Wood is the sound of old buildings, and old buildings supply much of a scene's atmosphere. The useful split is between wood under slow load, which creaks, groans and ticks, and wood under sudden load, which snaps and splinters. Most wooden sounds are one of those two events at a particular size and moisture. These prompts are organised around that split, because the models respond to it.
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.
old floorboard creaking under slow shifting weight, dry timber groaning with a small tick at the end, quiet empty house
dry tree branch snapping in half, sharp crack with splintering fibres tearing, forest floor, outdoor
wooden plank broken over a knee, loud cracking split with long splinters tearing apart, close mic
knuckles knocking three times on a hollow wooden door, dull resonant thumps, hallway reverb
axe splitting a log on a chopping block, heavy bite into wood with fibres tearing and halves falling
heavy wooden chair dragged across a hardwood floor, juddering stick-slip scrape, medium room
wooden ship timbers creaking and working against each other in a swell, slow rhythmic groaning, enclosed hold
small wooden matchbox shaken, dry rattling of matches inside cardboard and wood, very close mic
wooden fence panel collapsing, nails tearing free with planks clattering onto grass, outdoor garden
someone climbing old wooden stairs slowly, each step producing a different creak, tense spacing, empty house
These models respond to physical description. Name the material, the action and the space.
old floorboard creaking under slow shifting weight, dry timber groaning with a small tick at the end, quiet empty house
"Shifting weight" implies a continuous force, which is what produces a creak instead of a knock.
dry tree branch snapping in half, sharp crack with splintering fibres tearing, forest floor, outdoor
"Fibres tearing" separates wood from other snapping materials. Without it a break can sound like plastic.
knuckles knocking three times on a hollow wooden door, dull resonant thumps, hallway reverb
"Hollow" decides whether a knock has a boxy resonance or a dead thud, and the model honours it consistently.
heavy wooden chair dragged across a hardwood floor, juddering stick-slip scrape, medium room
Dragged wood grabs and releases. Naming that judder stops the result sounding like a synthesised sweep.
Moisture changes how wood sounds more than size does. Dry timber is brittle, bright and loud; it cracks cleanly and rings a little. Wet or green wood is dull and thuddy; it bends before it breaks and the break is muffled. If a snap sounds rubbery, add "dry". If a break sounds too bright for a rain-soaked exterior, add "damp" or "green". That one word moves the result further than most rewrites.
A creak is slow, and the most common mistake is rendering it into a clip too short to hold it. A floorboard under a shifting foot takes two to four seconds to complete its arc (rise, sustain, tick, release), and a one-second render truncates the interesting part. Give creaks room and ask for the ending explicitly. The small settling tick at the end is what tells an audience someone is standing there.
Wooden interiors are usually heard in a room with no furniture and no people, which is why "quiet empty house" appears in so many of these prompts. It tells the model to give you a long, slightly boxy reflection with a low noise floor. That is how an unfurnished room sounds, and it places the creak in a real space.
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}'