Electrical sound comes in two families that are often confused. The steady kind is hum and buzz, from current doing what it should. The violent kind is arcing and sparking, from current going where it should not. Both are useful and they need different prompts. Most disappointing electrical generations describe one family in the other's words.
Every clip shows the exact prompt that produced it. The render script reads its prompts from the same file as this page. Copy one, change a word and generate your own.
high voltage electrical arc discharging, violent crackling snap with an ozone hiss, close and dry
tesla coil firing repeatedly, rhythmic buzzing electrical discharges with a bright cracking edge, large room
faulty mains electrical hum, low buzzing drone with intermittent crackling and flickering, close, seamless loop
fluorescent tube failing, buzzing starter clicking repeatedly with the tube stuttering on and off, empty room
electrical power surge building then a breaker tripping with a hard clunk and everything falling silent
shower of electrical sparks from a severed cable, rapid crackling with sputtering bursts, industrial space
taser arcing between contacts, rapid harsh electrical crackle with a rising whine, close mic, dry
electrical substation humming under load, deep mains drone with a metallic resonance, outdoor, seamless loop
sharp static electricity shock, single brief snapping zap, very close mic, completely dry
lightning arcing to ground, tearing electrical rip into a deep concussive crack, open outdoor space
These models respond to physical description. Name the material, the action and the space.
high voltage electrical arc discharging, violent crackling snap with an ozone hiss, close and dry
"Ozone hiss" is a useful cue. High voltage arcs produce a distinctive hiss alongside the crack, and naming it separates an arc from a spark.
faulty mains electrical hum, low buzzing drone with intermittent crackling and flickering, close, seamless loop
"Intermittent" makes it a fault instead of a working hum. The irregularity carries the story.
tesla coil firing repeatedly, rhythmic buzzing electrical discharges with a bright cracking edge, large room
A tesla coil discharges at an audio-rate rhythm. Asking for the rhythm stops it collapsing into undifferentiated noise.
sharp static electricity shock, single brief snapping zap, very close mic, completely dry
Static shocks are among the shortest sounds in any library. Without "very close" and "completely dry", the room swallows them.
Mains hum is tonal: it sits at the supply frequency and its harmonics, which is why it can be notched out of a recording. Arcing is broadband and chaotic, closer to a crackling fire than a tone. Because they are spectrally opposite, mixing their vocabulary gives you mush: a prompt for a buzzing arc returns something halfway between that convinces as neither. Decide which family you need, then write the whole prompt in its terms.
A working circuit has little drama. Electrical sound gets dramatic through intermittency: the flicker, the stutter, the sputter, the moment it cuts out and comes back. Prompt the irregularity with words like "intermittent", "stuttering", "flickering" and "sputtering", and give the render enough time for several cycles. Four seconds of a fault that repeats twice reads as a fault; one second reads as a click.
Most energy-weapon sounds are electrical discharge, processed and pitched, so generating here and treating the result as source material often works better than prompting the laser collection directly. An arc gives the aggressive broadband texture, a tesla coil gives rhythm, and a rising hum gives the charge. Layer them and the result belongs to your project instead of sounding like a pack.
The models run on your machine, which changes the cost, the privacy and what you can automate.
Weights are fetched once. After that, generation, the library and the API all work with the network off. Everything lives in one SQLite file and one folder of WAVs under ~/.soundbox, and nothing is uploaded.
Soundbox runs an MCP server in the same process, with tools for generating and listing sounds. Generated files come back as absolute paths, so an agent can copy them into a project.
Every model's terms are shown before you download it, and non-commercial weights need an explicit confirmation. Soundbox is MIT. The licence of the model that made a sound governs what you may do with it.
claude mcp add --transport http soundbox http://127.0.0.1:17494/mcpcurl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:17494/api/generate \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"model":"audiocpp-stable-audio-3-sfx","prompt":"8-bit coin pickup blip","duration_s":1}'