UK based Audio Designer Samuel Justice has posted an interesting blog post discussing the importance of early reflections in recreating authentic sounding 3D environments. An excerpt of his article is below, and you can read the full article, with audio examples here

Game audio is at an exciting turning point these days, not only do game makers realise the full potential of engaging immersive audio (and the negative effect of a product lacking in this) but us sound designers are now given the responsibility and freedom to create an entire audible world with as much creativity as we can muster (within the given time frame).

The recent generation (and history) of games is a testament to how the industry is home to some of the most creative sound designers around, you only have to listen to their work and you are instantly transported to another world, created entirely by their vision and expertise. Game audio engines are as well more powerful then ever, talented audio programmers have been able to model occlusion, diffusion, diffraction and a whole other slew of wonderful processing effects that help players immerse themselves into the worlds we create.

But this article is not about praising sound design, or sound designers. Instead, what I hope to achieve is to bring about the importance of a major feature that is missing from a lot of game audio engines, or is not being used. It is one of the pinnacle processing effects (in my opinion) that glues audio into the environment and allows it to blend in naturally, thus, not breaking the all important immersion.

I’m talking about early reflections.

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The video on the top is from a session given by sound designer Steve Johnson and composer Vincent Diamante. In the session they talked about the use of sound design and music as narrative elements in Flower, a game for PS3 developed by Thatgamecompany.

Thatgamecompany’s Flower was an ambitious and unconventional game that saw fruition through an equally unconventional development cycle.

This session features a discussion from the composer and sound designer about the audio, covering how their process, source materials, implementation, and unique method of collaboration came together to convey a narrative without words.

Speaker: Steve Johnson (Sound Designer, Sony Computer Entertainment America), Vincent Diamante (composer, contractor) (March 13, 2010)

There are other 7 videos from the session. You can see all of them here.

Call of Duty (released 7 years ago) was one of the most important jobs for Chuck Russom, so we decided to make an interview talking about that game and what it meant for his career.

Designing Sound: How do you get hired on Infinity Ward and how do you get involved with Call of Duty?

Chuck Russom: It’s crazy when I think about it, the first Call of Duty game was 7 years ago. So many of the opportunities I’ve had in my career came about because of my work on that game. It’s also been insane to watch the Call of Duty franchise grow into one of the most successful game franchises ever.

My relationship with Infinity Ward started with a job posting on a website. I was looking for a new game audio gig and I found a post by a new company that wasn’t too far from my house. I contacted them and found out that the company was formed by a bunch of guys who had worked on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. That game was very successful and had amazing audio work, so the chance to work on a project with Infinity Ward was very appealing. After an initial meeting, they decided to contract me for a month to work on their first playable level. After that was complete, they hired me on fulltime to work on the rest of the game.

DS: I think your relationship with the rest of teams had to be even more “active”… How was that process of feedback and organizing all the stuff together?

CR: Everyone at Infinity Ward was very aware of sound. It was quite the opposite of most teams. I never had to step up on my soapbox and complain about the importance of sound. I didn’t have to spend my time convincing designers to hook my sounds up. The designers would have sound in mind while they were building an event. They would usually have sound requests to me before I had even seen the events they were working on.

DS: Being the only sound designer, and being your first project doing too much things, how do you organized your workflow? How long the project took to you?

CR: I don’t know if there was really any organized aspect to it. It was chaos! I pretty much learned as I went, though trial and error. It was my first time working on a game in that genre, my first time leading the audio, my first time working on something so high profile. I worked on the game for 9 months, and it was full bore the entire time. It never really slowed down. There was a mountain of work, and I just kept digging at it until it was done.

DS: How the limitations of that generation platform affected you on the sound specifically?

CR: Actually, Call of Duty was the first game (and the last) that I didn’t feel limited by the tech. We only shipped on PC, so I really had more memory available then I knew what to do with! Way beyond any game then I had worked on before. It was the first time that I was able to keep my sound assets at 16 bit 44.1K, which was so huge to me. It was also the first time that I had any tools that I could use to control the way sound worked in game.

DS: Did you get influenced by some other warfare game or film?

CR: Saving Private Ryan really changed my life. When I first saw that film, I had already been working as a sound designer for a couple years. I was totally blown away at the audio work in that film, I knew that I wanted to do work at that level, that I absolutely had picked the right career for me.

Going into Call of Duty, I was very influenced by Saving Private Ryan, as was the game team. The team was also very influenced by Band of Brothers and Enemy At The Gates, so those also became an influence. I spent a great deal of time watching every war movie or movie with guns that I could find.

The Medal of Honor games were a big influence, since that was our main competitor. Since most of the team had worked on Allied Assault, the audio on that game was referenced quite a bit. I spent a lot of time listening to the sound assets from the game, dissecting them, using nearly every sound as a reference to what I needed to match or better with the work I was doing.

