Jesse James Allen, Audio Director at EA Sports Tiburon, delivered an hour-long presentation to the Advaced Interactive Audio students at Full Sail University on ‘Top Ten Game Audio Mistakes’, addressing misconception such as ‘audio being a one person job’, ‘Audio is easy to integrate ‘ and ‘Video game audio cliches’

The Irrational Games Insider Blog has posted parts two and three of their Audio team’s experience of recording firearms for BioShock Infinite. In part two, the team discuss the sensations of firing live weaponry that they were aiming to capture, and in part three, briefly touch upon the designing/editing process.

Part one of the blog can be viewed here

Symbolic Sound has published on their blog called “the eight nerve”, an interview with sound designer Sylvain Lasseur talking about his use of Kyma system and several aspects about his work.

Sound designer Sylvain Lasseur is not just bi-coastal; he’s bi-contintental, working part time in Paris and part time in Los Angeles!  We recently had a chance to ask him a few questions about how he uses Kyma for 5.1 sound design and to explore some of the differences between post production work in Paris and Los Angeles.  By the end of the interview, the discussion turns to food, wine, and the Marx Brothers.  Read on!

In this exclusive SoundWorks Collection video profile, producer Michael Coleman sits down with the oscar nominated sound team of HUGO including co-supervising sound editor Philip Stockton, co-supervising sound editor Eugene Gearty, and re-recording mixer Tom Fleischman.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Brian Selznick’s award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret stars Asa Butterfield, as an orphan boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Sent to live with his drunken uncle after his father’s death in a fire, Hugo learned how to wind the massive clocks that run throughout the station. When the uncle disappears one day, Hugo decides to maintain the clocks on his own, hoping nobody will catch on to him squatting in the station.

His natural aptitude for engineering leads him to steal gears, tools, and other items from a toy-shop owner who maintains a storefront in the station. Hugo needs these purloined pieces in order to rebuild a mechanical man that was left in the father’s care at the museum — the restoration was a project father and son did together.

SoundWorks Collection

In the latest episode of the Game Audio Podcast, the panel (which includes guests Shannon Potter [Sounddelux DMG], Kristen Quebe [Microsoft Games Studios] and Fryda Wolff [Turtle Rock Studios] ) discuss the varied entry routes taken by audio designers getting into the Games Industry, as well as discussion on the diversity in games studios.

Listen to the podcast, or download it here

To all sound designers, editors, directors, music composers:

•Do you need to pinpoint the right sound to get that desired audience reaction?
•Would you like access to full-blast creativity and know-how for your sound design?
•Is it important to get on the same page with your director or client, and give them what they need from your sound?

SOUND DESIGN FOR PROS webinar series offers solutions to all that and more with a month of personal consultation on your sound design projects, plus 12 hours of recorded lectures to view any time.

Head over to Sound Design for Pros for more information and register.

Article by Jeff Seamster.

Jeff had originally wanted to include this during his feature month this past December. Circumstances conspired against it, but thankfully he wasn’t willing to give up. So, now we have another great article to share with you. Enjoy!

Make a quick list of your 5 favorite video games or films in terms of sound design. I’ll wager they all have something in common; strong audio direction and a cohesive audio aesthetic. This isn’t due to some happy accident or last minute thinking during the post-production process. A successful audio aesthetic requires thoughtful planning and documentation coupled with deliberate execution and course correction.

Why is it important?

Discussions of games like BioShock, Ico, Limbo or movies like Blade Runner, The Matrix and Toy Story will inevitably include references to strong visual direction and style. That strong and consistent direction makes it easy for an audience to interpret, absorb and connect with their favorite works. There’s no reason this can’t be true for audio as well. Achievements in audio aesthetic don’t get as much coverage as those in the visual arts, but there are concepts and practices that can guide audio professionals toward that same level of achievement.

Cohesive aesthetic is our best strategy for creating memorable experiences. By wrapping our audience in a well-conceived and unified soundscape, the work at large becomes memorable even if that soundscape seems complex or alien at first. Repetition and shared vocabulary are tools that can be used to reinforce that influence. We’re all trying to create an aural experience that results in immediate recall of our titles years after the initial experience.

The narrative and visual teams on any given project will have their own agendas and aesthetic motivations. When integrated with these other disciplines in a game or film production, cohesive audio aesthetic will result in a work that is stronger and more memorable overall. This is how our touchstone achievements are born.

What makes up an audio aesthetic?

An audio aesthetic is constructed from sound principles, reference and guidelines that inform design and content creation decisions all the way from the overarching project down to the level of individual assets. When talking with other audio professionals, I refer to these as our design pillars, common vocabulary, and style bible.

