Full Sail has uploaded the recording of a panel called “Beyond 5.1: The Future of Sound for Picture”, with sound designers Harry Cohen and David Farmer, and re-recording mixers Marc Fishman and Gary Rizzo.

Livestream embed code doesn’t work properly, so go to this page for watching the video.

Walter Murch will be talking about sound at Chicago Humanities Fest 2011. The event is scheduled for Nov 13. Price is $10 in general admission and $5 for students.

As a film editor and sound designer, Walter Murch has worked on classic films of our time, includingApocalypse Now, The Godfather, and The English Patient, among many more. The winner of multiple Academy Awards, Murch, with his technological know-how, has helped to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. His latest projects, which include editing Phil Kaufman’s Hemingway & Gellhorn and directing an episode of Lucasfilm’s animated Clone Wars, are quintessential Murch: eclectic, distinctive, and visionary. In conversation with Lawrence Weschler, CHF artistic director emeritus, Murch discusses the evolution of film technology from the creation of the 5.1 sound format to today’s Final Cut Pro.

via @pulsetrain

Michael Semanick is a two-time Academy Award winner and has been nominated six other times for Achievement in Sound Mixing. He was nominated for all three Lord of The Rings films and won for Return of the King in 2004. He received his second Academy Award for Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Semanick has been nominated twice for his work with Pixar on Ratatouille and Wall-E, and for his efforts on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008. His nominations for both Wall-E and Benjamin Button were given in the same year. Semanick was recently nominated this year for his work on The Social Network. Michael is excited to be joining our Ex’pression family to speak with the students, faculty, and staff upon the completion of Cars 2 for Pixar.

Ex’pert Series with Michael Semanick hosted at Ex’pression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, CA on June 23, 2011.

SoundWorks Collection

Ben Burtt will give a lecture called “The Sound Behind The Image” at the 129th AES Convention.

Much has been documented about the technical history of motion picture sound. We know a lot about the story of microphones, loudspeakers, and optical, magnetic, or digital recording processes. Very little has been said about the aesthetic history: Why do sound people do what we do? What have been the creative achievements? The great ideas? How has sound been used to enhance the image and give vast dramatic power to the feature film?

“The Sound Behind The Image” will walk us through cinema history from the silent film to 1977 when Burtt designed sounds for Star Wars. He will talk more about the ART of film sound than the SCIENCE. He will pinpoint and show the moments in American film history that inspired and allowed him to learn his craft in sound design. Burtt believes a Language of Sound developed in the classic era that is still the basis for all our creative sound work today. Let us study, learn, speak, and enjoy that language together.

For more information about this lecture and the rest of the activities of the event, please visit the official AES website.

Via @RandyCoppinger

Detailed analysis on the beginning of cinema. The possibilities of film-making as a languaje, exposed from the perspective of the great editor (and first to be referred as “Sound Designer”).

Vía: U.S.O Project

There is a nice article at The Kartel, providing some notes and ideas given by Akira Yamaoka on his lecture at GDC 2010. Check:

Surival-horror fanatics, despite their differences, can all agree that the Silent Hill series was revolutionary for creating both an immersive and creepy environment. Through the use of haunting sound effects, and an original soundtrack, sound designer Akira Yamaoka was able to create a terrifying world that stood out to gamers for years to come. Attending GDC for the first time this year Yamaoka spoke on the power of sound, his theories on composing music, and his plans for the future.

Akira first introduced his culture, stating that the Japanese have a meticulous attention to detail, and are constantly seeking perfection. He explains that the recent advancements in technology have presented the opportunity to get much better results for sound design. He also expressed hope that future videogames will incorporate all five senses, to fully immerse the player (Can you imagine tasting a videogame? Yuck…Donkey Kong). Akira discussed his different opinions on music design, and some little known sound illusions below [...]

Read more…

There’s another interesting article at GameSpot featuring Yamaoka’s lecture…

Who Was There: Akira Yamaoka, who is best known for his music in the Silent Hill series, leveraged his 20 years of experience in video game production to discuss audio design in games from a producer’s perspective. He has worked not only as a composer, but also as a sound designer, sound director, and producer. Having recently left longtime employer Konami, Yamaoka is currently working with Suda51 on a new game at Grasshopper Manufacture that will be published by EA Partners.