DS: You was also the implementer, mixer and apart of making the sounds you had to make all of them work on the gameplay. How was the implementation process done? What tools did you use there?

CR: I had a lot of implementation help from the designers. They hooked up most of the sounds in the game. They also wrote me a script that I could use to place ambient emitters (fires, waterfalls, etc). As far as tools, Call of Duty was made in 2003, and audio tools have come a long way since then. I was using excel and a CSV file to control all my sound volumes, variations, fall offs, etc. It was way more control that I’d had on any previous game. The tech we had worked quite well and I was very happy with the sound coverage in game and with the mix.

CD: That was your first time with a shooter game. How do you helped to make a great shooter experience? Is there a style or technique you used to enhance the player’s emotion?

CR: I had worked on one shooter before, but it was fantasy based and nowhere near as intense or immersive. The approach on Call of Duty was to make the player feel like they were in the middle of the war. I had very dense and very loud ambient tracks playing at all times. The ambient tracks would have elements like gunfire at multiple distances, tanks, explosions, and even up close bullet impacts at times. This really gave you the feel that there was a lot of sound happening all the time. There more intense the level, the more dense I would make the ambient track.

There were always a lot of AI characters on screen with you, both enemy and friendly. Just having all these characters near you shooting their guns, made for a real intensive experience. There were always bullets whizzing by or impacting near the player, mortars whistling and exploding near the player, guys shouting words that you couldn’t quite hear, it was all very LOUD!

DS: Could you tell us something more about the recording process? I know it was your first time recording guns, so what stories you have on it?

CR: We did 4 days of gun recording, capture both gunfire and bullet impacts. We had 4 different nationalities in the game, and each had 6-8 different weapons, so there were a lot of guns. We recorded most of the actual weapons from WWII. We teamed up with Spark Unlimited who were working on a different Call of Duty game (Finest Hour), so we did a combined gun shoot. I’d never recorded guns before, so I let Jack Grillo (Audio Director from Spark) handle the recording process. We recorded to 10-12 channels. I think we had a DA88 and a couple portable DAT machines. I do remember running a couple channels of mics on my Tascam DAP1. I can’t remember too many specifics, as it was 7 years and many gun shoots ago.

DS: And what about the dialogue? Did your record that? How was the process?

CR: I did some of the early dialogue recording. Handling the engineering, editing, and processing. As development ramped up, I was way too busy with sound effects to handle much of the dialog. The bulk of the recording and editing was outsourced. I handled the mastering and any processing that was needed.

DS: That was your first time designing guns and warfare stuff. How was the creative process on the design side? What tools you used for that?

CR: The tools I used then were not too different than what I use now. Protools HD, Sound Forge, and Waves Plugins. In addition to the guns that we recorded, I had every sound library that had guns.

The process was a lot of trial and error. There were a lot of iterations. I made (and learned from) a log of mistakes. There were a lot of reworks up until the last minute. I had never designed gun sounds before that, so it took a lot of work to get to the sounds that we shipped with. One of the biggest challenges was the number and variety of guns in the game. There were probably 25-30 different guns in the game. Giving them all a unique voice was a huge challenge. It still is to this day, anytime I work on a project with a large variety of guns, its difficult. Guns just start to sound the same after a while.

DS: What was the most you learn from working on this game_? And what was your favorite thing of working on Call of Duty?

CR: The biggest thing that I took away from the project, something that’s had a lasting impact on me, is what to do when your best effort isn’t good enough. There were numerous times over the course of the project where I designed a sound, or completed a level/sequence, and while I did the work to the best of my ability, it just wasn’t at the level required by the team or the project.

In a situation like this you have two options. The first option is that you can just give up. You convince yourself that you gave it your all, maybe you just are not good enough to compete at this level, you accept it and go away and cry about it. The second option, and the only one that is acceptable to me, is to face your challenge head on. Lock yourself in your room and continue to work and rework until you get to the level you need to be at, no matter how much time or how much effort it takes. It is really about complete tunnel vision, nothing can get in the way of achieving your goal. If you commit 100% of your focus and all of your time to a problem, and you tackle it from multiple angles, you will achieve the results that you are after.

There is a song by Eminem called Lose Yourself that basically became my motivation song on that project. There is one lyric in the song that would constantly play in my head; “Success is your only motherfucking option, failure’s not.” I would constantly remind myself that, every time I thought I hit a wall while working on something. I’d listen to the song all the time in the car while driving to work, just to hammer the thought home. There as no way I could accept anything less than perfection. The game was just too good to have inferior audio. And the team expected nothing less than “award-winning audio”.

“Be prepared to listen to other’s opinions as well as expecting others to listen to yours.”

