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.

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 :-)

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

Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself, and your path into game audio?

I am a classically trained piano player and have been making music since I was 4 years old. I spent my teens experimenting with 4 track recorders and synths and Amiga 500 computers.
I created Module in 2003 as a little side project after being in a few well known New Zealand bands at the time. After a few years of working on it I released my first album Remarkable Engines in 2006 which  got quite recognised by everybody around New Zealand  which was quite fun! I found myself having to tour to support that  album that I made for a record label called LOOP at the time to pay back the thousands of dollars it took to make it.

The more I was exposed to the live environment, and what people actually wanted from a gig, the more my music started changing from the downbeat-y sort of music that I started off with into more the kind of thing Shatter sounds like, really fun electro/rock’n'roll over the top music.

It was just a direct response of being somewhere between a DJ and a one man band. New Zealand Music industry is really small and I just had to adapt. Looking back on it, It was like pick a path adventure story. Everything I did was so I could survive as a Musician. I feel good now as I am 34 and still doing it full time !

The Shatter soundtrack was the culmination of years and years of playing live, and the kind of music I’ve always wanted to create; futuristic rocky synth music that has been buzzing around my mind for quite a long time. I took everything I learned from the live environment and channeled it into the Shatter soundtrack. It seemed to have worked really well.

Module really changed and became less about being a live indie band thing and more about a business! (laughs) It was quite a crazy change, as all of a sudden I ‘m doing video game soundtracks, movie soundtracks and sound design; all these kind of project based kinds of work things, which is interesting, and totally different from the ‘set up and play a concert’ type vibe I had come from.

But that’s cool that’s the way it worked out, and that’s the great thing about being a solo artist. I think its a massive change in technology that happened between when I started and now, because you can create literally anything almost anything on a computer, and it doesn’t really matter anymore. You don’t have to be this famous entity anymore, you can just do audio or music because you like making it, and it can become your life and your job That’s what has happen to me, and I feel very lucky.

Do you find that in your work for games that you end up sacrificing creative vision?

Yes, it’s kind of a compromise, it’s more of a relationship you get into a with a creative team. or the people driving the product be it designers, producers If it’s something that’s going to make the project better and more people are going to like it, then I will do whatever I need to in order to make that happen. At the end of the day. It’s just one part of what I do. You need to split yourself out. There’s work and then there is you. Work is work, so you just need to do your best for what the project needs unless you’re working on it on your own. Then you can do what the hell you like.
It’s the creative vision versus the schedule. The schedule is all powerful. The schedule must be obeyed.

Have you ever found yourself having to write a reggae track, or something outside  of your comfort zone in order to fit a gameplay segment?

(Laughs) I have done lots of different styles of music, but I guess I’m more known as Module for my electronic-y type stuff. But then again, doing a lot of other things. Like, when I was working on Rugby Challenge I was writing a lot of New Zealand based rock tunes. I don’t know if you’re familiar with anything from New Zealand like Dave Dobbyn, and The Exponents. Crowd-signing, anthem rock music. I actually enjoy making that kind of music! (laughs) I started to realise that I was slipping more into a producer kind of role, where I’ve got more scope, as opposed to limiting myself to a specific genre because it follows what I’ve established in the past. I enjoy country music, and I love rock music. I like the beats of hip-hop, My music tastes are very clear, and that come across in my compositional choices.

But even so, I get frustrated with the amount of time it takes to produce something using a computer, because I’ve come from a musical background; I’ve been playing piano since I was a kid. I love the immediacy of being in a band. I feel that people get too picky on music [production]; It’s the sloppiness and the more feeling based stuff that people respond to better, and not the over-produced stuff, you know what I mean?

Speaking with my own view, Who really gives a shit what EQ you’re using, the average person doesn’t. There is a trap a lot in music production, It’s an industry that’s not too far from the fashion industry. Use this plugin, mix like this, sound like that. It’s all rubbish. You just have to follow what feels right and if it doesn’t work keep trying.