What They Talked About: Yamaoka’s 2010 Game Developers Conference session began with a few slides that highlighted some facts of Japan, including the number of islands (6,852) and coastal line (comparable to that of Australia). Yamaoka wanted go over his background and heritage because the attention to detail that is part of the Japanese culture ties in closely to what he ultimately strives for: perfection.

Read more…

Here is an interesting video from an event called “Games Meet Films” with a panel discussion and Q&A at Pienwood Studios on 16th February and hosted by Dennis Weinreich (MD of Film and TV Post Production at Pinewood Studios Group).

They talk about the audio production process on games and films and discuss what the two industries can learn from each other and what are the challenges there.

Panelists

Films Side

• Nigel Bennett - Re-recording Mixer / Post Production Operations Manager, Pinewood
• Brendan Nicholson – Re-recording Mixer, Pinewood; Glen Gathard, Mixer/editor, Pinewood
• Mike Wabro – Sound Designer, Reelsound
• Alex Joseph – Freelance Sound Designer

Games Side

• Richard Jacques – Celebrated composer
• James Hannigan – Celebrated composer
• Jerry Ibbotson – Creative Manager, Media Mill
• Jon Vincent – Audio Director, Ubisoft and Dan Bardino, Creative Services Manager, Sony

Video Highlights

• 00:00 – Why are we here?
• 02:00 – Pinewood Studios Promo
• 06:46 – Panel Introductions
• 10:00 – Games Audio Workflow
• 14:45 – Film Audio Workflow
• 30:10 – How Games make car sound effects
• 39:45 – How Games use music – Richard Jacques
• 48:18 – Harry Potter – blowing up a piano example
• 53:00 – Slumdog Millionaire – creating emotion with sound
• 66:45 – Film – old school rules still apply

Via: @rbridgett | TIGA

SoundWorks Collection has a new surprise!

More than 47 minutes of video featuring Director James Cameron, Producer Jon Landau and the “Avatar” Sound Team (Supervising Sound Editor / Sound Designer / Sound Re-Recording Mixer Christopher Boyes, Sound Re-Recording Mixer Gary Summers, Sound Re-Recording Mixer Andy Nelson) on the Avatar Sound Panel conducted at the Fox Studios, Zanuck Theater on February 3rd, 2010.

The following article is an excerpt from “The future of sound design” lectures done during GDC, VFS and DFF between the periods of 2006-2007 by Charles Deenen. Rewritten for “DesigningSound.org”.

The Future of Sound Design in Video Games, Part 2

Every day in our life, sounds occur. Our brain thinks about virtually every sound we hear, and depending on how we’re connected with that sound, either (unknowing) react, translate, notice or feel something. On each sound we hear, we connect a space, event or happening to it, thereby learning how or when these sounds occur. Each human experiences sound every day, and learn about them, just like we learn a language. Some sounds are artificial, yet we connect a certain “moment” to them (i.e. computer graphic beeps in movies)

Now, you probably think “blah blah, yeah, yeah, where the heck are you going with this”. As a sound designer our job is to learn that language, transcribe it, understand it, and enhance it. You can easily make use of the human learned language of “experienced” sound. Fundamentals in sounds can be used together to form a combined emotion.

As an example, I’m sure you sometimes hear a distant fighter jet come by. By hearing it’s fantastic air-distorted rippling effect you instantly know it’s going incredibly fast without seeing it. When you hear a wasp buzzing, your instinct probably says “holy crap, swat it!”, all due to your brain associating a previous reaction/learning to that sound.

