Development & Design Philosophy

The Creation of Todd-AO's Professional Sound Design Engine

The Origin December 2024: Rob Nokes was on a call with modern-day legendary sound designer Craig
Henighan, for whom Nokes has pulled and recorded sounds on numerous films. Henighan envisioned an
application that would “freshen up” existing sound libraries so that the sounds remained familiar yet were
completely re-envisioned. And so, the journey began.

The Foundation FX-Gen is a professional audio generator created by Rob Nokes and engineered by
Google DeepMind / Todd-AO Engineering, with special thanks to Luciano Del Zoppo and Frederic Dubois.
It represents a unique intersection of decades of Hollywood sound design culture and the controlled
randomized music creation philosophies of the likes of Brian Eno and Einstürzende Neubauten.
The Complexity. To be clear: FX-Gen is complicated. It has to be. If you are trying to conceptually
emulate the varied workflows of legendary sound designers like Henighan, the only path is through
complexity. A sound designer determines their sound stylistically; hardcoded, simple settings cannot
achieve that.

Controlled Randomization The sound designer drops selected source sounds onto the app that
serve as the foundation for the Generator. The designer then assigns activation probabilities and
allowable ranges for FX. As activation chances increase and FX ranges widen, the FX-Gen outputs
become more diverse and exotic. Please note: less can be more. The Profiles section provides quick
presets—Human and AI re-creations—of documented legendary techniques.

Priorities & Workflow FX-Gen's hierarchy of priorities is: Quality, Control, Reliability, and Speed. All
processing is aimed at the highest offline quality possible. You can batch-generate creations overnight,
over a weekend, or on a dedicated second machine. The result is a cornucopia of sounds ranging from
the amazing to the unusable—and if you dislike the final mix, you can remix an output using the original
intermediate design files.

Evolution & Performance What began as a tool to “freshen up” a sound library has evolved into a
full-spectrum, GPU-accelerated audio engine capable of generating cinematic sound effects and musical
textures from your chosen source recordings—entirely offline, on Apple Silicon hardware.
Install FX-Gen → Set your Cache folder → Drag and Drop .wavs → Select a Profile → Generate FX!