Elevenlabs Sound Effects V2 API Documentation

Elevenlabs Sound Effects V2 API Documentation

Playground

ElevenLabs Sound Effects V2 Text-to-SFX generates high-quality sound effects and seamlessly looping ambience from text descriptions for video, games, ads, social content, and sound design workflows. Ready-to-use REST inference API, best performance, no coldstarts, affordable pricing.

Features

ElevenLabs Sound Effects V2 generates sound effects and looping ambience directly from text descriptions. Describe the sound, environment, intensity, and how it should evolve, then choose the duration and optionally enable seamless looping.

It is designed for cinematic effects, environmental ambience, game audio, transitions, Foley-style sounds, and other non-speech audio workflows.

Why Choose This?

• Text-to-sound generation
  Create sound effects directly from natural-language descriptions.

• Seamless looping
  Enable loop to generate ambience or effects designed to repeat smoothly.

• Flexible duration
  Generate sounds from 0.5 to 22 seconds.

• Prompt adherence control
  Use prompt_influence to adjust how closely the generated sound follows the text description.

• Environmental sound design
  Describe location, atmosphere, movement, intensity, and changes over time.

• Simple workflow
  Provide a prompt, choose the duration, and generate a downloadable audio file.

Parameters

How to Use

1. Describe the sound — Specify the sound source, environment, intensity, texture, and movement.
2. Set duration optional — Choose a duration from 0.5 to 22 seconds.
3. Enable looping optional — Set loop=true when you need repeating ambience or a seamless audio loop.
4. Adjust prompt influence optional — Increase it when closer adherence to the description is important.
5. Submit — Generate, preview, and retrieve the audio file.

Pricing

Pricing is based on the requested duration.

The rate is $0.0022 per requested second.

If duration is omitted, the default 5-second request costs $0.011.

loop and prompt_influence do not add separate charges.

Best Use Cases

• Cinematic sound effects — Generate impacts, transitions, mechanical sounds, environmental events, and dramatic effects.
• Ambient soundscapes — Create rain, forests, city environments, room tone, machinery, crowds, and other background ambience.
• Game audio — Generate effects for environments, interactions, objects, creatures, and gameplay events.
• Looping backgrounds — Create repeatable ambience for games, installations, videos, or interactive experiences.
• Foley-style effects — Generate footsteps, doors, fabric movement, object handling, and other action-related sounds.
• Creative prototyping — Quickly explore different sound-design directions from text descriptions.

Pro Tips

• Describe the sound itself rather than spoken narration.
• Include the environment when acoustics matter, such as a narrow hallway, open field, warehouse, or small room.
• Describe how the sound evolves, such as gradually building, fading away, approaching, or moving past the listener.
• Use specific material and action words for Foley-style effects.
• Enable loop for continuous ambience that needs to repeat smoothly.
• Increase prompt_influence when the output needs to follow specific sound characteristics more closely.
• Keep the prompt focused instead of combining many unrelated sound events.

Notes

• prompt is required and supports up to 450 characters.
• duration supports values from 0.5 to 22 seconds.
• duration defaults to 5 seconds.
• loop defaults to false.
• prompt_influence defaults to 0.3.
• Output is provided as an MP3 audio file.
• This endpoint is intended for sound effects and ambience rather than spoken narration.

Related Models

• ElevenLabs Eleven V4 — Generate expressive spoken narration, voiceovers, and character performances.

Authentication

For authentication details, please refer to the Authentication Guide.

API Endpoints

Submit Task & Query Result

set -euo pipefail

export WAVESPEED_API_KEY="your-api-key"

REQUEST_BODY=$(cat <<'JSON'
{
  "prompt": "A cinematic ocean wave at sunrise, highly detailed",
  "duration": 5,
  "loop": false,
  "prompt_influence": 0.3
}
JSON
)

# 1. Submit the prediction.
SUBMIT_RESPONSE=$(curl --silent --show-error --fail-with-body \
  -X POST "https://api.wavespeed.ai/api/v3/elevenlabs/sound-effects-v2" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${WAVESPEED_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "${REQUEST_BODY}")

TASK=$(printf '%s' "${SUBMIT_RESPONSE}" | jq 'if type == "object" and has("data") then .data else . end')
PREDICTION_ID=$(printf '%s' "${TASK}" | jq -r '.id // empty')
if [ -z "${PREDICTION_ID}" ]; then
  printf 'Submission response did not contain a prediction id
' >&2
  exit 1
fi
RESULT_URL="https://api.wavespeed.ai/api/v3/predictions/${PREDICTION_ID}/result"

# 2. Poll until the prediction finishes.
while true; do
  RESPONSE=$(curl --silent --show-error --fail-with-body \
    "${RESULT_URL}" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer ${WAVESPEED_API_KEY}")
  RESULT=$(printf '%s' "${RESPONSE}" | jq 'if type == "object" and has("data") then .data else . end')
  STATUS=$(printf '%s' "${RESULT}" | jq -r '.status // empty')

  case "${STATUS}" in
    completed) printf '%s\n' "${RESULT}" | jq '.outputs'; break ;;
    failed|cancelled|timeout|deleted) printf '%s\n' "${RESULT}" | jq . >&2; exit 1 ;;
    *) sleep 2 ;;
  esac
done

Parameters

Task Submission Parameters

Request Parameters

Response Parameters

Result Request Parameters

Result Response Parameters