“Indie Games Need Great Sound Too” GDC Drink Up!

Need more reasons? Here’s 10:

1a) Ouya? So, how will your game sound on people’s home theater system?
1b) So, Sony and/or Microsoft is all the sudden your friend? See #1
2) 5.1 Surround Sound? You don’t even have a subwoofer!
3) It just feels wrong to have all this great art and design and canned sound effects and music.
4) Oh yeah, indie games can have great dialog TOO…see Bastion or Primordia
5) You’d like good sound, but how do we deal with actors, composers, musicians, contracts, rights, royalties?
6) Your game has a potential worldwide market….but, how do we localize the audio?
7) One looping music file and 1 sound effect/per event isn’t cutting it anymore.
8) Time to do marketing..You need your trailer and logo sonic branding to ROCK!
9) We’ve got decent sound, but you’re interested in runtime reverbs, eqs, and advanced mixing.

and…

10)A Drink! Yeah, we’ll buy you a drink. Something we just do when we meet a sound friendly developer.

#indiesoundgdc for updates

Dead Space 3 Gamesom Trailer

The Wabi Sabi Sound Variety Show

Louis & BeBe Barron: Influencial Early Sound Designers.

1 Reply

I have a particular fondness for Louis & BeBe Barron. Our vision for Wabi Sabi Sound is that projects have a core purpose and every aspect of its production, whether or not it breaks convention, should serve that purpose. Louis & BeBe Barron had a gigantic challenge in this regard and pulled off an impressive compositional AND sound design feat. The musical accomplishment is well known, but let’s look at the sound design too.

Husband and wife team Louis and BeBe Barron, are often credited as creating the first electronic score for a film in 1956 for Forbidden Planet.

Why I love them:

1) Not only is it the first fully electronic score, they hand built every circuit specifically for the emotional tone they were trying to convey. Scene by scene, moment by moment, layer by layer.

Check this out from Wikipedia:

The 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener from MIT played an important role in the development of the Barrons’ composition.^[5] The science of cybernetics proposes that certain natural laws of behavior apply to both animals and more complex electronic machines.

By following the equations presented in the book, Louis was able to build electronic circuits which he manipulated to generate sounds.^[5] Most of the tonalities were generated with a circuit called a ring modulator. The sounds and patterns that came out of the circuits were unique and unpredictable because they were actually overloading the circuits until they burned out to create the sounds. The Barrons could never recreate the same sounds again, though they later tried very hard to recreate their signature sound from Forbidden Planet. Because of the unforeseen life span of the circuitry, the Barrons made a habit of recording everything.

2) The score/sound design is beautiful and crazy. “Battle With the Invisible Monster” is a good example of the music and sound design I’m talking about. The early moments are eerie and serene, but the Barons build tension through musical and sound effect type sound until you feel an epic battle is taking place…..very interesting vocal screams, alarms with distortion and destruction.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/battle-invisible-monster/id515165348?i=515165741

3) I just love this picture.

When I look at this picture I don’t see a traditional modern (for the time) recording studio. I see sonic experiments.

With the advances in technology and proliferation of tools to create sound, I find it helpful to stay connected to the past masters. It reminds me that the new experiences our audiences crave come from breaking through the norm, utilizing the very best of whatever tools are available, but letting the core purpose of the project dictate our methods.

Andy

The Witness Audio: 1000 Subtle Layers

1 Reply

I didn’t think Witness was going to be an easy project by any stretch, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be one of our biggest creative challenges. I’ve worked on nearly 80 projects spanning feature film, games, ads and other sorts, and my job as sound designer had always been to broaden the experience in every possible way. The Witness inverts this notion.

A tree of any significance in a film or game will have a bird perched on its branches chirping away. Cicadas will buzz. Wind will rustle its leaves. Branches will creak, stress and morph right before your ears. All this happening without you actually seeing it…or really expecting to, interestingly.

In The Witness every element has purpose. A key game mechanic, in fact, relies on the player’s perception as they explore. So, we’re not just talking aesthetics…noise (literally stated) ruins the game’s playability. Noticing, as a buddhist would call it, is key to discovering solutions and even finding the puzzles themselves. Nothing in the Witness is superfluous.

All this said, the island is a tangible living breathing organic place following roughly the same laws of our universe. The trees exist. They have mass and energy. My eyes receive bands of light reflecting off them, and in fact they are quite beautiful. So then what do my ears hear? Silence is not only a bad artistic choice, its untrue.

At this point, you’ve probably asked, “What about music?” It’s no spoiler that there isn’t a gigantic speaker system in the sky fed by a mic’d orchestra. So….

None the less, the island is a fascinating place, with lots to see, hear and do. Geoff and I ‘the audio team’ have had an interesting time exploring 1000′s of layers of sonic subtly, and finding ways to engage players to listen ever deeper. This is a unique project for game sound, and we thought it would be of interest to share our challenges and discoveries since starting with Jon in 2010 (and of course the challenges yet to meet). Like, follow, or sub to stay in touch.