According to Wikipedia, foley is “the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film, video, and other media in post-production to enhance audio quality. These reproduced sounds can be anything from the swishing of clothing and footsteps to squeaky doors and breaking glass.”
Foley comes from the man Jack Foley who was the first person to utilise sound effects in radio dramas, then transferring them to film later on. People who use these techniques, of purposely creating sounds in a studio to images (as it is now used in film as opposed to radio) are known as foley artists.
Foley is a very interesting art-form, as it involves taking a sound that is well known, and therefore has a very important connotative value, and then reproducing it out of context in a way that is often completely separate to the actual origin of the sound.
As some of the objects foley artists create sound for don’t necessarily make sounds, or are very difficult to capture, the sounds aren’t only captured out of context, separately from the image, but in a completely different environment, often from something that sounds similar, or some feel would sound like that object, creating a simulacra (Beaudrillard, 1981) of that objects sound in popular culture, but not that objects actual sound, all for the enhanced dramatic, emotional and connotative value.
This is a video about the foley artist behind a show marketed as a “live graphic novel”, The Intergalactic Nemesis. As the performance is half radio play, half comic book, the foley is performed live using various machines, instruments and day to day objects to create the sounds needed to immerse the viewer in the world. Immersion is vital in this type of performance (as they are in any), as you are essentially creating the world around the audience, and the sounds in particular achieve that through developing the atmosphere. The visual stimuli is the window into the world, but the soundscape creates the world, with all the auditory cues allowing you to gain a sense of place in this new world.
– Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulation.” 1981. Available at: http://www.cigarrvagen12.org/cirkulera/pdf/texter/Jean_Baudrillard-Simulacra_and_Simulation_s1-31.pdf