To animate literally means “to bring to life”, and it is my purpose in this paper to discuss animation features and the way sound design contribute to animate onscreen characters as well as virtual soundscapes and holds an indexical function of linking the animation to a sensoric real-life world enabling the viewer to engage and identify with the narrative through a sense of “perceptual realism” (following Langkjær 2010).

Drawing on Murray Schafer’s soundscape terminology (Schafer 1993) and insights from William Gaver’s ecological approach to listening (Gaver 1993), I analyze the way sound can be seen as providing materiality to animated environments and as a tool for generating agency and intentionality to onscreen characters. By providing environments and objects with synchronized sounds, produced and recorded to make them live up to audience’s expectations of reality, virtual soundscapes are created to simulate everyday perceptual experiences. Furthermore, synchronized sounds provide information about the physical characteristics of their perceptual sources – that is, the sources from the animation that the audience couples with the sounds rather than the real Foley-sources – hereby providing the animation with materiality by defining e.g. weight, texture, movement and placement of objects in the virtual space. Characters are as a result given agency and intentionality. Through this perceptual realism, all sound in animation will to some extent function as an indexical reference to life outside the screen, but the use of sound signals familiar to the audience can be seen as an enhancement of these references that enables audiences to engage further with the narrative.