(Laughs) But, I’m always trying to find a counterbalance between the two, and I think my life has been about that lately. I really try to find balance. Even in my own music, I’ve been writing a lot of piano compositions. As I come from a classical background, I find myself gravitating back to that style of music, away from that flashiness of game soundtracks and Module, and everything else.

I really need that sometimes, and it will probably be the kind of music I make more of as I get older! I still love the opportunities that video game music and sound design work have handed me. I’m extremely lucky in New Zealand to be one of the very few people doing what I’m doing, and have had such massive exposure to a global audience through many Apple devices and consoles.

How do you handle the dynamics of gameplay when things are quite focused on the music and sound side of things?

It’s very much a relationship between the composer and the audience. You have to think about how this is going to affect people, and what they are going to feel in these key moments and how you can take them on journeys. It’s very much like orchestrating an reaction from people in advance.

That’s the side that I find quite fascinating, because it’s almost like when you do a gig; You hit certain key moments within your set for people to react to. It’s a lot easier to achieve that in a gig, because people are in the concert, in the mood, at that moment. I mean the whole “drop” thing found in dubstep music is all about that. I guess I am trying to engineer in advance lots of mini audio drops relative to the game in some way so the player gets jazzed about it.

I’ve started thinking about video games as very similar; people are locked into that universe, or paying attention to the sequence of events and interacting with it. What can I do as a composer to enhance that? That’s generally where I will come in to it, and try to identify key moments within the experience; whether it’s from a story perspective, or a feeling, a visual or an action, or something that will give me some cue as to what the music should emotionally feel like, and what the player should react to. It’s all about context. what are the key things that are going on in this space and time. Love it!

How much of the implementation can be done from within FMOD Designer?

You can do everything in Designer in regards to setting up the project and the sound files and music and events and structure.

But It’s a very  much a 50/50 kind of relationship; there is a lot of stuff that needs to be done in code, but I use a lot of FMOD parameters, velocity based settings and real time reverbs

In the last game I worked on, for which I put a 75MB audio budget straight into an iPhone device  It has eleven tracks, and it has the most amount of audio I’ve put inside an iPhone game (so far). This was for Monsters Ate My Condo for Adult Swim, which is being really well received. The music is just batshit insane and is some kind of godzilla based pop music and there is a lot going on with the audio. That has been the result of geeking out and getting to know my tools, and trying to develop this really cool thing that people will listen to and enjoy, and hitting all those key moments. Alot of that was all done in designer with basic code hookups.

How much DSP parameterization are you doing in order to achieve certain effects or react dynamically to the game?

We try do that all the time, especially with low pass filters and volume its good to make sure things are sounding awesome. Shatter was really the first time we really took advantage of the parameter based DSP effects. We’ll use just those parameters, and you can hear it at specific moments, like, when you die at the end of a level, it will phase out, or would control the cutoff frequency. Not as much as other things we would use, like the crowd system I developed for the Rugby Challenge game, that was a bit insane! We used FMOD in a really cool way; basically the crowd system was several different layers of several different reactions and works the same way as if you were revving up a car engine based on emotion

When I first looked at FMOD it weirded me out. It took me a long time to understand the parameter based stuff, and that there wasn’t a timeline, because I was so used to working in DAW’s like Ableton Live. I’ve been making electronic music since the Amiga 500 days, so I’ve been exposed to technology most of my creative life, so I’ve been really lucky in that sense in that I’ve always had the kind of brain that understands that stuff. It was really cool because the more I understood how FMOD worked, the more I understood how it talked to the API, the more I realised the tools I had available as a creator and I found that really exciting.

One of the most interesting thing about Rugby Challenge was the limited memory I had to pay with, 11MB I think. At the start of the project I didn’t want to to deal with the commentary because it was over 14,000 files. So it was always space vs time vs creative vision.

Can you speak more on the dynamic system for crowds?

