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AS MOVIE makers have long suspected, made-up noises really do sound better than the real thing. Psychologists Laurie Heller and Lauren Wolf from Brown University in Rhode Island recorded the sounds of people walking through mud and autumn leaves. Then they faked the sound by squeezing wet newspapers or sticking their fingers into a packet of cornflakes, and modifying the rhythm of the sounds on a computer. Volunteers asked to identify the most realistic sounds picked the fake noises more than 70 per cent of the time, the researchers will report at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Pittsburgh next month. Heller says isolating which qualities are exaggerated in the fakes will help us understand how our brains identify noises. It could also make for better sound effects for games.