Sound Effects quickstart

This guide will show you how to generate sound effects using the Sound Effects API.

Create an API key in the dashboard here, which you’ll use to securely access the API.

Store the key as a managed secret and pass it to the SDKs either as a environment variable via an .env file, or directly in your app’s configuration depending on your preference.

.env

ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=<your_api_key_here>

We'll also use the dotenv library to load our API key from an environment variable.

pip install elevenlabs
pip install python-dotenv

npm install @elevenlabs/elevenlabs-js
npm install dotenv

Install the ElevenLabs CLI. Homebrew (macOS) and Scoop (Windows) are recommended.

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install elevenlabs/tap/elevenlabs

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add elevenlabs https://github.com/elevenlabs/scoop-bucket
scoop install elevenlabs

npm

npm install -g @elevenlabs/cli

curl

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/elevenlabs/cli/releases/latest/download/elevenlabs-cli-installer.sh | sh

Then authenticate — this opens your browser to authorize the CLI:

elevenlabs auth login

Create a new file named example.py or example.mts, depending on your language of choice and add the following code:

# example.py
import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv
from elevenlabs.client import ElevenLabs
from elevenlabs.play import play

load_dotenv()

elevenlabs = ElevenLabs(
  api_key=os.getenv("ELEVENLABS_API_KEY"),
)
audio = elevenlabs.text_to_sound_effects.convert(text="Cinematic Braam, Horror")

play(audio)

// example.mts
import { ElevenLabsClient, play } from "@elevenlabs/elevenlabs-js";
import "dotenv/config";

const elevenlabs = new ElevenLabsClient();

const audio = await elevenlabs.textToSoundEffects.convert({
  text: "Cinematic Braam, Horror",
});

await play(audio);

Then run it:

python example.py

npx tsx example.mts

You should hear your generated sound effect playing through your speakers.

Generate a sound effect and save it to a file:

elevenlabs text-to-sound-effects convert \
  --text "Cinematic Braam, Horror" \
  --output sound-effect.mp3

Open sound-effect.mp3 to hear the result.

Learn about sound effect generation, supported formats, and use cases

Generate spoken audio from text with the Text to Speech API

Explore all Sound Effects parameters and response formats