Andrew Quinn, sound designer at Splash Damage, was kind enough to speak to Designing Sound about his work on the recently announced mobile strategy title RAD Soldiers on the new social label WarChest. The music for the game was produced by Marc Canham of Nimrod Productions.

DS: Can you tell us a little about how you got into game audio, and your audio career so far?

AQ: I always had an interest in sound and music. In my youth I played guitar in local bands, recorded music with friend’s bands and generally made a racket. This messing with sound and music led to me studying a BSc in Creative Music and Sound Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University. During the course I got a chance to delve into post-production and more importantly game audio in the third year and I really enjoyed it. I stayed on another year at Leeds to do an MSc in Sound and Music for Interactive Games under the expert tutelage of Richard Stevens and David Raybould.

After I graduated from the masters, I really struggled to find a job in the games industry. Luckily, the university was looking for a part-time lecturer on their audio course and they took me on. As it was only part-time it gave me a bit of time to work on my own projects and get a portfolio of work together. One project I got to work on was the Game Audio Tutorial book by the aforementioned Leeds-based lecturers Richard Stevens and David Raybould. I ended up creating the tutorial levels and sound library bundled with the book.

That summer I decided to attend the Develop audio track in Brighton to do a bit of networking and generally get my portfolio about. I must have done something right as a few weeks later I secured a couple of interviews and later a job offer.

I joined Splash Damage just before BRINK shipped and I’ve been there just over a year now.

DS: Is there an area of sound that you’re particularly drawn to?

AQ: My main focus is sound design and implementation, that’s what I do. I particularly enjoy creating creatures and weapons.

DS: How did you approach pre-production for a mobile title such as RAD Soldiers? How did this differ from your work on a console title?

AQ: Pre-production for this title was very short. The game had already been going a little while when I was brought on, there was quite a bit of concept art, some of the characters and environments were being worked on and some of the base gameplay was already in. After I joined the rest of the team and I spent some of time working on the overall direction of the sound design and music. I came up with some style examples for the music and did a few pre-sonics for some of the ambience and weapons. I also wrote a document with some initial ideas for cool little audio systems we could have if we had the time to implement them.

In general though it’s very similar or I should say my approach is very similar, but scaled down. For instance, rather than ten variations of a knife stab or punch, we’ll have two. Instead of having all the characters speak localised dialogue, we’ll have very general barks, grunts and vocalisations that could be interpreted in any language. We may not have the same amount of time or budget as a AAA game but I still approach every sound with the question “How do I make this as good as possible with the resources available?”

DS: How large an influence did the Strategy genre and multiplayer aspects of the game have on your decisions?

AQ: We took a bit of inspiration from some strategy games, the Command and Conquer series and Worms being two notable examples. This was more their tongue-in-cheek approach to rather than a particular style.

DS: How do you approach communication with the other disciplines on the team? How closely do you work with the other departments?

AQ: During development I was sat with the team working on a pair of headphones rather than hidden away in a studio, so communication was pretty easy and free flowing. The team has always been fairly small (at its largest 8-10 people), so there was never the issue of not knowing what other people were working on or doing. It created a nice dynamic where you could iterate relatively quickly on content and make the game better.

DS: What do you feel is the hardest part of creating sound for interactive media on devices such as smartphones or tablets? What were the main creative / technical challenges you faced in achieving your vision?

AQ: Delivering a compelling and interesting audio experience on a mobile device is quite a challenge, however there were a few things inherent in the game that helped. The asynchronous turn-based gameplay meant that the amount of sound playing at any one time was largely predictable. This enabled me to orchestrate events in a semi-linear fashion, so the overall design ended up being pretty clean. The mix never really gets too busy which can be a problem in strategy/multiplayer games and would be an absolute nightmare on a mobile device. Additionally, for the most part the game has a fixed perspective and player view, so we didn’t have to deal with shifting distances or multiple player perspectives on the same actions which would have complicated the mix and increased the amount of sound playing back. So in the end we managed to avoid quite a few headaches that can be inherent of strategy and multiplayer games.

One of the major issues we encountered was caused by the devices’ ability to only decode .wav or .mp3. Wav is obviously really nice, but for most instances, the size of the file is just too big for a mobile device. Most of the implementation work in Unity was done on a PC that compresses sounds in Ogg, which is lovely. The Ogg compression seemed to hold up pretty well, even at ridiculously low bit rates. However when the build gets deployed to a device, all the sound gets re-compressed into MP3, which created all sorts of interesting problems. Listening back to the sounds on the devices was night and day; there was aliasing, artefacts and all sorts of other compression nasties. The guns and ambiences were particularly affected by this. In the end, I had to spend a bit of time working out what sort of compression values didn’t degrade the quality on a sound by sound basis. In some cases the Mp3 compression bit rate had to be a great deal higher than the Ogg versions to get the same quality.

Strangely, the usual game audio memory limitations haven’t seemed to be as much of an issue as they usually are. The devices themselves have a decent amount of memory, and being sensible about the amount of sound used has meant we haven’t had to go through assets purging quality. Saying that, it’s not like we have skimped on the amount of sound – in fact, we managed to squeeze over 1000 sounds into the base game.

DS: What are the Splash Damage audio team preferred tools for working with? Do you have any software suites, plugins or apps that you use regularly?

AQ: We use Sound Forge/Protools and a combination of Waves, GRM Tools, McDSP and Sound Toys plugins for content creation. Implementation in RAD Soldiers was done within the Unity Engine with some extra custom in-house audio components. On our other projects we’re running an Unreal-Wwise combo.

DS: What do you feel is the most satisfying part of creating sound for games?

AQ: Sound for games poses a unique challenge that I really enjoy. Not only do you have to create the sound asset but you also have to make it work in an interactive environment. When you have hundreds of events, states, parameters, dsp’s and files being triggered dynamically, just getting a sound playing back in-game as intended is a big win.

DS: Do you have a favorite sound or audio system from any game?

AQ: I can’t really put any one down, but I can mention a couple that impressed me recently. Mass Effect 3 did a great job of selling the scale of the war happening around you in the ambient audio, and the big audio events featuring the reapers were really cool. Portal 2 just generally impressed me audio wise, the gels had some really cool little music systems attached to them and the processing on GlaDos’s and Cave’s voices were really great. Oh and Battlefield 3 in its entirety (damn you, DICE, I want my life back).

DS: What was your personal favourite sound or audio system from RAD Soldiers that we can look forward to?

AQ: I had a lot of fun with the weapon and ability audio, it’s mostly hyper-realistic, overdesigned stuff. They were really fun to create.

