Model Details
ElevenLabs Sound Effects turns a short text prompt into a generated sound effect and returns it as a hosted MP3. Describe what you want to hear — a single Foley hit, an ambient bed, a UI blip, a cinematic whoosh, or a creature roar — and the model produces matching audio. Its strength is going from a plain-language description straight to usable sound design without recording or sampling, with optional control over clip length and how strictly the result tracks your prompt, plus a loop mode for seamless ambience and beds.
## Best for - Foley and one-shot effects (footsteps, impacts, door slams, glass breaks) from a text description - Ambient beds and backgrounds (rain, forest, crowd, city traffic) — set `loop` to true for seamless looping - UI and game audio cues (notifications, coins, power-ups, transitions) - Cinematic design elements (risers, whooshes, stingers, braams) - Quick placeholder or final SFX when you have no recording on hand
## Choose another model when - You need spoken words or narration from text — use a text-to-speech model - You want music with melody, rhythm, and song structure — use a music-generation model - You need to clean or isolate voice from an existing recording — use an audio-isolation model
## Tips - Keep the prompt concrete and sound-focused ("heavy wooden door creaking open, then slamming") rather than abstract - Leave `duration_seconds` unset to let the model pick the natural length from your prompt; set it (0.5–22 seconds) only when you need an exact clip length - Raise `prompt_influence` toward 1 for a literal, on-prompt rendering; lower it toward 0 for more variation and creative interpretation (default 0.3) - For ambience and backgrounds you intend to tile, set `loop` to true so the start and end stitch together cleanly - The text prompt is capped at 450 characters — describe the single effect you want, not a scene script
## Limitations - Generates non-speech sound only; it will not produce intelligible spoken dialogue - Maximum clip length is 22 seconds per request
To run via the ModelRunner JavaScript client: ```js import { modelrunner } from "@modelrunner/client";
const result = await modelrunner.subscribe("elevenlabs/sound-effects", { input: { text: "heavy wooden door creaking open, then slamming shut", duration_seconds: 4, prompt_influence: 0.3, loop: false, }, }); ```