The first task in developing an audio aesthetic is defining design pillars for the entire project. These are the types of content, techniques and styles upon which the game or film will rely most heavily. Content types may include character voiceover, ambient sound and music. Pillars of technique might include stylistic counterpoint, hyper-realism and anthropomorphism. A project will typically have one or two style pillars, often tied to the project’s visual style. These style pillars could include directions such as “Cyberpunk” or “Gothic”. Altogether, design pillars should put you in a position to describe the audio aesthetic for your title succinctly. If your design includes more than a handful of these pillars, it might be worth performing a reassessment to make sure the design isn’t becoming muddled stylistically.

In order to communicate about aesthetic effectively with your audio team, it’s worth developing a library of reference and common vocabulary early on in the project. This vocabulary is used to further refine the project’s sonic identity and can be extracted from multiple points of reference including films, games, books and music. Your references can and probably should be shared by multiple disciplines on the project. Descriptions for common vocabulary would read something like “Gritty explosions: (see Battlefield 3)”, “Visceral fight scenes like the Bourne movies” or “The foreboding ambience of Se7en”.

Once design pillars and common vocabulary have been established, I like to condense these ideas into a “style bible” that can be easily understood and referenced by the existing audio team, newly hired audio personnel and external, non-audio teams alike. The style bible provides detail on the project’s aesthetic direction as well as guides and constraints for content creation. Detailed aesthetic direction should include elaboration upon design pillars as well as specific points of reference within the project’s common vocabulary. These specific points of reference will take the form of video clips and audio files including a brief writeup of how the material in these clips applies to the project. Content creation guidelines can direct toward style and technique (i.e. “50’s sci-fi”, “compress, but leave some breathing room”) or even away from them (i.e. “avoid synthesized sounds”, “no spring reverb”). A comprehensive style bible will reach beyond the field of sound design and into the areas of voiceover and music.

Documenting your vision

As I mentioned earlier, the documentation of an audio aesthetic should be simple and easily understandable by all disciplines on a project, not just the audio team. But it should be easy to express your direction without a document as well. If the audio direction for a project can’t be conveyed verbally and clearly to other team members and creative leadership, then it may need refinement. Periodic meetings with the audio team that specifically discuss aesthetic will help with this refinement while keeping the team informed of stylistic shifts and changes.

Once the direction has been refined, it’s time to begin construction of your style bible in a format that’s easy to edit and easy to share. The written portion could be a source-controlled Word document or Google Doc if you have multiple editors working on the document simultaneously. If you have a team in which members are given categorical focus (i.e. voiceover, combat, ambience), invite each member to review and develop the section upon which he or she will be focused.

Design pillars will act as the commandments of your style bible and should be documented with no more than a couple of sentences. After you’ve got those down, document your common vocabulary and stylistic references with links to video and audio files. Keep reference material local whenever possible as you never know when an online video capture or sound file will suddenly disappear. If a reference from a game, movie, or television show is given solely as an audio file, try to include at least a screencap of the video source to help team members get a frame of reference. Finally, document your content creation guidelines with write-ups for each category of sound along with corresponding processing and mastering techniques. For added clarity, link your document to some individual, mastered assets along with the audio projects used to create them. These projects should be clearly organized and they should serve as examples of departmental standards, both technical and creative.

A very popular practice that should be borrowed from our visual counterparts in game development is that of the art room. Game artists create an art room as a fully realized example of a game’s style in terms of setting, scale, lighting, decoration, coloration and more. Game audio professionals can mirror this practice by creating a menagerie of game characters and settings with sound or even a fully playable level with comprehensive audio treatment including mastering and mix. For those of us in film sound, the art room can be a 5-10 minute segment that is representative of the overall audio aesthetic for the production. Whatever the format of your art room, it must be an easy to use and accurate reference for those creating additional content for the project.

When should you create your audio aesthetic?

The short answer is “As early as possible”. If you have the good fortune to be involved on a game or film during the pre-production process, experiment and isolate your aesthetic during this time to free up the rest of the project for pure content creation. For those of you strictly working in post-production, spend at least a little time assembling, if not a style bible, a style handbook to inform your team and your decisions during the intense post-production window. My short answer continues with “and as you go.” Whether you are involved from the start or only at the tail end, aesthetic is a moving target that can evolve, even if just slightly, right up until the project is wrapped.

Keep it flexible. Keep it safe.