Another group of sounds I enjoyed creating was for the UAV character. He’s a plucky little robot that enjoys nothing more than a bit of casual leg humping. The sound of his voice was made using a recording of a screwdriver being fed into a little plastic desk fan and some processing with Sound Toy’s Crystallizer.

Under the hood, RAD Soldiers is pretty simple. There were a couple of little audio systems that I was pretty keen to get in from the start of the project. One of these was a simple ducking system to try and make the big events shine through. It’s essentially a very basic snapshot system that allows us to duck a group of sounds when another sound is playing. We can define the attack, duration, depth and release of the snapshot, and snapshots can layer on top of one another. It’s something that big, grown-up engines have been able to do for a while that I wanted to have.

Oh and seeing as the game is set in London, it would be a shame not to have a working Big Ben!

DS:What developments in game audio would you like to see in the future?

AQ:There is some interesting research going on into sound propagation, I’d like to see some systems that approach real acoustic modelling appearing. However with that, I’d still like to be able to tweak and tune how sound plays back within a space rather than having a one stop reality model.

DS: Thank you for your time, Andrew. We look forward to hearing the game in action!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Designing Sound: So, you guys are working on Simon Killer…you’re wrapping it up today.

Antonio Campos: Yep.

Coll Anderson: Yeah. This is our last day.

DS: It’s going to print.

CA: Yeah. As soon as everyone leaves, I’ll probably re-bus…we have one line of dialog to see if we can get. It’s always a little game of inches at this point. All of the changes that we’re making are very, very, minor…just changes that sort of hyper focus the mood and flow. So, we have one line that we’re trying to get another inch or two out of, and then that’s it. Re-bus the console and hit record.

DS: So, how long have you been working on this film now, Antonio?

AC: We shot the film in the end of November/December in 2010, and then edited throughout the year. We submitted to Sundance in the fall and got in. So, we picture locked after about 11 months of editing. Coll and I started working in the…spring of that year?

CA: Yeah. You didn’t have an assembly when I started sending you stuff but scenes were starting to happen.

AC: Yes. Well, there are a lot of long takes in the film; a lot of scenes that are just one or two shots. So, we could go back and forth on full scenes.

DS: You were working on edits while Coll was doing sound?

AC: Yeah, we were only a few months into editing. There was a lot of back and forth. Coll designed a lot of the tones in the film. Coll started doing his thing, which I really like, taking a piece of dialog or word and creating a specific tone out of it. You don’t recognize the word, because it becomes a drone. I got a whole batch of those and started playing with them.

DS: That sounds kind of similar to some of the stuff you did on Martha. [ed. Martha Marcy May Marlene]

CA: Yeah, very much so. It was that stage in editorial, too early for music, but needing something emotional…some sort of connection to the actors that’s more than just talking.

DS: Something a little more abstract?

AC: Atmospheric.

CA: Atmospheric and…

AC: It’s felt, more than I think it’s heard. I think a lot of people don’t recognize the tones right away. They just sort of blend into the mix of the film.

DS: Could you…and obviously I won’t ask you to go into too much detail since the movie isn’t out yet…but could you give a little description of what the story is about?

AC: Simon just graduated college and has just gotten out of a relationship that he’s been in for five years. He goes to Paris to start this sort of Euro-backpack trip but ends up bumming around Paris too long and meets a prostitute and falls in love. That’s where this journey starts. Once they get together, that’s where the story really takes off. That’s all I can say without giving away too much of what the film is about.

DS: And how would you say the sound connects into the story, besides what we’ve already discussed?

AC: Theres’ a few things going on. One is that there’s a lot of long takes in the film, some of them wide, and the sound will allow us to push the audience’s eye one way or another. It’s amazing when you’re working in a very minimal soundscape how much you can get out of the details…how effective the details can be. Even the clinking of a glass contributes to setting the mood in a scene. The other thing going on is that we do go from very quiet to very loud in this film. One of the devices, or motifs, in the film is that we hear what he’s listening to on his iPod. He’s listening to a lot of indie-pop sounding music, electronic music, and we really played with how long we’re in silence to go to this loud explosion of music…and back to silence. [To Coll] What else would you say?

CA: I was thinking a little bit less about music and more about sound. In the case of Simon, and the film, there’s a sort of establishing geography that functions with the protagonist. How he feels grounded or doesn’t in places. We use sound as a tool to establish this vibe with him. In places where we want to settle him down, it’s really easy to create a location, a space… that’s very understandable to us audibly. It helps us create a link between the watcher or the viewer and Simon… Then, as his character evolves, we can subtly manipulate not just the backgrounds, but EFX, music even perceived spaces, so that we take him from being a grounded individual, to one who is less so, and thus mess with that subconscious attachment between the audience and Simon. He becomes no longer that grounded of a character. Our connection to him is now unsettled, because of how disconnected he becomes to the geography around him. And because it is so subtle, the audience still stays un-comfortably attached to him and they don’t know why. It’s really fun to create a space where we like him, because we understand the spaces that he’s in and then mess with that connection.

AC: Yes.

CA: We hear things we recognize; it’s a very comfortable environment to us. We shift it up a little bit…dynamic cuts in music, faster cuts so that the shifts are very obvious, traveling through the city…and as he becomes disconnected with the world, we shift the connection point in what we hear. We subtly manipulate those things that are so normal to us, those teacups and other small literal effects, become less and less literal as he becomes…I don’t want to say unhinged…but as our understanding of him changes. So, you don’t really notice that something is happening, but it is. It all happens between the use of backgrounds and designed sounds, and then using specifics to take your eye around the frame and look at what’s going on. As he changes, so does our world. That subtlety is something we can do with sound, it’s sublime.

AC: There’s also this other shift that happens in the film. In the beginning when you sense he’s still very much a tourist in the city, the sense of the city outside…even when he’s inside…you sense the weight of being in a foreign place. That gradually fades away, and it becomes so much more about him and whoever else is in the scene with him.

CA: Much more internal.

AC: It gets MUCH more internal. Another important character detail in the film, that is part of the sound design…he’s interested in peripheral vision. That’s what he studied; the eye and the brain. Visually, we played with that idea, and in terms of sound we play with that idea. There’s so much that’s happening in the periphery of the frame, that we’re not seeing, and the sound is doing all of that work. I really like when there’s off-screen action, because it inherently creates a sense of tension. The audience is now being given a certain amount of information that they can’t see, and their brains are working to put it together. There’s always something that could happen. There’s always a sense of tension in the film…that’s outside the frame.