-Rob Bridgett

One area that has been gaining ground since the early days of EAX on the PC platform, and more recently it’s omnipresence in audio middleware toolsets, is Reverb. With the ability to enhance the sounds playing back in the game with reverberant information from the surrounding space, you can effectively communicate to the player a truer approximation of “being there” and help to further immerse them in the game world. While we often take Reverb for granted in our everyday life as something that helps us position ourselves in a space (the cavernous echo of an airport, the openness of a forest), it is something that is continually giving us feedback on our surroundings, and thus a critical part of the way we experience the world.

While It has become standard practice to enable Reverb within a single game level and apply a single preset algorithm to a subset of the sound mix. Many developers have taken this a step further and created Reverb regions that will call different Reverb presets based on the area the player is currently located. This allows the Reverb to change based on predetermined locations using predefined Reverb settings. Furthermore, these presets have been extended to area’s outside of the player region so that sounds coming from a different region can use the region and settings of the sounds origin in order to get their Reverberant information. Each of these scenarios is valid in an industry where you must carefully balance all of your resources, and where features must play to the strengths of your game design.

While preset Reverb and Reverb Regions have become a standard, and are a welcome addition to a Sound Designers toolbox, these techniques ignore the inherent physical characteristics of a space and are unable to dynamically react to reflections from these surfaces relative to the player. In order to bring Reverb closer to realtime expectations, level geometry could be referenced based on the originating position of a sound within a space, and that data could then be used to apply appropriate reflections.

One way of accomplishing this in the current generation of consoles is through the use of Ray Traced Convolution Reverb, a technique which snuck in under our noses in the Xbox 360 launch title Crackdown, from Realtime Worlds. 

”When we heard the results of our complex Reverb/Reflections/Convolution or “Audio-Shader” system in Crackdown, we knew that we could make our gunfights sound like that, only in real-time! Because we are simulating true reflections on every 3D voice in the game, with the right content we could immerse the player in a way never before heard.”-Raymond Usher (Team Xbox)

So, what is realtime Reverb using ray tracing and convolution on a per-voice implementation?
Simply put, it is the idea that every sound that happens within the game world has spatially correct reverberation reflections applied to it. Let’s dig in a bit more…

Here’s a quick definition of Ray Tracing as it applies to physics calculation:

“In physics, ray tracing is a method for calculating the path of waves or particles through a system with regions of varying propagation velocity, absorption characteristics, and reflecting surfaces. Under these circumstances, wavefronts may bend, change direction, or reflect off surfaces, complicating analysis. Ray tracing solves the problem by repeatedly advancing idealized narrow beams called rays through the medium by discrete amounts. Simple problems can be analyzed by propagating a few rays using simple mathematics. More detailed analysis can be performed by using a computer to propagate many rays.” -Wikipedia

On the other side of the coin you have the concept of convolution:

“In audio signal processing, convolution Reverb is a process for digitally simulating the reverberation of a physical or virtual space. It is based on the mathematical convolution operation, and uses a pre-recorded audio sample of the impulse response of the space being modeled. To apply the reverberation effect, the impulse-response recording is first stored in a digital signal-processing system. This is then convolved with the incoming audio signal to be processed.” -Wikipedia

So what you end up with is a pre-recorded impulse response of a space (room, cave, outdoor) being modified (or convoluted) by the Ray Traced calculations of the surrounding physical spaces. The distance of a originating sound from the level geometry defined in the Ray Traced calculation gives the reflections their parameters which effect the Impulse Response sample of the space type.

You can hear the results of their effort in every gunshot, explosion, physics object, and vehicle as you travel through the concrete jungle of Pacific City. As the player walks around the city, a passing car is with it’s radio blaring can be heard positionally from the open window in addition to it’s reflection off of a nearby wall; meanwhile footsteps & gunshots are continuously being reverberated realistically depending on the changing environmental characteristics. What this allows the sound to communicate is a greater sense of location and dynamics of the sound at the time it is triggered.

While the result may be less impressive than the complexity of the implementation, the additive effect that it has on the multitude of sounds happening throughout a game can bear a significant effect on adding realism to the environment. It’s also worth noting that Crackdown2 will be hitting shelves soon from Ruffian Games, along with the Realtime Worlds’ new MMO All Points Bulletin. No word yet on whether either of these will continue to push realtime Reverb but all ears will be on them for advancing the potential of this technique.

With a future for convolution Reverb implied in a recent press release for Audiokinetic’s Wwise toolset, and the brief outline of it’s use in Radical’s recent open world game Prototype, let’s hope the idea of Realtime Reverb in some way, shape, or form continues to play an integral part in the next steps towards runtime spatialization.