So, lets put this in practice by listening to some examples. The following is an example of standalone sweetners which would be used to add to parts of a car-by sound. It’s various ways of adding a “scream”, “howl”, “pain” or other sense of emotion to a car-by sound. Something probably that most of you have done, but why you did this is really the question:

As sound designers, we often try to emulate a certain sensation we’ve heard in real-life. Instead of using the real thing, we can reproduce the same effect by mimicking the feeling we want to chase. In this case we’re after alternate ways to add a sensation of speed to a car by. First sound is a regular Jet-by, followed by the pictured sounds, finished off by the car-by with the added ‘speed’ layers (example contains sounds from various sources)

To quickly grab a sound “feeling” in the future, one of the things I did a long time ago is make a list of various sounds which moved me somehow. Then I wrote down the feeling they impressed on me, and some ideas on how to use them.
Every time when I was in a rush, with little time to think about sound design and feelings, I pull up the list and scan it for my previous thoughts. Usually I find some ideas in it, especially in relationship to expressing a certain (combo) emotion.

• Make a list of “experienced” sounds and the emotion you feel when you hear them, with possible ideas on how to use them

“Fighter Jet fast By” – Speed sensation – Car by Sweetners

“Jail Cell Door close” – “Closed off feeling” – Logo slam

• Create some new sounds by using the character of what defines the “experienced” sound, in combo with some “plain” sounds.

S(t)imulating Learned Ear Deficiencies


The ear is an odd looking piece of human isn’t it? On some, it sticks out like a TV dish, shaped like a weird alien disformed growth, freezes when you’re in Montreal during the winter and oh yeah, does this awesome thing with sound. The ear behaves in weird ways sometimes. Now, this is not scientific in any way, so please don’t rant to me about it. It’s purely my own speculation on what happens.

Have you ever noticed that your ear seems to “compress” or partially shut-down the high-frequencies when it hears an instant loud sound? Or how it seems to “warble” when there’s a lot of low frequency build-up in the real world?

There’s a few tricks you can use (and maybe use already), which mimmic this ear behaviour, thereby tricking the listener into believing they are really hearing something much “bigger”

• ‘Low frequency Distortion’ is read as “loud” by the ear. It mimics the high frequency compression that’s happening when you’re listening to very loud sounds, and at the same time adds to the air distortion that happens between the source and your ear. The first sound in the below example is an indication of this (that sound btw was simply made by boosting the low-end by an incredible amount, running it through a crappy (behringer) compressor which freaked out about this low end, and then reducing the low-end back down.
• I believe your ear and brain have learned to translate spiked high-frequency sounds going into mid-range/low-end as “loud”. It’s a similar scenario that happens on guns & explosions. You can easily mimic these sounds by simulating an ear “shutdown” where it rejects higher frequencies after a brief moment. Lets call this the “Hi/Lo offset technique”; offsetting high frequency sounds, followed by a mid/low frequency sound. Try it out, and realize why does this sound “loud” to you?

Example: ear_def.mp3

Build-ups… ok, no rocket science here :) Any sound rises can be used to create a build-up of tension. There is a large variety of ways to do “rises”. Many of these techniques are used in Film Trailers daily. Not all are commonly used in gaming though;

• Music rises (the most obvious one)
• Building Rhythmic sound effect (i.e. pulse growing in size over time). Very effective to draw attention.
• Pitch / Frequency increase, effective in denser layers as you’ll certainly notice these through a dense layer of “noise”.
• Volume increasing over time
• Repetition frequency increase (i.e. pulse speeding up). The most overused sound attached to this is probably the heartbeat (yikes ! :)

In gaming I’m usually only hearing music used as a way to build intensity over time, yet the combo of delayed animation spawning combined with the above can create such a nice build-up of tension.
Now the cool thing is that the opposite (the descend), creates the opposite feeling. The feeling of calming down, loosing, “letting go” etc. can all be enhanced or created in that way.

Example of some “pitch” and “Volume” rises back to back. Some of these have been used in games. Starting with the most known “rise”.

rise.mp3

Hopefully some of this was useful or interesting to you. My hopes for this article are that you consciously use these “experienced sounds” in your daily sound design, and hopefully better understand why we actually use them, or shape certain sounds to begin with. Shoot me any comments you might have.

All movies and sound contained in this article are (c) Charles Deenen and cannot be distributed or used in any way without prior written consent.

The following article contains excerpts from the “Future of Sound Design” lectures at GDC, VFS and Dutch Film Festival originally presented in 2006. Please note that certain expressions are personal opinions, and cannot be read as “fact”.