DS: This is nice, because I just did a pair of articles on Designing Sound about deprivation and barriers, and leaving perceptual elements out in order to let people develop their own impression of the story. So this is going to tie in nicely with that. [laughs]

CA: The third eye is what makes…and when I say the third eye, I mean the implication that there is a necessary element “to” the film but that exists outside it… being the audience. The film itself, the characters and their interaction, is only one reality. The audience interaction with that is what completes this sort of film; how we as viewers project story… and Anotonio’s done a really great job in expanding that. What we see, and what happens outside of the frame, involves the audience filling in their own information; their own internal desire to complete story. It makes our involvement, with Simon in particular, unbelievably deep. It’s really fun. I don’t know how else to put it, other than the third eye involvement with the characters and what makes the film work so subconsciously.

DS: So, having myself only seen a handful of snippets of scenes a few moments ago, my familiarity with the film is poor at best. Were there any points where you were finding some good synergy between the visuals and the audio.

AC and CA: [Both laugh]

CA: Oh yeah! There’s a whole…

AC: I’m trying to think of just one.

CA: The flickers.

AC: Yeah, when we started…

CA: The Eiffel Tower, Paris…the whole scene.

AC: Right. That’s a good example. There’s this “light show,” we call it “light show,” that we did with flickering lights. The screen just becomes covered in this color scheme of red and blue…red will be, sort of like an orb, and the blue will be sort of flickering, and that will dissolve into an image of the city. Going in and out of those things…once we started taking those tones [ed. mentioned earlier in the interview] and making them really specific to just those sequences…all of a sudden, it gives immediate life to the thing. We had found the sound of something that had no sound. That’s exciting. When we shot the lights, it was shooting christmas lights with no lens on the camera. It was just the sensor responding to light in the room. It was all MOS. There was nothing to ground that in. The tones became the sound of those lights. And the way that they interact with the city, and the way those things bring us into his head, and out of his head, is part of the story. The tones and drones, in some way, could be considered a voice over.

CA: Yeah, they kind of are.

AC: For something going on in his head…

CA: There’s a visual that is just…it’s like the inside of Simon’s head. The sound occupies such a similar space that they just amplify each other. The connection of the two is unbelievably symbiotic. It’s kind of crazy. [laughs]

DS: I don’t want to eat up too much of your time with other questions, but if there’s anything you would like for people to have in mind when they go in to see this film…and this question goes to both of you…what would you like people to take away or go in prepared for?

CA: For me, sound in the film was a way to create a connection to a character that we were very comfortable with. So, we became attached to him…became a fan. We liked him. Once we cemented that sort of sympathetic relationship with the character… we shift who and what he is and the relationship the audience has with him. This calls into question our own feelings about him and more so, ourselves. “How could we like this guy?!” That’s what makes the film work for me, and that’s what makes the sound work. We are completely sympathetic to Simon. Then, all of a sudden, we realize how ugly we are in that connection. That’s what makes the character so deep.

AC: I like when people go into a film with an open mind. The thing to be prepared for is a very dark journey in a character that’s conflicted, and to accept your own conflicted feelings about the character for what they are. Don’t feel like you need to feel one way or another about him as a person. I think sometimes people want to feel one way about a character, and if they can’t accept that a character is conflicted or confused or unhinged…it won’t work. I like it anytime that people go into a movie with an open mind and take the journey that they’re going on for what it is; as opposed to expecting some sort of definitive answer. Even with Martha [ed. Martha Marcy May Marlene], we leave a lot of things up in the air. That’s the point. It’s not by accident. Everything that we do is very thought out. If a character is behaving in a way that makes you think, “I don’t like him,” at this point, and then behaving in a way where you go, “Oh, he’s kind of charming,” that’s what we set out to do.
 

The  release date for Simon Killer is not yet set, though it is expected that it will be in theaters later this year. A special thank you to Antonio and Coll for taking time out of their mix schedule to sit down with me.

…and now, as promised, a little bit of hilarity… The interview went very smoothly, and we were having a lot of fun…even with one small interruption.

When Dogs Attack! ………interviews:

Michael Bross is an award winning composer, sound designer and audio director who has worked on such popular video game franchises as Oddworld, Ratchet and Clank and WWE Wrestling, and he is currently working on free-to-play FPS MMO  ‘Firefall‘. Through my own work on Oddworld HD remakes, I has the chance to chat with Michael, who was kind enough to answer a few questions for Designing Sound

Designing Sound: Can you tell us a little about how you got into game audio, and your audio career so far? Can you tell us a little about what you are currently working on?

Michael Bross: I was first hired by a small game company called Paragon Software as a composer in the early 1990′s. I ended up doing sound design for them, too, and learned that part of my work on the job. I’ve been working on a couple projects this year which includes an Insomniac project. That’s all composing work. I’m also doing a bit of audio directing a project for Rumble Entertainment called King’s Road. Plus, I continue to write music for Firefall.

DS:  Is there an area of sound/audio development that you’re particularly drawn to?

MB: I go through phases. At times, I’m drawn more to sound design while others I’m drawn to music.

DS:  As an experienced Audio Director, how do you approach pre-production for a project? (defining aesthetic, creating a palette, communicating vision)?

MB: I spend a lot of time understanding what the game is about. I also talk with the key people on the team and we bounce around ideas about what kind of audio experience that we’d like to create. From there, I begin to gather a lot of reference material from games, film, TV, music along with any other sound sources that are inspiring and related to what we’re doing. I, or my audio team, may do some sound or music prototyping at this stage. There are also a lot of technical aspects to plan for a game, too, so I’m laying groundwork on that.

DS:  What are the main creative / technical challenges you faced in achieving your vision? Do you find the same challenges occurring on different projects?

MB: The main challenge is creating a production pipeline that allows creative people to focus on being creative and less on dealing with technical process.

DS:  How do you approach communication with the other disciplines on the team? How do you keep audio in peoples minds?

MB: By understanding who they are and how they contribute to the development process. How to keep audio in people’s minds? It’s a proactive effort for sure, but understand that great teams know that audio is important.

DS: What do you consider to be the hardest part of creating audio for interactive media?

MB: Production crunches, especially at the end of projects. It’s the time period where there are too many things to do and not enough time. At the same time, it’s also an exciting time. Adrenaline runs high.

DS:  You have worked on a wide variety of genres within games, from platformers Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, to upcoming MMO first person shooter Firefall, through to sports / fighting with WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2011. Are there any unique challenges each of these genres poses?