As you can see above in FMOD In the first layer is a low loop, then a medium loop, then a high loop, which represent different frequency ranges. When you roll over those, they play from a list of callout things, and horns and that kind of stuff. These are controlled by a parameter called ‘Emotion’, which is driven by a context bucket, so if someone starts running for a Try, it will amp up the emotion. And on top of that I’ve got some reaction cues set up. The Cheer cues play 10 different cheers at one time, which is all positioned around in surround sound randomly, which makes it sound like a whole big audience. The whole entire reactive crowd audio is only 4MB. It sounds ok, but as I only had a budget of 11MB I had to compress the hell out of it to make it work. I can really hear the compression, and its nowhere near the quality I would have liked, but considering I just placed 4 Zoom H2 mics around the Westpac stadium, I was happy with the result.

The great thing about FMOD and most of the Middleware engines for audio is that you can design everything and hand it over to a studio It’s a really good platform for me. I haven’t had the chance to explore the others as much as I would like.

Especially being able to draw parameters in the Event Editor.

I know, Its just the multiple parameters per event, that’s I love. Its like “Hey, I can have unlimited parameters here, I can do what I like!” You can get right into the detail, and when the emotion is on those parameters because they are all different reactions, its closer to being more intensity based, reactive crowd stuff. I didn’t even know if that would work, it was basically the emotion meter runs over, and just triggers that sound, I was like ” That actually works, that’s great!” The other solution was more complex, there had to be a secret event, and that wouldn’t fire because of a whole host of reasons. So I was like, “Ah, lets try this”. But you know, just really cool things like we’ve managed to get some really cool reverb definitions going. The thing with a lot of iPhone and iOS titles is that you are not really dealing with a 3D world as much, which is something I’m kind of missing a little bit.

Because I’ve been doing a lot of iPhone iOS development, and have been trying to push FMOD to the extreme in regards to what we can deliver. I do kind of miss making things for consoles, or even PC because you just have a bigger scope to work in, and it’s much more creatively satisfying working on larger scale projects. Sadly, they are few and far between! But getting things sounding awesome on the iPhone is still very satisfying.

In a way, it makes you work creatively within your constraints.

Yeah, that’s something I really enjoy. Having limits to things. It’s the new old school all over again. The pipeline we’ve got now is really quite cool, and exposing other people to that is really neat and that has ended up being quite a collaborative process. so you have to work with what you have to get things out the door.

How have you been handling the mix phase, are you connected to the game?

We used the FMOD net connection to mix straight off the iPads, which has worked really well. We can get a really good mix like that. Prior to that, we used the real time connect straight into the PS3 so that we could do surround sound mixes. But now I figured out how to launch xcode and the iPhone simulator and can connect to that instead on my local machine during development which is pretty crazy. I can build the game and be up and mixing and creating audio on a virtual device emulating a real bit of hardware. It works really well.

When you get that whole system up and running though, it’s a phenomenal feature. When working with hardware I just plug my iPhone or iPad output directly into my Pro Tools 003, which is all metered up, with some test tones I can just send out a 0dB signal and monitor everything from my computer. I’ve got some spectrum analyser software as well so I can monitor the frequency content and make sure it’s going to sound great for people.

But I don’t really bother anymore on tailoring audio to work through the speakers; When those devices came out There was a lot of emphasis on getting iPhone audio to sound good through the bullshit device speaker but I’ve given up on that now and I think everyone else should too.

There is really no point modifying the audio for it to work like that, it’s like, if you want to hear good audio, put some headphones on! The quality that you can get out of an iPhone, with the right compression codecs and a good pair of headphones is pretty close to commercial audio quality. I have some impulse reverbs that can emulate the sound of the iPhone and iPad speakers I can put across a pre-recorded output in Pro Tools to get a idea of what things will sound like and check out the frequency spectrum. There are alot of immersive games now that need good sound for the experience.

But why bother turning all the treble up, or modifying things so that it sounds better through those  speakers? As long as its not annoying, obnoxious sounds that will piss people off or overload the speakers and get basic messages across to the player but sound awesome once you put the headphones on. I think that should be ke

Do you work algorithmically at all, or using any other interactive or dynamic techniques?