Article: The Audio of Crackdown
Podcast Interview with MGS Kristofer Mellroth (Starts at 12:00 in)

See video example of Realtime Reverb Debug @ 4:15

Crackdown – Sound Study Footsteps

George Spanos has published a nice talk he had with Vance Dylan, sound designer with work on titles such as Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Sonic Chronicles. Vance talks about specific games, his career and how he creates sound. Let’s read:

Let’s start off with the ubiquitous question: when did you decide to pursue a career in sound?

Vance Dylan: I was inspired by my Uncle Eddie who was a singer/songwriter who would often open for Bill Haley and the Comets way back in the day. My dad was also a great closet musician who never did pursue his dream but damn he was a sweet guitar player.I tried a few things, became a decent drummer, tried to write songs but sucked at it but the whole time I was very interested in hooking up gear and messing around with recording things. I think my first recording was that of my sister playing her recorder back in he 70′s using a Candle cassette recorder.

With the success of the first Mass Effect, where there any sound implementation changes that were necessary for Mass Effect 2?

Vance Dylan: There were massive changes in audio from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2. We used the (Creative Labs’) Isact audio engine on the first one which limited what we could do, we are now using Wwise which in my opinion is the best audio engine on the market today. We also had a big shift in our team as we brought in Rob Blake as the audio lead and added more team members to handle the load. I think we had 10 guys working on ME2 at one point. As far as implementation, it was a whole new ball game using Wwise. For example in ME2, I was responsible for all the vehicles in game and in cutscenes and all that and we were able to do stuff like making sound more intimidating if you were more paragon. The idea being if you were more renegade then you wouldn’t be as scared or the sound wouldn’t be as scary to you. Things like that took only a few minutes to set up using Wwise where before it just wasn’t possible at all.

Continue reading…

Designing Sound: Hi Charles, first of all, would be great to have an introduction about your career. How did you start, how you grow up in the sound world, and so on…

Charles Deenen: Thanks for the invite! We’ll have a fun month together with (hopefully) lots of usable info.

I’ve been called an old fella by some young folks in the industry, so am getting up there in age. I grew up in the netherlands and around 1983, attempted to start doing audio on a computer. That was the era of Commodore PET, so I tried to get tolerable sound out of a single-beep CBM-PET, and oh my, that didn’t go so well, LOL. Soon after acquiring a C64, I started to make music/graphic demos, through which I met Jeroen Tel. We wanted to make our own music, and wrote a music-driver for the Commodore 64. Well, this led to us having the “odd” idea that maybe we could make money doing this. You know, maybe just enough to pay for some gum and floppy-disks. There we travelled as young teenagers, all dressed up, to the european computer show in London where Hewson gave us our first paid gig. Apparently they liked what we did, and this led to many more jobs from a wide range of companies. Initially, I mainly provided the sound-effects for the titles which we did, but soon had to delve into doing music. Well, I knew nothing about music. I knew that a C major sounded OK after a D minor, that’s about it, LOL. However, funny enough the first music pieced I did wasn’t bad, and started doing more and more.

Early appreciation of cars

In the late 80‘s our company “Maniacs of Noise” had to begin sub-contracting, and at its peak had 5 people making musical noise at once. Considering those early computer-game years, that was huge. During those time, computer games were not nearly as main-stream as now. Zzap 64 was about the only magazine dedicated to gaming, and a game development team was 3-4 people. We provided music and/or sfx for over a hundred games on Commodore 64, 128, Amiga, Atari ST and Spectrum.

In 1990, one of the projects we did was “Dragon’s War” by Interplay which I’d taken on. They liked what I did, and asked me to move to the USA. Only 20 years old, I said “sure, why not”. After all Visa related items were completed I moved to Irvine, CA in the middle of 1991 where I started as Audio Director for Virgin Games and Interplay Productions. After doing McKids for Virgin on the NES, I moved solely to Interplay where I stayed for the next 10 years. Startrek, Baldur’s Gate, Ice-Wind Dale, Descent and others were some of the franchises I worked on while employed there. After a short stint at Shiny where I worked on the Matrix game, I went freelance to work on feature films. Thanks for Soundstorm, who gave me a chance on “Superman”, “Fast and Furious” and “2 Fast 2 Furious” were some of the first ones I worked on. This is were I fell in love with cars and emotionally engaging sound design.

Electronic Arts was in the process to re-boot their Need for Speed franchise a bit with NFS Underground.  During this, I received a call from a very nice gentlemen at EA who asked if I’d be interested to move to canada to work on this. My first reaction was “canada… oh man… that’s too cold… thanks, but no”. Through the generosity of EA, my wife and I visited Vancouver, BC and actually really liked it, so we ended up moving there.   We had the fortunate luck to find a house which allowed me to build a nice studio from which I do a fair bit of (non game) projects as well.

Since 2001, doing sound for Feature film trailers has been a side-job on weekends. Daredevil was my first one, and since then have worked on more than 60 of them including some recent ones like “Clash of the Titans” and “Salt”.