Each has had its own unique challenges. With the Ratchet and Clank project, my focus was less on technical aspects and more on the creative, so really with that, my challenge was to pay respect to the soundtrack work on past titles while also trying to give it a refresh. With the WWE title, my role was to help them transition to new audio technology and pipeline, so it was more about making that happen and less about new content.

DS: You have previously been involved in creating music for films such as ‘Black Dahlia’ and ‘Ripper’. Is there a big difference in how you approach composing for games versus music for linear media?

MB: Actually, those projects were video game projects, too, but they were FMV-based games. The industry went through a period where it experimented with using live-action elements within a 3D world during the 90′s. We don’t really see that kind of game anymore.

DS:  What do you feel is the most satisfying part of creating sound for games?

MB: Working with talented people and being in the trenches with them and aspiring to make something astounding.

DS:  What are your preferred tools for working with? Do you have any software suites, plugins or apps that you use regularly?

MB: I use Pro Tools for sound design and Logic Pro for both music and sound design. I use an array of different plugins, but in general my favorite effects are those that manipulate pitch. Lately, I’ve been playing around with Izotope’s Iris plugin. It’s one of the more creative plugins I’ve come across lately. It’s like playing with crayons. I love it.

DS: On your last project, is there anything you would approach differently?

MB: On my last big project, I wished I would have had more time to go back and revise some of my mixes.

DS: What developments in game audio would you like to see in the future?
Closing the gap between content tools and implementation tools.

DS: Thank you for your time Michael

Hart FX has released Hart a Gator, a new library of alligator sound effects, cut from 10 hours of material recorded at 192kHz.

Alligators are quiet, stealthy creatures that roam the swamps and marshes of Florida like big, scaly, green ninjas. You see one silently skimming along, then all of a sudden it disappears! They hardly make any sound either – except for this one time of year… mating season.

During mating season, gators all of a sudden decide to emerge from their quiet ninja state and let the world know how much of a sexy beast they are – or at least they try to let the female gators know about it.

A gator bellow is when a gator fills it’s lungs with air, then lifts it’s tail and head up into the air, and then forces the air out in a way that causes the entire gator to vibrate violently. This creates this really awesome little dancing of water off the gator’s back, and creates a crazy growl that can be quite frightening. It definitely gave me a new respect for these oversized lizards…

This was not an easy library to record! The gator bellowing is infrequent, and it is often difficult to get close enough to get a clean recording. To add to that – if you approach too quickly and startle the gator, he will stop bellowing.

Hart a Gator is available for download at $95. More info: HartFX

Below is a q&a with Colin Hart, who shares some details about the process behind the library.

Can you tell us about the process of conceiving and planning this library?

I don’t really remember how the original idea came up (it was over a year ago…) but somehow we got the idea that it would be awesome to go out and record gator sounds. There is a gator “park” nearby where I live called “Gatorland”. They have upwards of 2000 gators and crocs there – I figured it would be a good place to start. So I called them up and got in touch with a guy that ended up touring us around to get gator sounds. The first time we went was in June – we were able to get some cool hisses and jaw snaps, which are territorial and warning sounds. Our contact told us that if we wanted some great sounds, it would be best to come back during mating season, when the gators bellow (as a mating call).

So come this year, around March, I called up Gatorland again and asked to come back in for a day of recording. I had no idea what to expect, so I just brought a bunch of gear and planned to stay a few hours. What I was able to get that day absolutely amazed me – these sounds were incredible! I had to get more. I was at the park for about 3 or 4 hours that day and only ended up with about 5 or 6 usable sounds, so I scheduled time to come back. I ended up going down there about 7 or 8 times total to get the sounds that I needed to build this library.

How were the recording locations and the specific situations with the animals? Did you have any preference regarding their movements and vocalizations?

The location made things a bit difficult. Because there are so many gators around, there are a lot of birds around. These birds don’t belong to the park – they are wild – but they come to the park because the gators add protection for nesting. No way a raccoon or bobcat is going to try to make it past all those gators to get to a bird’s nest. These birds were so pesky and loud! It made getting a clean sound very difficult. I basically had to be on top of a gator to get a decent sound.

The weird thing about recording the bellows was that the gators decide to bellow all at once. You’ll be sitting there with nothing to do for anywhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours, then one will start bellowing. Within a minute or two, all of the others start bellowing – one after another – as if they’re talking back and forth. Essentially, they are, telling the others how much more of a stud they are… In the main area, the bellowing probably only lasts 10 minutes, if you’re lucky.

So you stand around for up to 2 hours, waiting for the bellows, and all of a sudden it starts and you only have a few minutes to record. So you have to be ready. I would hang around taking pictures or something – maybe recording some ambiences – but my recorder was on and ready to go. I had to stay alert – as soon as you hear that first bellow, it’s off to the races! Then it was just a matter of figuring out which gator was about to bellow and get to them in time.

That was another thing – you could tell when a gator was about to bellow. They lift their head and tail up in the air and hold it there for a few seconds before they start. So when I saw one that was in a good recording location make that pose, I got over there as soon as possible – it is a very large area though, so sometimes that can be difficult – you always had to keep moving to try to anticipate what was going to happen next. The trick is that you can’t approach the gator too fast from the front – you will startle them and they’ll stop. Gators see movement and colors very well. David found that out the hard way when he wore bright colors one day and all of the gators were stopping once he approached them. Didn’t do that again!

How was your setup and methods for getting those sounds?

I had a recorder (generally a 702T) and a shotgun mic (a Sanken CS-3e or a Neumann KMR81i, depending on how I felt that day). I had the rig strapped to me and in standby for the whole time I was there, so that I could press record and go at a moment’s notice. Some days I brought little handheld recorders and my Joby tripod to mount them to the railing. I would just set them there, hit record, and leave them there for an hour or so. Those gave me my best ambiences, especially because the birds were slightly more active when nobody was near them.

The first two times I kept my headphones on, because I was concerned with the sound quality. Once I figured out how to best capture the sounds, I kept my phones around my neck, because I wasn’t able to locate where a sounds were coming from with them on, so my reaction time was slow – I was missing recording opportunities. David talks about this in one of his posts from a while ago on DS. I kept them nearby so I could reference if I needed to, but keeping them on my head wasn’t working so well. I experimented with using open back phones so I could hear through them, but they were still messing with my perception of direction.

I know one of the alligators ate a blimp that was covering the mic… How shocking was that? Do you have any sound of that moment?

That was a bit shocking – somewhat of an adrenaline moment… Both Johnny and I were recording when that happened, so we do have recordings of that – both from “First Mic” and “Third Mic” perspectives.

