Under the “Story Requirement” section of “The Canons of Please Stand By,” requirement E reads, “The mad magic of SOUND must be employed as often and as artfully as is feasible. The ear must never be treated as step-brother to the eye.” For this reason, the series presented viewers with sights and sounds never before experienced. One of the things that made the sound of The Outer Limits so iconic is the traversal of the boundary beyond the stereotypical coffee-percolator sound of science fiction film that by this point was such a clichéd sound for the future. Sounds for science fiction and fantasy deal with and engage the imagination. Sounds in science fiction must be both believable and satisfy audience expectations. There are three ways to create convincing sound effects in film and television, and The Outer Limits used all of them: manually, vocally, and electronically. Manual concerns the use of instruments or everyday objects, vocal uses the human voice, and electronic uses either electronic instruments or machines. Often, more than one of these will be used at any given time. As such, the episodes’ ambient sounds take precedence over the music in order to make the viewer aware of the new soundscape and its possibilities.

Frontiere established the sound design of The Outer Limits that would persist through the end of the series’ run, even when he and Elizalde no longer worked on it. Occasionally music or orchestrations by Frontiere's composition teacher Robert Van Eps and Edward B. Powell were also included in season one, and this will be discussed further in the next chapter. But music supervisor and sound editor of the first season John Elizalde, and John Caper Jr. in the second season created many of the series sound effects, including the added alien voices and electronic sounds. Those also responsible included coordinator and copyist Roger Farris, mixer Jay Ashworth, editor Arthur J. Cornall, and recording engineers Jack Wood and Harold Smith. The series’ sound design helped to emphasize the point that what you cannot see often can scare you most and make what you can see more frightening. Watching The Outer Limits was truly an experience and the music and sound design of the series enhanced that experience. The sound effects often enrich the diegetic space in which the viewer enters and heightens its credibility.