In our endless passion to make games have a similar, or exceeding sound-scape experience in comparison to other media, we constantly try to find new ways and techniques to obtain this. Some people ask “why are we comparing ourselves to film sound design, we’re very different”. Other say “Film sound experiences are the ultimate goal”. I say both are right. But to really figure out what the future may hold, we have to first learn from the past to enable measurement of missing objectives and goals.

To answer, we have to being by asking ourselves some questions:

• What’s been done in the past?
• What’s broken/missing?
• How does this compare to Visuals?
• What about Emotions ?
• Is there a future for Audio?
• What about everything else ?

The Past – Evolution in Numbers

Technical hinderances, ever since the X360 and PS3, have been much less of a hurdle for a sound designer to create engaging soundscapes. Lets look at the history, based on the most popular game machine/console during each period.

As you can see in Fig 1 & 2, the amount of sound-data currently storable on the console is so much, that in comparison the old consoles barely show up on the graphs. Memory isn’t really a technological barrier anymore.

What’s broken/missing?

The obvious one to look at would be the Sound Designer/Artist. Are the requirements of creative vs technical understanding still too high? Are they a hurdle we still have to overcome? In fig 3 I’m showing my estimates of the job requirements of a sound artist/designer working in the video games industry, when looking at the biggest selling platforms. Funny enough, the industry seems to repeat itself. Consumers are now using phones and other small devices to play games. These devices seem to be equally powerful to game consoles 4-5 years ago, which brings back the same technical hurdles, all well known and documented.

The 2nd obvious one to look at is the “no boundary” story telling experience. During the years I’ve noticed that for some sound folks who grew up in the technically restricted era, its very hard to cross-over to new platforms. As an example this is one the reasons I originally stopped doing music in the mid 90’s. I was pretty good at making small processors like the C64 and SNES do things they weren’t meant to do, and therefor got an edge on making enjoyable music. With the introduction of Redbook (CD) audio, the playing field was open to everybody, and I was no longer able to take advantage of any hurdles others hadn’t overcome yet. It’s critical that these folks find ways to move to the story telling, un-inhibited way of thinking. They have to gain this experience, or they’ll be left behind.

So what does this lead us to? To me, the biggest general missing link in making games have equal or better sound experiences than film is an investment in emotionally believable audio followed by treating the player smart, in both gameplay and audio. Lets focus on the first one for now.

Too often when playing games (including our own), I still feel “disconnected” from the experience due to sound. Some games make a great attempt at it, but in the end, there’s always something happening which causes the de-focus from the experience. During the remainder of this article we’ll touch upon what causes these disconnects. To understand this better, lets also look at how audio and visuals work together

Visual Media

Look at the below pictures. You’ll probably have a different instant feeling or emotion about each. You can tell that approaching visual realism isn’t always a good thing (the “uncanny valley” effect). It distracts from the believability, and the connected emotion you’re supposed to have. We’ll see later that Dialog has a similar issue.

Another interesting effect is that feelings generated from visuals can be interpreted different from person to person and feelings created by visuals are culturally relevant at times. Images generate a feeling, a response that we learned during our life.

VISUALS and AUDIO –  THE MARRIED COUPLE

Now, lets do a quick exercise to see the relation-ship between visuals and audio (note: due to copyright, we can’t put this music here).

• Pick one of the above pictures. Look at it carefully. You’ll notice the feeling you had initially withers away quickly.
• After a few seconds, cue up your favorite rock piece near the chorus… Did the meaning of the picture change?
• Now cue a film-score (I like to use “seven pounds” as an example). How dramatically did the meaning of the picture change, but importantly, did the feeling it generated in combination with the picture sustain?

What can you conclude out of this? How does Audio fit into this picture?

• If picture gives you the instant feeling/reaction, audio maintains this feeling over time.
• Audio cues can change the expected emotion a picture generates
• Audio can enhance picture in more than a support role and change the emotional outcome
• Audio emotions take (usually) time to establish

A quick word about Feelings and Emotions

We have to understand when to say “Feeling” and when to say “Emotion”, as both are pretty different. It’ll also help us understand how audio plays a big part in this.