I have to say, I was kind of asking for it to happen because I was trying to provoke the gator into making hissing sounds by bopping it on the head with my boom pole – something that I picked up from the trainers. What I didn’t pick up from the trainers was that they were doing it with a stick, not a boom pole with $2000 on the end of it… Not my brightest moment, but it lead to some fun stories. The gator grabbed the “Dead Wombat” off of my blimp, along with one of the end caps. He also put enough weight on the pole to snap it in the center. Luckily I was able to wrestle it back from him (I did not actually wrestle him – just yanked on the boom pole a lot…), so I didn’t lose the mic or the blimp frame. K-Tek and Rode were both very nice and amused enough at my stories that they sent me replacement parts for free. Two awesome companies when it comes to customer service!

If I think about it enough, I can still feel the jarring sensation in my hands from when the gator bit the blimp – those things are strong!

Recordings of that moment:

You must be very busy recently, since there hasn’t been so much activity on Hart FX. I wonder if this library is the beginning of a new wave of releases or something. Any plans for what’s coming next?

I have been very busy! I’ve been doing a lot of SFX Editing on a handful of feature pictures over the past year, which has taken up a lot of my time. Also, a lot of custom sound effects libraries for specific projects. That has prevented me from having the time to release all that much on HartFX in the past year, but I am working on some stuff. I have 3 or 4 libraries that are all half done. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them released in the next few months :-)

Rabbit Ears Audio has released Hind Helicopter, a library of 77 files recorded at 24-Bit/96kHz.

One Soviet-era helicopter, four recordists, and plenty of fuel brings you REA_010 Hind. The Mi-24 Hind is a Soviet gunship that was introduced in 1969 and saw action in Afghanistan and throughout the Cold War. A few month back, I had the opportunity to record the Hind and assembled a team of of recordists to get ‘er done.

Sometimes when an opportunity presents itself, you just have to jump at it. This an animal of a helicopter that requires 26,000 lbs of thrust to get off the ground and pushes a ton of air. The helicopter’s large size and five blades give it a unique sound that is a combination of a “chirpy” whine and extreme low end.

Hind Helicopter is available at $129. More info: REA.

Below is a quick Q&A I had with Michael talking about this new release.

- What led you to create this library?

I was working at another gig and a friend of mine mentioned that he knew the owner of this particular helicopter and asked if I wanted to record it. At that point I didn’t know much about the Mi-24 and I started to do some research. Once I discovered how few of them were in the US and how little coverage there was, I jumped at the opportunity.

- What were the most interesting things of this helicopter regarding sound?

I can’t say that anything was boring. We learned very early on how powerful this machine was. It put out a tremendous amount of SPL and air-pressure. At various points throughout the shoot, each of the recordists were knocked down at least once from all the air that was being pushed. The blades are huge and the Hind has five of them, so it is truly a beast of a machine. I watched one recordist, Rob Byers, get flipped over twice during a take-off sequence because the Hind  passed a little too closely in his direction. We lost some good takes when we got a little too macho. During all of the pass-bys, I often found it hard to breathe from the amount of pressure hitting my body. Boy, was that fun!

We also spent half a day recording all of the doors, switches and electrical systems.  I really fell in love with that material during the editing process. Even the smallest switches have real weight to them.

- Could you tell us about the setup used and methods used for capturing those sounds?

For all of the pass-bys we wanted to capture a variety of perspectives and tonal elements so we went went out with a diverse collection of microphones. For all of the exteriors, we recorded with the following gear:

Exterior: Schoeps MK4, Sennheiser MKH 40, MKH 60, Sennheiser 8020, 8040, and 8050. Onboard: MKH 30/40. Interior Switches and Exterior Electrical Systems were recorded with a Schoeps MK4 + MK8 and a Sennheiser 8060. All tracked to Sound Devices 7-Series recorders.

The Schoeps really brought out the chirp of the helicopter where the Sennheiser 8000 series helped bring out the shear size and low end of the helicopter. Ultimately, the most important task at hand was recording as much coverage as we could with the fuel load we had. As you can imagine,  it is expensive to put the aircraft up, so you really have to maximize the potential for interesting recordings.

- How was the collaboration between the team of recordists?

I was happy to bring a crew of recordists that I knew very well and had worked with previously. All of the guys (Rob Byers, John Loranger, and Kelly Pieklo) have plenty of field experience.  Since I knew them well, spending a few days together was not going to be issue. We truly had a blast!  If one is going to do any sort of vehicle recording, having a group of recordists will help get the job done way more efficiently. We were able to spread ourselves across the airfield and cover the aircraft thoroughly.

U.S.O (Unidentified Sound Object) Project is defined as a continuing evolving organism of sound. Created by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi, two sound artists working on several fields and exploring sound in many inspiring ways. Perhaps you already know about their fantastic blog, where they share lots of great things, making the site a must for anyone interested on sound experimentation, film sound design, electronic music, sound synthesis, signal processing, etc.

In the last year, Unidentified Sound Object started a new series of libraries aimed to sound designers and composers, starting with Hologram Room, a package of a wide variety of sources suitable for all kind of contexts and designed meticulously by the two sound sculptors. Today they’ve released their second package, which includes a fantastic collection of sounds created from electro-magnetic field captures.

Electromagnetic informations are invisible and omnipresent. In every city, especially the big ones, an infinite number of electromagnetic waves is hidden: we can’t hear them, but they’re everywhere! We explored this invisible noise pollution transducing electromagnetic fields into audio signals with a telephone pickup: it acts like a radio antenna for hum and weird electromagnetic noises.

We plugged it into a SONOSAX SX-R4 recorder, moving it close to electrical devices – like a stethoscope – to locate interesting and curious sounds, just like LCD television, internet antennas, lighting systems, transformers, game consoles, tablet, electronic security systems, scanners, computer monitors and hard-drives, printers, navigation systems, fax machines…

Available at U.S.O. $30, 40 files, 48kHz/24-Bit.

Below is an interview I did with Matteo and Federico, talking a bit about this new library and the ideas behind their project.

DS: Why you became interested on releasing a sound library about electro-magnetic sources?

M&F: For this Unseen Noises (USO002) we used telephone tap coils that receive electromagnetic signals around us and convert them into audible information to discover invisible and surprising aspects of the environment in which we live in. To widen our sound palette, we explored cell phones, tablets, light systems, automated teller machines, wireless communication systems, anti-theft security devices, surveillance cameras, computers, navigation systems, wireless Internet routers, neon advertisings, public transportation networks. We just used the system of electromagnetic induction as way of amplifying musical sounds. Our efforts were focused on finding “articulated” behaviours and other musical qualities in them. Note that the files contained in “Unseen Noises” are real performances executed on different devices without editing. What you hear is a selection of several hours of recording: you’ll find those sounds in our musical productions such as InharmoniCity or installations like Empty Rooms.