They are my learning cases. How to do great sound-design under an extreme tight deadline has you reaching for the most odd solutions, which in turn help with the production of video-game sound design.

DS: You’re creating sounds since the era of the Commodore and Atari ST… What do you think about the evolution of the game audio industry? What could be the next step?

CD: We’ve now reached a level of sound reproduction similar to film sound. The next era will not be about “more voices” and “more dsp”, it’ll be about creating emotionally engaging and believable soundscapes. 95% of games still break the believability barrier within the first few minutes, wether it’s through actor performances, character placement or odd pauses and gaps. There are many ways to take a player out of the experience, and that’s still our biggest issue today. Added technology will help, and make it easier again, but until we overcome this believability gap, all the technology in the world is not going to do it for us.

DS: You have worked as freelance and in-house… What would better for you? What you learn of each “status” and what do you recommend for all the sound designers out there?

CD: I was always freaking out a bit when I was freelance. Always looking for the next gig. It drove me insane at times. The insecurity of having a mortgage and family to sustain and the need for a constant stream of income worried me greatly. Oddly enough I never had to really look for jobs when I was doing freelance work, it was merely the “what if” factor that did it.

What I’d recommend freelance sound designers to do is become good and fast. Easier said than done I know, and it might be a simple statement. There are so many sound designers out there who haven’t been exposed to musical pacing, musical editing styles, or haven’t been exposed enough to highly demanding directors who crave for a emotionally stimulating and fitting soundbed. These experiences are needed to sustain in a demanding, volatile market-place to be able to rely on your experiences to deliver. Also, specializing in something really helps getting some sound design jobs. For example right now I’m hired a fair bit for car chases and any other vehicles. That seems to have become my “thing”.

The amount of games with large budgets is rapidly decreasing. The request for “cheaper and faster” not only is hitting the film industry, but also the game industry. In this situation though, cheaper and faster doesn’t mean “worse”. Industry peers are still expecting high quality work. The trick is how to gain the experience of doing something fast and good. This is only something you can learn mostly on your own, learning your own strengths and boundaries. Its critical you acquire honest feedback. If everybody keeps on telling you your work is awesome, there’s something amiss, unless your name is Randy maybe. You simply haven’t met the producer or director yet who has found some flaws in your work which requires improvement or adaptation. Now, make sure you continue to work for that person. He’s the one who’ll drive you further (or nuts in some cases :)

DS: I can see a couple of series of video games and films, such as NFS series, Star Trek and Fast and the Furious. What are the sound challenges on each sequel? The game/film is always different, but the essence is the same, so how you make to have a sequel of sound too?

CD: Sequels have indeed their dilemma’s. You’re asked to better the work you did which was last year was just considered “your best”. Now “your best”=old, and you’re faced with re-inventing the sound-design you did. In some cases you’re lucky and the movie or game has a new feel which will inspire this. For each project I always look for the single “it-factor”. Sometimes this doesn’t come to fruition until the last second, and sometimes it ignites the project. For example on NFS Shift we did these “in your head” driver experience sound-beds. This resulted out of an early teaser where I played around with non typical sounds, trying to emulate what a driver would hear in a race. This came partially due to the “driver experience” slogan the game just got. This stimulated the signatory sound for the NFS Shift FMV’s and menu-beds.

Charles at Interplay

DS: What kind of software you use to work with sound at EA Black Box? What are the technology to work with the implementation process?

CD: Some industry folks say that we’re spoiled at EA. I hear this often at GDC and such. Know though that the technology we use is build by a very small team, and often on the game-teams themselves. Technology is not the end all be all.  For me, it’s less important how the tools work, as long as the result can be obtained. For the past years we’ve worked with a MAX/MSP style tool where we can manipulate sounds in almost any way in real-time. This has been the work-horse for many EA games for over 8 years.

Then there are game specific tools. For Blackbox’s Skate, we build tools which were able to emulate the skate-boarding sound much more realistic than ever before. For our driving games, we build a car-engine technology which (until recent) hadn’t been done in any other game. Now, with Dice’s Frostbite technology it makes it even easier for Artists at EA to integrate flawlessly with the game itself. So, yes in one way, we’re spoiled, but these tools are driven by folks who know what they want to hear, and through team-work, get great results.

I recall when I started at EA in 2003 we were mixing in text-files, and had to restart the game everytime we made a single change. Now, it’s all real-time, thanks to a talented group of programmers and the artists who steered them  In hearing the many storeis from other companies, I do believe EA has some of the most advanced tools right now, and we’re making them even better every day.

DS: What you consider as the most important skill of any sound designer must have?

