I enjoy making sounds that imitate the realworld "physics" actually... be it nature or even acoustic instruments... i never aim to hit the original sound 100% perfectly (though it would be nice sometimes), but instead try to induce the character of real life audio physics into my sounds... for some reason those sounds come to life in a different way than pure synthesizer sounds, and they seem to work very well in the Ambient genre I'm trying to do.
In fact, I see this goal of creating sounds that remind you of realworld sound as kind of a "Frankenstein" kind of approach... it is to me, like if those sounds I create that try to emulate nature and acoustic properties simply "come to life" more... it's like they're induced with a "soul", but never really capturing it perfectly making them some kind of aural "Frankenstein abomination"
(please forgive my strange analogy, but it IS Halloween times
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Also... often I find it hard to create many of these "real life" sounds because, yes, you can make the sound of the wind, water, fire etc... but very quickly you realize that some sounds are quite abstract... how do the sound of fire really sound? and is it the sound of fire? or is it really not the wind blowing on the fire that you hear, or the wood cracklings? ... also goes for the sound of "Earth" when I tried to create the four elements as REV2 sounds... Air and Water were easy, fire was a challenge but Earth really got me... what sounds depict "Earth"!? ... I ended up with trying to make a sound that resembles dirt and rocks falling down a slope... what about the sound of an Earth Quake!? is that the sound of the earth?
My point is, that we very often give sounds in nature their traits from other things... how about the sound of the Northern Lights? ... the sound of spiders and other crawling insects which we really do not hear? ... the sound of a slithering snake? ... all those folley sound FX can be rather tricky... it's an artform in itself because you have to trick the listener into believing that a thing that actually makes no sound in itself, has a fake sound given to it, that will make the listener feel it's "fitting" somehow.
You even mention the "sound of tingling ice" ... hey... ice do not have a sound at all, but anyway we often associate cold, freezing, snow and ice with the sound of bells... why? ... is there a direct connection between bells and cold because bells are often associated with Christmas and therefore winter which equals cold, snow and ice? ... is it because ice has a bellish kind of resonant property i do not know of? ... or did someone a long way back simply just decide that "hey! we use bells for this icy cutscene!" and then it has passed down thru history that "this is just how the sound of snow and ice should sound!" ?
But nonetheless... it's fun to try and make them, and in the process you almost always come up with other strange and organic sounds defying anything "real life", so it's totally worth it... really