DS: I wonder how’s your collaboration as a team and how is sound design and music linked in your work?

M&F: Our first meeting dates back to 2005 on the Cinema Audio Society forum. Despite the distance between our hometowns (Milan-Rome), from day one we’ve been very good friends and we never stopped producing ideas and material in various forms – under the common denominator of Unidentified Sound Object. This second sound library is a good example of multi-disciplinarity. Our experience in different domains – from post-production to composition – helped us creating musical material of various kinds. Sound editors and designers can choose whether to use the sounds contained in our collections as they are, or sculpt them further – being very rich in the frequency spectrum. It’s material which lends itself to be processed in the frequency domain in order to extract the masked harmonic components. Our work is all about detail, and our albums take a long time to make. Usually we extract from a raw material the aspects that will serve the compositional idea. In every collection there is a part of each one of us, a mixture of our different experiences.

DS: What about processing of the elements?

M&F: We processed the recordings a little, by means of decorrelation, to control only the source width and create a diffuse sound field. When decorrelating the source between two speakers, the impression is a psycho-acoustic spreading of the audio in the space between them to achieve a diffuse, broad sound image. A recording is replicated in a second channel and shifted with a variable offset (ms). Decorrelation of audio signals uses this micro-temporal delay to enrich the sonic complexity of the overall listening experience, creating timbrical colouration and combing due to constructive and destructive interference. These time intervals are indeed acting and influencing our perception of musical facts. As in “Hologram Room”, we took care of the loudness overall level: the problem we always found navigating through sound libraries of different origins, is the extreme difference in signal level between their content. Having examined the subject in loudness over the past two years, it is clear that it no longer makes sense to peak normalize the sound-files, but it is better to balance them towards a universal center of gravity. Personally I found the EBU R128 solution an efficient response. The experience of moving between sound effects and music without constantly adjusting the listening level is an approach on which we can not give up. The future is in the loudness control and the calibration of the monitor. The K-System by Bob Katz – who has the authorship of the system – is an effective solution: excellent readings are available on his website digido.com.

DS: Although you designed all the sounds included in the package Hologram Room (USO001), it doesn’t feel like a collection of designed sounds. I’d say is more like a package of layers or something like “designed raw elements”. If that’s correct… could you tell us how do you proceed on making these single elements, rather than “ready to use” sounds?

M&F: The sound sources can be extracted from field-recordings, everyday objects, acoustic instruments or materials generated through analog and/or digital synthesis.  This library is born instinctively, at first in an effort to create a private archive of custom designed sound effects to work, easily available for TV works. The effort to create an appropriate catalog, has generated similar groups for various applications. What we were looking for, was a family of recombinant sounds, to be easily layered and structured in any DAW. Thanks to Kyma and the custom tools in our possession, we’ve been able to sculpt our idea in an easily and familiar environment with instant feedback, before jumping in the Pro Tools timeline. We wondered: why not provide the material extracted from our musical encounters as “raw” material, but already organized, to suggest “emotions”? Fragments of sound materials – amorphous in terms of musical discourse – are defined by David Lynch and his composer Angelo Badalamenti as firewood. The director said that “continuing to work with sound, what you do not want to become is more and more evident.” In fact, the most perceptually original ideas we had, have always determined the nature of our compositions, with or without sound processes of transformation and transfiguration. Every phenomenon, deliberately taken out of its natural context, becomes something else and is no longer reconstitutable.

DS: What were your main tools and methods for fabricating sounds for these categories? Specifically talking about Kyma, could you tell us about the advantages you find for sound design related works? I wonder if you have any thoughts regarding other “similar” alternatives, such as Max/MSP for example.

M&F: Max/MSP and Kyma are not really similar. Kyma shares more similarities with SuperCollider. The advantages are in terms of operating procedures and efficiency of programming in an object oriented environment. All the control domain functions are written in Capytalk (a real-time implementation of Smalltalk). So the fact that you can “code” functions instead of patching them is quicker and more elegant (in terms of debugging). Kyma offers a true DSP object oriented work-flow that is focused on sound design. Max is more flexible when we talk about multimedia stuff, like installations, augmented reality or cross-domain applications. There is an issue about sound quality as well. Kyma has its own “sound-print”, which we like very much.

DS: How much improvisation is involved in the process?

M&F: Improvisation or sound exploration is fundamental. Sometimes you can achieve interesting and unexpected results only running trough unknown paths. It is time consuming – of course, but very often you find undiscovered territories only if you lose yourself inside them. Experience plays also a great role. It is not about what to do, but what to not do. It’s a negative approach; don’t do this or that, because you already know what it will sound like. It is a series of no, and no, an so on until you find what is left, which is very often quite challenging. Most appropriate for our work of art is the process of designing our tools and to study their “aural” behaviours based on what we would like to accomplish. Then the feedback approach comes into play. You do something and then you hear the output, very often predictable, then you inject some amount of “randomness” into it and things start to sound more exciting. A very stimulating approach is what we call “exploring the phase space”. When you define an instrument, that instrument can achieve specific discrete configuration states. We obtain this by using presets, and presets of presets. Then we move inside this discrete space adding just a little bit of randomness around each predefined states. So you explore in a non-linear way the behaviour of the system and its internal dynamics.

DS: How regularly are you thinking to release these libraries? What could we expect in these series?

M&F: Like every one of our free initiatives, there is no precise schedule for the release of future libraries; we would like to produce at least a couple of packages a year, derived from timbrical explorations of ongoing projects. We’ve quietly started working on a new collection: our job is to always deal with something new, to find sound objects for aesthetic consideration on their own terms. We’re just kind of scratching at the surface of that, we’ll see where it ends up. And in the pipeline there’s a new upcoming “untitled” album, to be released soon. In parallel, we recorded a considerable amount of material for a mobile interactive album that will be released very soon, a pure sensory experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

David Nichols, of the Track Time Audio blog, has posted a second part of his interview with Nick Wiswell, the Audio Director at Turn 10 and audio overseer of the Forza Motorsport games. In this part, Nick discusses how his team used FMOD to implement the audio, how they sourced rarer vehicles, the complexity of Racing audio, and working with Lance Hayes on the UI sounds and music to create the atmosphere the team was looking for. The full interview can be read here, and you can view part one of this great interview here

TTA: Racing game audio is, as I understand it, very unique in the video game world (much like the racing genre is rather unique). It seems like it takes the right kind of person who’s really into cars to produce a great racing game. Do you feel this is the same way for racing audio? Are there particular challenges unique to racing games compared to other genres (technically and/or creatively)?