CD: Will-power. Never give up. Sometimes directors will ask the impossible of a sound-designer, and I’ve seen many give up. The ones that didn’t,  became the leaders in this industry. One story I’ve told many is one that happened to me during Descent; I wanted to make a very cool ship fly-by, and whatever I did sucked. Determined not to give up, I locked myself up in my sound-design room, not to leave it until I arrived at a result. I started off by mimicking some other ship fly-by’s from movies in order to learn. This was the hardest part; I had to create each element from scratch with a very limited library. Frustration set in rapidly, but got to know my effects processors (DSP4000, PCM80, DSP4, BBE, SPL’s etc. etc. at that time) very very well. After 3 days and nights I ended up with a set which I really liked, but that wasn’t the payoff. The real payoff was that I had just learned 100+ ways on how to make by’s, air-distortion, clean tonal whooshes etc. Those 3 days have brought me partially where I’m at today.

Another big part is real-world inspiration. Sound Designers who don’t get to hear the world and its wonderful plethora of sounds, and/or don’t expose themselves to other people inspirational work, will inhibit themselves of growing to their full potential.

Sound Designers also must find a mentor to learn from, people who inspire them to greatness. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You’ll be amazed how many people are very willing to help others, especially in the sound community.

Few more things I value in sound-designers; musical understanding, musical sensability, and rhythmic sense, as well as the ability to know every owned plug-in’s potential very well.

DS: You’ve worked in film and video games. If you had to choose just one, what would it be? and why?

CD: That’s like making me choose between Candy and Chips. Come on !! :) Each have their best parts; Game development has a real sense of team-work. You become part of the development from day 1, and get to adapt the game to make it work better with audio to enable a richer player’s experience. You get to play with a lot of technical tools, which is really fun, but the amount of emotional fulfillment isn’t nearly as high as film. With film or other cinematic experiences you’re usually working to make a director or sound supervisor happy. You work purely on sound and its emotions, with no worries on how to play it back. The amount of emotional connection to picture is a dozen times higher. I edit sound on picture based on feel, not on # of channels available or trigger mechanism. It’s a whole different paradigm, but I wouldn’t want to miss either one. Sound design for film speaks to my emotional side. Sound design for games covers a lot of my technical outlets.

DS: How you survive to “the crunch”?

CD: When you get older, surviving a crunch becomes harder and harder, and I can’t honestly say I survive it well anymore. I simply can’t do the 80-100 hour weeks I used to do. At this point its more important to me to get stuff done earlier vs. later. This makes the crunch at the end is a lot shorter. My job over the last 3 years  (through my own doing) has been close to a constant “crunch”, helping out several games during their final stages. It also had me travel quite a lot which, combined with late hours, can get a bit straining. But that said I’m not complaining about it. Will-power makes me overcome the crunch, and the end-result always is the pay-off. Lets say I like coffee and “beaver buzz” energy drinks :) But my real goal is to limit crunches by setting deadlines much sooner, and by distributing more of the work. The crew at EA is awesome. They all help out during needy times.

However I’ve had my downs too; during my first year at EA I was doing some late nights since I wanted to learn every tool quickly, and was drinking a lot of Mountain Dew. Now, nobody in canada had told me that you can artificially put caffeine in a drink, so the mountain dew I was drinking didn’t have the usual buzz I was used to. After 7 cans I was wondering why the hell I was falling asleep.. The next morning, there was quite a bit of chuckling going on when they explained the canadian non-caffeine rule… damn :)

DS: How many time you spend playing games?

CD: Honestly, fairly little since I have little spare time. I check out the competition of games we work on, and any games my friends work on, and/or highly praised sound-jobs on games. Usually I spend enough time with them to get the jist, but hardly find myself continuing to play for “fun”. Luckily through some peer judging panels I’m part of, every year I get to play 20+ games during december and march, and usually those are the best of the best that year, so it’s fun to check them out and talk among peers about what’s great etc.

DS: Someone you admire? Any special influence in the world of sound?

CD: There’s many folks I admire, either for their talent, their perseverance, their contributions to the industry or other. Whenever people ask me this question, the first person that comes to mind is Harry Cohen. For the last 15 years he’s been my inspiration for sound-design, and he’s always open to share some advice and/or techniques.
The other that comes to mind I John Fasal. Everytime we work together he remains calm, even under the greatest stress, and always delivers quality work. There aren’t many people who can do this on a consistent basis. I want to learn his “zen mode”, LOL.

Having known Tommy T for 19 years, ever since we worked together at Virgin, I admire everything he’s done to promote the game industry towards the outside world. We’ve had our differences for sure, but that doesn’t take away from everything he’s accomplished in those 19 years.

I also admire people who speak their mind, and don’t bullshit. Some execs in my past talked a good talk, but don’t always walk the walk. This in turn made them loose respect from the crew. A great visionary (exec) producer who knows what he wants is his weight worth in gold.