I’ve had quite a few projects that we just generated by lots of tuned loops randomly playing. It sounded almost like Brian Eno! Just by messing with parameters, layers and controlling different settings. You can do a lot with spawning lots of sounds within a sound definition with FMOD.

There was great because there was this beautiful generative random music that just twinkled away in the background. I’ve looked at FMODs music system and really researched it You can do basic cueing template-based themes between sections.

With iOS you can’t get away with a 32 channel stream inside memory limits or anything like that. Even the PS3 would struggle with it. So for now It’s a very much ‘pre-baked’ kind of approach, or maybe a one or two layer kind of approach. Maybe things will be better on the iPad 3. It’s a few years away still.

But I have been using alot of random sounds to make generative backgrounds such as forests and storms and city ambience. say 10 different car and horn sounds, a ambient loop and various traffic noises. It’s interesting the patterns that appear in that kind of audio are all pretty much the same but with different noise sources.

I’ve always found that these technical challenges really drive the creativity in games.

It’s pretty interesting, I remember when I  first got exposed to FMOD, one of the biggest problems I had was in the API, the system I/O was defaulted to 16 channels. For the ‘Blood Drive‘ game I was working on at the time, which I had 8 months to complete,we had 8 cars, zombies were screaming and the whole game was just chaos. We had 217 events firing at once at one point. There we explosions, each car had its own explosion, each car had multiple layers of engine sounds, running over multiple zombies, it was madness! And I was trying to mix this thing!

So we developed our own code-based sidechain compression. If anything exploded, it would turn down the  music, and things like that. That was a lot of fun to implement, and is part of our pipeline now as an sound effects code, so whenever we need that kind of level of control, we can always use the DSP to control a wide variety of dynamic effects. All that process that I’ve taken from using other software, and trying to figure out a way I can replicate that using DSPs and FMOD.

Those are really great tool-sets to have, particularly in games that have commentary, or vocals and music, with chaos in the background! You still need to relay that information in a way that is digestible by the player. In one game we used these effects to add a cliched Matrix-style bullet-time effect just for fun! (laughs) I do find myself doing quite cliched stuff sometimes, but having a lot of fun with it, you know, really dramatic sounds just for the hell of it!

Right, as long as it supports the gameplay you can go really dramatic. Are there any examples of game audio where you think it’s been done really well?

The game that does that best in the whole entire ultraverse is Limbo. Its understanding of space is phenomenal. I listened to that the other day in the studio  and the intricate design between what’s happening with the relationship between events and the sonic is really amazing.

It’s that’s the kind of approach where that single sound has has so much design and attention, that when you hear 100 of those, it’s still phenomenal and I don’t think you get to do that much in a project often. I also think because of the way the game is playing, and the way that it is literally spotlighted, the audio and gameplay and the way it’s presented is spotlighted bit-by-bit, instead of having it all presented at once. You really get to take those moments in so the detail really needed to be there.

Part Two (Coming Soon)

Cool video profile about the work of the guys at Wabi Sabi Sound featuring sound designers Andrew Lackey and Geoffrey Garnett.

The Sound and Vision Magazine website have published an interview with Rob Blake, the Audio Lead on Bioware’s upcoming Mass Effect 3. The interview discusses the musical direction of the Mass Effect series, the story behind the credits song of the original Mass Effect, effective control of the dynamic range in order to fully realise the sound design and emotional content, the salarian singing voice and what defines ‘Mass Effect’ sound design

What makes a Mass Effect game sound like a Mass Effect game compared to other games? What are the key things that set the series apart from other games?

You touched on it earlier: the soundtrack is quite identifiable. It’s an iconic mix between orchestral and synthesizer stuff. That’s something we felt strongly about and made sure stood out in the franchise. Sound effect–wise we have some great stuff. The weapons, for example, have these very interesting elements of different types of technology. The foley sounds have a sort of pneumatic and mechanical quality to them, so they sound unique.

Read the entire two page interview on the Sound and Vision Magazine website here