NW: Creating audio for racing games has a very different set of challenges to creating audio in most other types of games.

Most games require lots of one shot sounds for things like character movement, footsteps, weapons, VO, world objects and object interactions etc. with a small number of constant sounds for moving objects, vehicles or background ambience.

With a racing game most of the objects in the game and making sounds created from many layers of continuously changing sounds.

Read the rest of Nick Wiswell returns for part 2! on the Track Time Audio blog. ( Thanks David!)

Motionographer has published an interview with sound designer John Kassab, talking about his work on the short film “Childhood of a Circle”

As I was being transported back to my youth watching Childhood of a Circle, I noticed a thread lining several recent posts here…

Melbourne-based audio designer & deep sea diver John Kassab has been making a subtle but sound statement through a handful of featured Motionographer articles, notably: Callum Cooper’s Full Circle, Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (exerpt + interview), and of course, Kadavre Exquis’ recently released piece above (among others).

As the sculptors of all things aurally beautiful, sound designers are not often given their proper due, so be sure to lend an ear to John & all the other artists here who routinely tickle our cochlea.

Continue reading…

The guys at Tonsturm have released their sixth library, called Clocks.

With this sound pack you get a huge variety of ticking and chiming clock sound effects, recorded from various type of clocks: Old tower clockworks, wall clocks, cuckoo clocks, antique grandfather clocks and many more….

Avaliable at $69 (until 25.04.2012). Specs: 24 Bit 96 kHz / 142 Files / 6,42 GB

Below are some details Tilman and Emil shared with DS about the creating of this new release.

How did you start to record this library?

The first clock we actually recorded was the clockwork of our “Cologne Cathedral”, you have probably heard of it before: It is one of the biggest cathedrals in the world and a world heritage site. We got an exclusive guide to the tower clock, which is still the original mechanic unit and not an atomic clock. It was a big experience to be in areas of this huge cathedral where you usually are not allowed to go.

But unfortunately we realized that the city noise was much too loud. We did record it for about two hours or more but after checking the recordings in the studio we decided to not include it in the library. After this initial recording we knew we had to find a way to record more of these fascinating tower clocks in a more silent and controlled environment.

I wonder how your interpretation of time or the age of the clocks affected the way you approached the library. I guess those weren’t used just as “generators” of sonic material.

The perception of time has changed a lot over the centuries. And so the sound of clocks has changed too. The interesting question for us was, what will happen if we record a clock from a decade, where time had a very different meaning. Like the clock from 1600 AD for example. Not to forget these clocks have an interesting history, most times they were used in churches. Will this have a different impact when you create a scene in a movie which takes place today? What will be the consequence?

What was the setup you used for the clocks? any special preference regarding the size of the objects?

We used a lot of different microphone setups for this sound pack. A MKH 70, 30, 8050, Schoeps CCM41, CCM8 and a piezo microphone Schertler Dyn C stereo set. We decided to add the Shertler piezo mics as they are build to pick up classical instruments and have a very low self noise. We were interested in how the clocks would sound when recorded with a piezo mic directly from the surface, especially those tower clocks. Sometimes the sound of the piezo mics was so different from the other microphones, you could have thought that it is a different clock.

Could you tell us about those special gems you recorded? I know there are clocks that are about 400 years old?

We found someone who owns a lot of tower clocks, Mr. Harig, he is a real expert when it comes to clocks. He restored every single clock on his own. A work where you have to be very detailed and precise. He also owns a clock which is from around 1600 Anno Domini (which is short after the middle ages..). It is really astonishing to see something work that was crafted that long ago, hearing it is like doing a time travel!

What are your favorite sounds from the pack? Any special story about any of them?

Yes, there is one sound named “many clocks”. There you hear almost all tower clocks of Mr. Harig at once:-). All the tower clocks are ticking and working in one room. It is really like a concert. Mr. Harig told us, that he likes to sit in a chair and just listen to his clocks. In the evening he is going there, starting every clock, just sitting and listening. This is such a touching scene, at least for us, it could be in a movie.

You told me one special thing you did on the sounds, and is that you edited the files so they can be looped without needing to do fades. Do you see this as the way independent libraries could evolve? Actually thinking about the designer and giving those add-ons, those things that will change their workflow perhaps?

Yes, absolutely! I think we all already do this while recording. The way we record them is the way we need them in editing for film. But often this can be taken further, no doubt. One problem is that everyone is editing a little bit different. But the way we did it with the clocks is something I missed a lot. When looping a clock you always have to be patient that the loop is correct, that the rhythm is correct when looped. Its really much more convenient if this is done in first place, so you don´t have to worry about this anymore. And no fades, just apple-d, its really nice to add clocks this way to a project:-). So, if you, the reader, have any idea how you would like to have sounds prepared, just write us! its important to get inspirations!

Thanks a lot for your questions Miguel!

TONSTURM

DS: Tell us about RjDj

Robert: RjDj was formed in 2008 but was actually initially conceptualised as far back as the 1990s. The first app that was released was very unusual for that time because it was doing things with sound from the microphone and using the accelerometer in ways that was not really supported in the SDK. Since then we have done a wide range of different apps, which are about exploring interactive music or reactive music or augmented music and that has gone from RjDj to Rj Voyager through working on projects like the Inception app to Dimensions, the latest one, which is veering more in to the world of games. RjDj was formed by Michael Breidenbruecker, who is one of the cofounders of last.fm and he is the CEO and driving force behind the company. My role is more in terms of music composition and looking after the sonic side of things, and Joe is also working in that area and a bit more oriented toward the reactive infrastructure of how we make music happen in relation to events. He also works a lot more on sound design that I do.

DS: Most of what you do is in Pure Data (Pd). Do you begin the composition and design process in a regular DAW and then migrate to Pd?

Robert: We use a conventional DAW of some kind and export bits that get reassembled in real time based on whatever rules are appropriate for that situation. Much of Dimensions was done in Cubase and some of it was done in Logic and then exported as tracks which are some times stacked one on top of each other and fade in and out based on different user interaction. There are individual hits that get algorithmically put back together on the fly – drum patterns and things like that, and layers of reactively triggered synthesis.

Joe: In our earlier projects we were trying a lot more to reconstruct all the music inside Pd but we obviously had performance hits and we had to optimise it all. In Dimensions, we created all the assets in the DAW and mixed it as well as we could so that we could concentrate on how it played back in Pd. How we construct the assets in Pd is just as important, as it needs to be simple while achieving the same sort of experience.