DS: Finally, could you tell us something about your current projects? And for the future?

CD: In January, I went back to work mainly on Need for Speed games, to help shape its bright future. At home I’m still helping out on an occasional ad, trailer or movie, but have tried to take more time off to enjoy life with my lovely wife. My hobby of photography (http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdeenen/sets/) is also moving a bit to the foreground. A few years back I noticed that a lot of fellow sound designers are also photographers, and have enjoyed sharing techniques with them on both sound and photography.   One of my biggest pleasures will remain helping folks excel at what they do, and succeed.

Seeing the plethora of young, very talented sound designers arise through the masses makes me realize our industry has a bright, but very different future.  Each person brings their own element to the table.  Too bad we don’t have a sound design museum. We should. There is so much great work out there done by all these folks to be enjoyed and inspire a whole new generation.

The future will also hold more relaxing time, I hope :)

Thanks for listening

Dark Void is a new sci-fi adventure game from CAPCOM for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. The story is about a cargo pilot called William Augustus Grey who crashes into the Bermuda Triangle and is teleported to a parallel universe. With the help of other survivor humans and Nikola Tesla, Willian have to go back to the earth, but first fighting with all kind of creatures on the Void.

Here is an interview I had with Tom Smurdon, Audio director of Dark Void.

Designing Sound: Hi Tom, please give us an introduction of your career and how was your start with sound design.

Tom Smurdon: Hi! When I was younger I learned to play guitar, but I was always playing more with the effects. I loved plugging pedals into pedals and more pedals to see what kind of noises I could make. Then I got a 4-track and knew that’s what I wanted to do. I ended up going to Full Sail to become a recording engineer. I interned and then became a second engineer at Bad Animals in Seattle. This was in the early 90’s and I got to work with some great bands Soundgarden, Deftones, Staind, Pigeonhed, Presidents of the USA, and the Foo Fighters. I also worked with some great producers and engineers. There is a lot of downtime when you assist on a record and during mixing the bands get so bored.

Luckily right around this time the playstation came out. If I wasn’t in the studio I was home glued to that thing. All the bands had them too. The music industry was changing and I bought my first daw, PARIS. I started freelancing more and doing some sound design work then. I ended up working for an online education company as their audio guy. I would edit dialog all day and sound design the flash animations that went with the lectures.

DS: How did you get involved with the games industry? and how with Dark Void?

TS: My wife was still working at Bad Animals and she would record voice talent for videogames. She was working on a game called Voodoo Vince for the Xbox. One of the guys asked her if she knew of any sound designers that worked freelance and bam, I got my first videogame! I still have no idea how I talked my way into that job.

After that game, I got a job working for Omni Audio. I worked on sooo many games with those guys over 6 years. I have sounds in over 22 shipped titles. We did all of the Guild Wars games; I think I am personally responsible for over 300 different sets of monster sounds in that series alone. Worked on Halo 2, the Sims, Vanguard, Rise of Legends and on and on. Omni is a great group and they will do entire games or just get pulled in at the last minute for emergency sounds when teams run out of time.

Airtight Games was looking for an audio team and they hired Omni. I became the audio lead on Dark Void and then when the project ended, I stayed on as Airtight’s audio director.

DS: How long was the development cycle of “Dark Void”?

TS: It was right around 2 years from vertical slice to finished game.

DS: How the concept of the game influenced the audio crew to start thinking about sound? How was the relationship with the developers, artists…?

TS: The artists would show us a ton of concept art and that would let us start to build our source libraries. The story starts out in the 1930’s and involves Nikola Tesla, so we wanted a lot of electricity source. We also wanted it to have an older feeling to it, but not make it sound like an old movie. And I knew I had to put a Theremin in the game somewhere.

There always seem to be some term that gets used for every game. For this one it was ‘Dark Energy.’ Dark Energy is what the Watchers used to power their weapons and vehicles. Poor Chase Combs. He was another sound designer at Omni who worked a ton on this game. He would just get revisions saying, make it have more dark energy. I think he wanted to kill me whenever he heard that term.

The devs and artists were great, it was just a matter of keeping up with everybody. The game changed a bunch from the original vertical slice. It started out as a more graphic novel styled game and turned into a more realistic one. That changed how we approached all of our sound design. The survivors guns had to be more realistic and the watcher guns nastier.

DS: Could you share some interesting field recording experiences? What were some of the sources for the sounds of the game?

TS: We went up to the American Museum of Radio and Electricity in Bellingham, WA and recorded all of this old electrical gear they had. We only had a day so we recorded everything to a bunch of different mics since we didn’t know what piece of equipment would interfere with which mic. It was different depending on the contraption the owner was playing with. The tesla coils were shooting out arcs of electricity all over the place. We stayed far back from that stuff. We got a lot of great source from that trip. They also had a ton of old radios and televisions that we recorded all of the switches and knobs from.

