“Step into my office,” says Joanna Fang. OK, however to the untrained eye it is a kleptomaniac’s hoard: rolls of Astroturf, mud and moss, wood planks, violin bows, smashed keyboards, plastic packing containers brimming with sneakers, a full armory of axes and swords, a sand pit, a bamboo fence, rocks, half a motorcycle, smashed iPhones, a ship’s anchor chain, a dirty automobile door. “Never trust a clean foley stage,” she says.

Fang is a senior foley artist at Sony PlayStation. Her job is to place sound to video video games. So after all her stash consists of a whole lot of leather-based jackets, since “in games, everyone wears leather.” But different widespread online game tropes—assault rifles and the like—aren’t shut at hand in her San Diego studio. Her work is all about improvisation: Fang educated as a classical musician, and now every thing is an instrument. “I always say that the best props are ones that you can play like a Stradivarius,” she says. “They just sing and they sound great. And you could do them anywhere, anytime, and get super expressive with them, right?”

Shake a looking knife and a torque wrench collectively for the sound of a gun being reloaded. Tape wood sticks to gardening gloves to make a cat’s paw. Toilet plungers on concrete are a clopping horse, crushed charcoal turns into crackling snow. To break bones, Fang crushes a pistol holster full of pasta shells; smashed skulls require hammering melons—for the squish of the goo inside.

Just as droning strings can rework a humdrum road right into a threatening alley, Fang makes use of her sound results to prime our feelings. “It’s like weaponized ASMR,” she says. “We’re trying to get the audience to feel something.” But even with such a well-outfitted area—she extols the virtues of her concrete water pit—foley is an artwork of limitations. Struggling to embody a easy sound impact (Whoopi Goldberg in flat sneakers, sauntering as much as a bar) led her to a private revelation. “I was having such a hard time with that cue because I didn’t feel right in my body,” Fang says. “I used foley for so long as this perfect art form that helped me shake off, frankly, my gender dysphoria.”