Animal noises, reshaped into monsters
Many of the original Doom monsters’ unsettling voices were built from animal sounds. Composer and sound designer Bobby Prince took recognizable noises—growls, snarls, and other vocalizations—and altered them so they no longer sounded like ordinary creatures.
The trick was to change a sound’s pitch and duration, then layer or combine it with other audio. A familiar growl could become lower, rougher, or strangely stretched, turning a real-world noise into something that seemed to come from a creature with no real-world counterpart.
Why the sounds feel so wrong
The effect depends on recognition and distortion working together. The ear catches the shape of an animal vocalization, but the altered pitch and texture make it difficult to identify. That gap—familiar enough to register as a living voice, yet wrong enough to resist recognition—helps make the monsters feel disturbing.
The sounds also had to work within the game’s technical limits and be heard clearly amid gunfire and other effects. Their short, forceful bursts gave players an audible warning that a monster was nearby, while their warped quality made that warning unnerving. A beastly roar in Doom could begin with an animal sound; the unsettling part came from how far the game transformed it.