DS: What were your primarily tools for sound design on Dark Void?

TS: I used nuendo, sound forge and a fireface 800. Uad-1 cards for a lot of processing. Chase also found a great little plug in called Pitchfork. That was used a ton on the giant metal beasts in the game. When you use it on metal groans it can make this incredible giant mutant sound.

DS: And how about the implementation process? Could you tell us more about that?

TS: When you are on the ground, enemies are pretty close but when you fly around with your rocketpack, the distance to enemies multiplied by 20. If you hear all of the flying vehicles when you are in ground combat, you wouldn’t hear the ground combat. So we had to come up with a way that the radius of sounds changed depending if you were in the air or on the ground. In a game where you can just take off at any moment, this was one of our biggest challenges.

I also changed the way the air vehicles sound depending on your location. In the air, your rocketpack is playing all the time. So it would knock out all of the mids on the UFO’s and planes. Different layers play depending if on foot or in air to help compensate for the rocketpack.

Putting in music was a dream. Bear McCreary is a gamer and he was totally into the way the music would work. He wanted no repetition and he recorded all kinds of alts and solo tracks that let us play the tracks differently just about every time they are used. The music has a great progression as it changes from more natural instruments to just crazy over the top at the end of the game. He has a great blog post up on his site about scoring the project.

DS: What software you used for the implementation process? How was the sound engine of the game?

TS: We used fmod with some customization and it worked pretty well. We did have some issues with streaming too much info and we are working on solutions for that on our next games.

DS: There are a lot of different weapons in the game… Any experiences or specific process there?

We started with just the machine gun. And we made it BIG. The thing is that it was the smallest gun in the game, so we kept making all of the other guns bigger. We recorded a lot of guns for the game. The machinegun uses shotgun blasts for part of its sound. There were 10 different guns sounds used to make the machinegun.

We also made all of the weapons surround. The coolest ones are where we could put the whine from the automatic weapons in the rear speakers and the shots were in front. And always, more dark energy never hurt.

DS: And for the spaceships/sci-fi stuff and creatures? (if you wouldn’t mind)

TS: There is a Theremin mixed in with the UFO. I didn’t want it to sound too 50’s sci-fi so it really only comes out as you are banking and when you are hijacking them.

Most of the creatures are mechanical. Lots of metal creaks and groans, but we tried to stay away from too many servos. Inside of each pawn robot is a living slug. So if you are lucky enough to have one pop out, you can stomp it for a nice squish. I had a temp pig squeal attached to the slugs during production. It was so obnoxious. There was a bug where it just played over and over again if there was one near you. One of the guys from Capcom told me he was going to cancel the game if I didn’t take it out.

Another request I had was to make the sarpa (snake creatures) sound intelligent. So we made up some nonsense chants and english taunts and split them to 2 tracks. One track we put through a high pass filter and then a tremolo. That track is automated so that its volume only comes up at the ends of words and the tremolo was automated so that it would go from fast to slow at the tail. When this is mixed with the non-processed track, it gives you a little snake sound. All of this was pitched up and then added a small amount of verb.

DS: The Jet-pack is one of the key features on the game… How was the sound design of it?

TS: The jetpack was fun to make. That was done really early in the development cycle so I figured everybody would be sick of that sound by the end, but surprisingly we didn’t get any complaints. I set out to make something that was going to be on a lot, sound big, but really take up only a small portion of the audio spectrum. You really need to hear all of the other vehicles, music, dialog and weapons at the same time. We added the sonic boom late in the game to give you a better feel of propulsion as you start flying. I also made the sound louder when you first take off and then the volume comes down on it as you are flying so you can hear everything else. It was also compressed and limited pretty heavily to keep it out of the way. I think the source was a couple of jet engines with a pitched vacuum cleaner and a low rumble. Sorry, I don’t have that project here at the moment.

DS: How you do the sound design direction for the game? Any special influence or method?

TS: I’ll start building source libraries early on and I will usually stumble on to some sound or weird plug in that gives me something new. I always keep my H4 on me and that’s great for source that you didn’t expect. Everybody always wants everything bigger, but I always push back saying that if everything is loud, nothing is loud. As for influences, I always check out what the concept artists are looking at. They find great source and then if I use some of the same stuff as reference it helps the art and sound to gel better.

DS: Did you find any limitations or technical issues that prevented the team for develop something?

TS: I always want more memory, more streaming and more time! I am pretty happy with the audio for Dark Void so I can’t really complain.

DS: What would you like to have in a next generation consoles?

TS: Real time convolution reverb and more memory. Always more memory.

DS: Finally, could you tell us something about your actual and future works? What’s next?

TS: I would love to tell you about our next projects, but unfortunately everything is still unannounced.

Dark Void Website