Robert: In 2009 we did a project that was extremely ambitious. Almost everything in there was algorithmically put together in the mix. It was all stemmed material or individual tracks that were put back together in Markov states and various trees of possibility and based on the user behaviour and all kinds of things. We found it very difficult to achieve a very good level of quality if we were that ambitious with the structure. Also, a lot of the end listeners couldn’t understand the level of complexity we were producing in terms of the structure and the variants of the music. For them it was just music. Now we concentrate on making one very obvious reactive thing over more linear music.

DS: What sort of technical limitations are you up against?

Robert: We have to impose our own limitations because Pd is so open that it is easy to get completely lost in creating some hugely intricate and complex reactive system that no one is every going to understand and you can get very very deep in that and lose sight of the over all picture. It is very dangerous – in my opinion.

Joe: It is too easy to go down that route and just think about making the architecture and not creatively make things.

Robert: The other limitation that we have, which is getting better all the time, is the kind of CPU power and memory limits of the devices. Until Dimensions we have been working at 22KHz to give us more CPU top end to achieve more ambitious real time effects.

DS: Do you filter out the top end to simulate what it might end up sounding like?

Robert: I try to not rely on creating musical sensations that I know will rely on a lot of high frequencies. Its still very frustrating when we down-sample. We try to get as much out of the sampling rate that we work at. We have also written some specific externals for Pd which allows us to playback mp3s or compressed files.

Joe: I think the beautiful thing is that its just a temporary sort of limitation. As these devices get increasingly powerful we can do more stuff and eventually run at 44.1KHz.

Robert: The next app is at 44.1KHz and it will be much more ambitious as well in terms of effects. It always gets bigger with each app.

DS: Along with these technical limitations do you impose creative limitations? How do you know where to stop?

Robert: In Dimensions, there are soundtracks for different parts of the listeners life. For instance, there is the tranquil dimension and we know through the microphone that it is going to be quiet in that scenario. Each one of these factors is the driving force of how we approach it creatively. For tranquil, the brief for the whole of that dimension was creating something that reacted to that type of audio environment and enhanced a sense of tranquility. Equally, in the kinetic dimension, which is all about movement, we know that the user is moving through accelerometer analysis. It is basically targeting a piece of music to push all of the listener’s emotional buttons to make them feel that they are in a kind of action sequence and reacting in a very fine way to different levels of the accelerometer. That is a very powerful brief as a composer and it means that you know that you can create a very dynamic experience for the listener. In many ways its like writing music for games, except, we have the additional hard task of doing analysis to determine what the game events are.

Joe: In any sort of interactive medium, it is important that you have a feedback control that is very easy to understand for the user. In a lot of what we do, the majority of the user’s interaction is with sound. We have to make it very clear in what they hearing that they are affecting a certain part of the track. We have made our own dynamic mixing system to fade assets in and out.

DS: There are a lot of effects on the microphone, like pitched delays and granulation. Were these decisions made before hand?

Robert: Normally what we are trying to do is to find something that transforms the listeners perception in to feeling like whatever the brief is. In the ghosts dimension for instance, it works with audio analysis to decide when an audio event happens and then records that and generates a reverse reverb in real time. There is also one that records in to the buffer and then stretches out that buffer as it plays it back. I don’t think these days we think about CPU limitations very much. For instance, in the second level in Dimensions, there is one called the unstable dimension which has got every type of conventional effects unit in it, all stacked on top of each other and doing all kinds of glitchy sort of effects in real time to the microphone. There is also a new version of the collective dimension which captures a sound in to a buffer and then starts scratching back and forth as if it is like a turntablist on reality. That is the more crazy end of what we try and do on the fly. We do use some very simple effects – even just normal reverbs and delays some times. What is interesting from an engineering/producer point of view is that most people who have never used a studio or used any sort of music production tools find a delay line an incredibly unusual experience.

Joe: We also have the problem that we can never predict what the input from the microphone is going to be. A bus could come by and destroy everything in the tranquil dimension. We have to make sure that we can handle that correctly and it sounds okay.

DS: You obviously use the accelerometer and microphone as sensors, along with the GPS for the map. Anything else happening under the hood?

Robert: We determine a lot of situations that people are in by cross referencing things like the time of day or the GPS combined with weather data of that location. If they are in a sunny environment we put them in to the sunny dimension. A lot of the time it is about triangulating between different sensors to work out whats going on. When they are inside that dimension we will have very specific bits of analysis we do to try and achieve a certain effect.

DS: Any 100% procedural techniques used in the game?

Joe: In the previous update we changed the artifacts so that they are procedurally generated with subtractive synthesis. It was a lot better, because beforehand we were using one sample and all the artifacts sounded the same. Now we can actually generate a load of different sounds. There’s also a lot synthesis work in different dimensions.

Robert: It is all a big mixture really. The common thing with our approach is deliberately doing that so we can achieve the highest quality. In RjDj for instance, I have done quite a few scenes that are entirely procedural. It is very interesting work to do. But when we are designing very specific experiences like Dimensions, we want the best of all worlds.

DS: Do you reprocess the samples to create variation? Any volume/pitch randomisation or granulation?

Robert: One interesting example of that is the sound of the Nephilim, it changes as it gets nearer to you. That is one sound in a table in Pd which is played back in a granular way. There are quite a lot of things that we do in music where we will have samples and play them back at different pitches and we will affect them or algorithmically create rhythmic structures out of them.

Joe: In the kinetic dimension there are five different patterns based on the accelerometer levels and it switches between them quite easily and adds in random variations.

Robert: There is an improvisational level in the programming of the drums so that they are algorithmically improvising. We also have on top that a glitching set of effects that are adding repeats and pitching and other effects. I forget what is in there after a while [laughs]

Joe: It almost doesn’t matter how you have done anything, if it sounds good it is good. You can use any technique, although, it is a lot cooler if it is all procedural [laughs].

DS: What’s next?

We are doing another app – I can’t really talk about it at the moment. It relates a lot more to detecting what is going on in people’s lives and thinking about how content could fit in to those situations. I’m not quite sure when we are going to start talking about that publicly, but it is not a game. We are still very interested in the type of direction we have been going with Inception and Dimensions, which is a holistically designed experience in sound. We are also very interested in music and making music fit in to people’s lives in interesting and new ways.

Joe: There seems to be a lot of similarities in the stuff we are doing and the game world and how they deal with interactive music. A lot of the paths that they have gone down are very similar to what we mess around with.