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15 Free Ambient Background Noise Tracks

By Logan Baker

Published: July 25, 2022 Last Updated: July 27, 2022

Add depth and real-world atmosphere to every scene with these 100% FREE ambient background noise tracks!

Of all the “secrets of the trade” found within the filmmaking bag of tricks, few tools are handier than the often-overlooked ambient audio background track. Placing an ambient background track into your timeline can immediately add a rich, real-world atmosphere to your video projects as it plays underneath your footage.

Additionally, you can use them to cover up audio blemishes like hums, hisses, and pops. Having ambient audio playing underneath almost any type of video helps the video feel like the momentum is slowly moving forward but never halted.

While it will always be best practice to record room tone and ambient audio on location, it’s a step that can easily be overlooked or forgotten. No worries—your pals at PremiumBeat have covered you with fifteen 100% FREE ambient background tracks! (SPOILER ALERT: They’re at the bottom of the article.) We’ve also included several free sound effects packs for filling out your soundscape even more. Additionally, we’ve included a pack to one of our “cinematic atmosphere” freebies that could be the perfect fit for your next project.

Now, let’s look at the hows, whys, whens, wheres, and wows of working with ambient audio.

What is Ambient Music?

I’ve found it best to think of ambient music as “instrumental electronic music that plays in the background.” Does that make sense, or was that completely silly? Ambient music, at its core, is meant to fill up the silence in the background of whatever is taking place or taking the attention of whatever is happening. Overall, ambient music focuses more on a mood or tone than distinct beats with a chorus and melody like most music offers. When thinking of famous ambient artists, look no further than the works of Brian Eno (who coined the term), Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker, Tangerine Dream, or even Tycho.

When to Use Ambient Background Audio

When is the “right” time to use an ambient background track? The answer: Most of the time.

Ambient audio makes an on-screen world deeper, richer, and more true to life when deployed thoughtfully. Aside from creating an atmosphere in narrative projects, they can also help your client, corporate, and everyday work! Here are a few content types that can benefit from ambient background tracks:

Narrative shorts and features: Ambient background tracks give most scenes and settings a more diverse, dynamic backdrop that, in turn, places your characters (and pulls your audience) into a more fully realized world.
Documentary projects: Ambient background tracks for documentary work can be controversial, as you’ll always want to use accurate audio recorded at the moment when possible. However, there are instances when scene creation is needed, and these tracks can help provide a sense of realism.
Commercial projects: It might surprise you that many commercials (even broadcast ones you see on TV) use ambient background tracks and audio to quickly root scenes in their specific reality.
Corporate projects: Similarly, corporate videos and projects use ambient noises and sound effects to make mundane office settings feel bustling, as though real work is being done in the background.
Digital content: Finally, using ambient audio and sound effects is a fast, easy way to make TikToks, Instagram Stories, and other digital creations feel “bigger.”
Streaming: I’ve noticed in the past few years that more and more streamers have some ambient-sounding track playing in the background while they… stream. Again, it’s just one more way to effectively keep your audience engaged without the sounds being too distracting from the video’s focus.

Tips for Using Ambient Background Tracks

Audio Editing — *Often overlooked, audio is one the most important aspects of any project. Image via edwardolive.*

Here are six quick tips to keep in mind when working with ambient background tracks like the TOTALLY FREE ambient background tracks at the bottom of this article.

1. Download and Review

Okay, obviously, you must find the tracks, download them, and listen to them. Please give them a quick play-through to get an idea of their quality and potential use cases and make sure the tracks don’t have any noisy blemishes, odd sounds, or audio tags/watermarks.

2. Find Your Favorite Stretch

Open the files in your video editing software (or audio editor) of choice, and find your favorite stretch. Depending on your needs, that might be a five-second clip or a fifty-second one. With your favorite part identified, now it’s time to . . .

3. Create Your Loops

Mixing Music — *Extend your audio capacity by looping the tracks. Image via Marmolejos.*

It’s time to start cutting. If you want to use the background audio over an extended time—say, anything over two or three minutes—then you’ll probably want to loop the audio. Using your favorite section, just copy and duplicate that stretch over and over, using crossfades to link everything together. We also have many tracks with “Loops” built in, so you can choose from several options for what part of the song you want to loop.

4. Match to Your Video

Once your background audio is ready to go, be sure to (of course) match it up with your video. Ideally, you’ve already done all your video editing and are at picture lock. You’ll only want your background audio to be heard when appropriate, corresponding to what’s on screen.

5. Adjust Levels and Effects

Finally, you can make final level adjustments once everything is laid out and set. Unless a scene or project calls for any background audio to be super noticeable, you want the audio levels to be relatively low, creating a soft hum in the background, which simply adds to the ambiance.

You can also try out some other effects—like high-pass or low-pass filters—to make the audio feel either closer or farther away. However, most of the time simply adjusting the levels should be fine.

6. Choose the Instrumentals

One last tip is choosing the instrumentals from our vocal tracks in our library and using them as an ambient background track.

You can also slow the track down, which will change the instrument’s pitch and sound, making its weird ambient-esque feeling. You can even filter your selection of tracks based on the instrument, so choose Synthesizer or even something like Keyboard and look through till you find something that has that distinctive ambient sound. Trust me; it opens up so many different doors to using music that you won’t hear anywhere else.

Where to Find Ambient Background Tracks

Video Editing Process — *Background tracks are a necessity! Unless you’re going for the* No Country for Old Men (literally has no music) vibe. Image via George Khelashvili.

Now, let’s move on to where to find ambient background audio and tracks online—for FREE! I recommend searching for ways in the super-robust PremiumBeat music library, but we’ll get you started with the freebies below.

Here’s what you’ll get when you download this collection of FREE ambient background tracks:

Bird ambiance
Busy city street
Campfire
Car interior
Coffee shop
Electric hum
Forest 1
Forest 2
Helicopter
Ocean waves
Plane
Rumble
Street traffic
Thunderstorm
Windy desert

To download the ambient background sound pack, click the download button below! These sound effects are free to use in any personal or commercial projects. By downloading, you agree not to resell or redistribute these free assets.

Download Here

Once you’ve downloaded the pack above, play with the various tracks in your timeline to ensure they work well with your video project. Next up, we’ve got our big 80+ FREE pack of cinematic atmospheres for you to check out and download.

This collection is so extensive we had to split it into five different downloads. Each download contains a different style and sound for a different mood or type of video project. You’ll find loops, so you can extend and control the tones and sounds the way you like them for as long as you want. The idea was to give you control, making you the composer, in a sense. Everything is fully controllable and customizable! Have fun with these ambient sounds; we sure did.

Download the FREE Ambient Cinematic Atmospheres Here

Free Sound Effect Packs

Once you’ve found an excellent ambient track to use for your project or film, maybe you need some extra soundscapes to fill up the world you’ve created. It’s hard to capture every sound you need on the day of shooting, so you’ll always have to throw in foley during the post-production process. Over the years here at PremiumBeat and Shutterstock, we’ve released several sound effect packs for you to download for FREE! Here are some of the best ones below:

For more freebies, audio tips and tricks, and related filmmaking resources, check out these articles:

Cover image via Mauritius Images