sound and one that is fairly simple to synthesise. I'll share a way to recreate the sound of a stereotypical landline phone, like you might find in an office.
I'll use Phase Plant to do this, but the main principles should be applicable to other synthesisers.
First, fire up your synthesiser and add a square oscillator.
Next, add an LFO with a square shape. You should assign this LFO to modulate the oscillator's pitch by seven semitones up. Make the LFO quite fast, such as around 15 Hz.
Now if you play a note, you should hear the oscillator rapidly fluctuate between two notes, almost fast enough that they blend together and appear to sound like a single chord. I like how this sounds when playing a G4 note.
I'd also like the sound to pulse twice, then pause for a bit, then repeat that sequence. To do this I'll add another LFO, then draw in the following shape.
Note that I've added a subtle ramp to the later edge of both of the LFO's pulses. This is to make the end of each pulse a little less abrupt.
I'll set the oscillator's volume to zero, and assign the second LFO to modulate its volume. Now if you press a note, you should hear the note pulse twice and then pause, repeating for as long as the note is held down.
This mostly works, but you might find that this sometimes makes unpleasant clicky sounds when the sound pulses. This is due to the fact that the two LFOs aren't synchronised with each other. The clicky sounds appear when the volume LFO goes high while the pitch LFO is partway through its cycle, causing you to hear a very short sound at one pitch before it changes to the other pitch. Fortunately this can be fixed quite easily by assigning the LFO to reset the phase of the pitch LFO whenever the volume LFO pulses. In Phase Plant we can do this by connecting it to the trigger input of the first LFO.
I'll now use Soundly's free "Place It" plugin to apply a speaker emulation to the sound. I like how it sounds using the "Radio" preset.
And now we're done! Here's the finished sound:
This article is also available as a video here