Behind a mesh fence on a dusty, desert ranch in southern Nevada, a dromedary camel named Fabio paces back and forth while making deep, bubbling roars that rise and fall with an almost mechanical rhythm.
The sound can stop you in your tracks, and yet it feels eerily familiar.
“He’s puffing the air through his neck to make those reverberations,” Manda Butler tells The National. “It’s telling the ladies that he’s a very handsome boy … and telling the other males to stay away.”
Ms Butler is a zookeeper at Camel Safari in Mesquite, a small town near Las Vegas, where tourists come to ride camels and learn about the animals that are well suited to the hot, dry landscape.
The desert climate is not unlike parts of the Middle East and North Africa, where the camel came from.
During mating season, camels like Fabio produce some of the most unusual vocalisations in the animal kingdom.
As they enter rut, a fleshy sac known as a dulla inflates from the side of the mouth. Air is forced through it, creating a wet, gurgling sound that shows its dominance, while attracting females.
“They become very testosterone-filled,” Ms Butler says. “They’re very focused on breeding.”
The noise Fabio makes feels almost prehistoric. And that may be why it has found a second life far from the deserts of the Middle East on this ranch in the US.
“Camels are a gold mine for sound designers,” David Philipp, studio head, UK at video game services company Arrival and a founding member of sound creator Boom Library, tells The National.
“They have a very specific guttural sound that is really useful ... there is this 'moany' quality ... and they hold this sound for a long time.”
Mr Philipp, based in London, has recorded sounds from camels as part of video game production, and describes them as surprisingly rewarding animals to work with.
But long before the microphone is switched on, capturing those sounds takes weeks of preparation, from careful research to delicate negotiations with handlers.
It also demands a high tolerance for failure when the real recording begins.
“It’s a gamble," he says. "Every animal is as individual as a human ... even if you want them to vocalise ... they [may] not do anything."
Camels, however, have offered him some rare reliability. Working with a specialist in the UK, and his long-time colleague, Arrival's senior sound designer Jack Webber, Mr Philipp discovered that a brief period of separation can be key. Temporarily remove camels from the group, and they begin to call out loudly for the others.
He recalls one instance where they called back and forth in long, echoing noises that carried on for minutes at a time.
“That was one of the most straightforward [recordings] we’ve ever done,” he says.
A similar technique has been used in Hollywood. During the making of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the cries of a baby Tyrannosaurus rex were built from recordings of a real camel calf.
Gary Rydstrom, the film’s sound designer and re-recording mixer, described how the team captured the sound after briefly separating a baby camel from its mother.
“I don’t think we modified the baby camel too much,” he says in a behind-the-scenes special feature posted on YouTube. “It’s a baby camel calling for its mum.”
The use of camel vocalisations extends well beyond that film. According to Vanity Fair, similar recordings were used to help create the roars of woolly mammoths in Game of Thrones.
They have also appeared in modern video games, including God of War Ragnarok and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, in which Mr Philipp and his colleagues incorporated them into a range of creature sounds.
In the studio, camel recordings usually take on a new life. They are stretched, compressed and combined with other sounds until something unique emerges. The result might be a monster, an alien or something more primal.
“It could be a chair screeching on the floor,” Mr Philipp says. “You try and blend those elements together so it sounds like one cohesive creature … that is where the art begins.”
