Nostalgia in Sound Design

The comedian Fred Armisen has a thing for sound. He’s a former punk musician and a master of accents, and he is now releasing a new album of sound effects. “I was lamenting that there aren’t sound-effects albums in our lives as much,” he tells Michael Schulman. “I feel like they just used to exist more or they were more present. . . . And instead of just, you know, taking out my phone and just recording stuff, I wanted to treat it properly. Like, let me go to a recording studio and really do it. Let me try to mimic some things that I’ve heard before.” The result, “100 Sound Effects,” comes out this month on the venerable indie label Drag City. The track titles are themselves punch lines: “Guitar Tuned but Still Somehow Out of Tune,” “Supportive Booing at a Speech,” “Obligatory Applause at a Speech,” and “Terrified Audience at an Authoritarian Nation Official Event.” Talking about the importance of paying attention to the auditory world, Armisen and Schulman went out to record some classic sounds of New York City—and what they couldn’t find they faked.

This segment was produced with assistance from John DeLore.