Any location can serve as a locale for room tone. One lesson to learn from this: room tone is not relegated to the room. After I found these sound files, I dragged them into the session, brought them to the right level, and did some processing: I panned the two outdoor sounds left and right to surround the hut, and brought them lower in level, rounding off their treble frequencies to make them feel exterior to the scene. We have three ambience tracks: the interior room sound of the hut, with its flap open, as well as some wind, and a brook in the distance. I scoured several sound libraries for the right ambiences to make the scene work. Here we listen to two men uncomfortably talking about a woman, doing so in an open-air hut. Even this drama, set in long before the modern age, makes use of room tone. This is a prehistoric drama starring Ethan Suplee and based on the world’s oldest unsolved murder-that of Otzi the Iceman. Observe this scene from the audio drama Otzi the Iceman Must Die, which I had the privilege of mixing for Voyage Media. Room tone allows you to add verisimilitude to a scene-to make it feel real.
![izotope rx 6 remove room tone izotope rx 6 remove room tone](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54d696e5e4b05ca7b54cff5c/1634044864859-2W3LQPSUOSVNGT0I1N2D/Dialog+Isolate+-+Before.jpg)
That is what room tone is, the natural noise of your recording environment that’s impacted by the materials of the space and any existing background noise. Even a Whisper Room or vocal booth will have a certain amount of ambience if you dig deep enough. This atmosphere will make it into the recording. The walls of your recording location-their materials, their dimensions-combine with any latent background sounds to make an audible atmosphere. When you record yourself speaking in a room, you’re not only capturing the sound of your voice.