Even if you and your team are confident in the direction for a project, that direction should be flexible. You may realize later in the development cycle that your aesthetic isn’t necessarily working and the creative heading for a project can change, sometimes drastically. When developing your sound and compiling your style bible, keep in mind they should never be so static that one or more components cannot be replaced, shifted or removed. Yes, it can be a pain to retread work that is already done, but preparation for design shifts outside of audio will lessen the sting if and when it actually happens.

Equally important as being flexible is being critical and honest about your own work. Think of it like a voice actor spot checking accent over the course of a production. Regular confirmation and course correction of your audio aesthetic is the only way to guarantee that your vision will make it through to the final product. Naturally, this is a more time consuming aspect of the job on a 20+ hour game than it is on a 2-hour film, but it is no less valuable a practice in either format.

Not just a big budget issue

If you’re thinking to yourself, “This seems like more of an issue for major motion picture and large scale games”, I encourage you to reconsider. It could be said that aesthetic development is even more important for smaller productions since they have less production time and a shorter window with their audiences to establish a unique sonic identity. Regardless of the budget, duration and scale of your project, developing cohesive aesthetic is a practice that pays off every time. Start small, keep it tight and go make history.

(seen via Game Audio 101 and Twitter ( @EngineAudioTom )

Click here to view the embedded video.

All kinds and thicknesses of ice was recorded and at many different temperatures. It was kicked, cracked, hit with a sledgehammer, crushed into itself and smacked with heavy chunks of ice. Ice debris was dropped and tossed around at many locations for a unbeatable, multiple take set of crash effects. When all these styles of frozen water and air vapor are pitched around with your favorite audio mangling tool, you will be amazed at the broad spectrum of sounds that can be created with the ultra high frequency response of the microphones.

Sound designer John Leonard has started an independent sfx library called ImmersiveFX. There are two releases available at the moment and for being reader of Designing Sound, you can get a special discount price. Use the code DFSX50 and you’ll get 50% off on both libraries:

• Sounds of Flight - An eclectic collection from my extensive archive Jumbo Jets, Military Fighters, War-birds, Helicopters and Bi-Planes From an F-16 to a Tiger Moth – it’s all here. 48/16 WAV files with embedded Soundminer Metadata – $25
• The Voice of Poseidon - 101 effects of seascapes and some river and waterfall sounds. From the gentle waves on a sandy beach to the crash of breakers on the Pacific shore. 48/24 WAV files with embedded Soundminer Metadata – $80

Sound recordist Mikkel Nielsen runs a library called Sonic Salute, where he has released four sound collections so far:

• Metal Scrap – 97 stereo/MS recordings of metals. Clink/clank/crash/boom
• The Shipyard – 16 stereo/MS recordings captured in the summer of 2011, at the commercial port of Copenhagen. The area is filled with giant cranes, trucks, and containers, and is closed to the public.
• Pigs FX – 246 recordings of all kinds of pigs, recorded at Pigfarm Esrumgaard, which has close to 1000 pigs of all ages and sizes.
• Footsteps Snow - 25 minutes of long walks in cold and snowy conditions. Recorded during tree winters from 2009 to 2011 in a remote deserted Swedish forest, miles away from the nearest road.

EFX has new changes on the site and also a new library: Colombian Countryside, including 35 nature atmospheres recorded and remasterized at 48 kHz 24-bit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Affordable Audio 4 Everyone has released The Hud Menu Interface Toolbox, a library of 700 interface sounds. All proceeds above $5 will go to The National Federation of the Blind.

The Hud Menu Interface Toolbox features various sounds that can be used for various menus, Game HUD’s, and also small object interface interactions. It is a great tool for building, and creating response sounds to player interations, or for any type setting that may need some additional sounds for a character or actor to make when interacting with something.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BOOM Library has released free Flamethrower SFX pack.

Remember the video from Chad Thunberg, who really knows how to do some little DIY-Engineering? He’s the guy that built an epic FLAMETHROWER out of plastic pipes and a garden hose. Luckily for us, Axel was around to point the microphone towards this “eternal flame”. Guess what: It sounded just awesome. We gave these SFX away for free during our advent calendar weeks. This awesome SFX pack is now available for EVERYBODY.

Support for Android, PlayStation Vita and WiiU

Altiverb “Outdoor and More” Impulse Response package

Keyboard Shortcut Manager

Fades and automation for Music Clips

Some changes to Music Transitions:

• Transition: Cue names can be used to specify precisely where to jump in to a destination music segment.

• Stingers: Cue names can be used to specify at which custom cue exactly the stinger should be triggered.

• Callbacks: Callbacks return the name of the cues to the game which opens up new gameplay possibilities.

LFE control merged with main volume control

Wwise Gain Effect

These new features, plus bug fixes and other information on the update are included in the Wwise 2011.3.1 release notes