• Feelings are a learned response of the culture and your surroundings in which you grew up.
• Feelings are a subset of all your mind-body states (i.e. disappointment, hunger, hope etc.)
• A Feeling is the response part of the Emotion. (“I feel disappointed”… a resulting emotional reaction could be “I’m Angry”)
• Emotions are cross cultural – the same meaning all over the world
• Emotion is a chemical state in our brains. Those same chemicals inhibit our capabilities and limiting what we call rational thought

So how can a game use this ? If visuals and audio work together to establish feelings and emotions, you can use this to a certain degree to influence game-play:

• More emotion = less judgement
• If you want to remember something, get into the emotional mood you were in when you first experienced it.
• You’re likely to come back to a “liked” emotion. Some emotional states can be addictive.
• Person’s mood tends to follow that of the situation presented in front of them.

OK, so lets get back to Audio…..

The main ingredients of Audio in Game:

Everyone reading this probably knows the 4 main “technical” ingredients of audio in a game: Music, Dialog, Sound Effects and Mix. During the many lectures on this topic I always asked the question to the audience: “What is the most important element to a believable and emotionally engaging soundscape”? “What is the top contributor”, and “What is the top damager”. The answers usually ranged across the board, each picking their “favorite” one. Composers would pick music, sound editors would pick sound effects. Repetitive footsteps was often mentioned. Dialog was the most picked damaging ingredient…. Seldom the answer was “all”.
It’s probably obvious to you that every single ingredient is of equal importance to create an emotionally believable soundscape. You can’t approach a single ingredient in a lackluster way. Believability is key.

Believable Dialog

Dialog is still the #1 offender in believability area. I’ll get probably flamed for saying this, but I’ve yet to hear a single game which makes me believe I’m listening to the characters on-screen for an extended period of time. None have captured it as truly “believable” yet. Space, placement, acting, story, odd breaks, visual discrepancies etc. all contribute to dialog flaws. We’re running up against the same “uncanny valley” effect as visuals. We’re approaching reality and the human ear will now pick up every flaw, and is no longer forgiving. Yet if we’re very far from reality, we’ll believe it. Have you noticed you can watch a saturday morning cartoon and believe the characters?

What also isn’t helping us is that some characters in-game on-screen still look robotic (or don’t even exist), making us having to work even harder to make that certain voice believable in contrast to the visuals.

One issue I’m hearing quite a bit is the recording method used. Lots of dialog for games is still recorded in the traditional “music” way of placing a U87 (or similar) close-up to the actor. Often, introducing movement, space, air, body shocks is totally negated. 

Game Example: "NBA Street"

In 2005 we did a quick test for a game called “NBA street” for which no longer accepted this type of recording. We rigged up a lot of players with wireless lavs, and had them play for several hours while feeding them scenarios and lines. The resulting effect was a much higher degree of believability. Following is an example with the “U87” version back to back with the “Lavalier” version. On purpose, similar hokey lines were picked to illustrate the concept (this was not a concept of good acting). Which one is most believable to you?

Example: nba.mp3

#1 is the old U87 version, #2 is the Lavalier version, separated by a beep

Believability Gap

Believability “gaps” are the #2 offender. Everytime a player is jerked away from the game’s believability, it makes him realize it’s a game, and intensity lessens. When this happens the intensity buildup has to be restarted to a certain degree. The game will never be able to reach the full potential of engaging, emotionally believable audio. Some examples of these gaps are:

• Awkward forced Loading screens (i.e. “silence screen”)
• Repetition on dialog, sound effects, or anything else noticeable
• Un-natural imbalance (Vol / EQ / Space etc.)
• Non believable Dialog
• Anything which goes against “learned” sounds, if not on purpose (more on this later)

Audio Mix – “The Glue”

This is a large topic, one that’s too big for this article to cover, to which we’ll come back later. It’s the #3 offender to create sustaining believable soundscapes. Too many games still ship with the “wall of sound” approach. A player can only take this so long. There are many solutions to this problem. One of the causes still seems to be “producer X listening on his TV in a noisey floor area wanting to hear every detail”, which is a hard one to overcome.
With any of the solutions, the mix shouldn’t make a user notice what’s happening, yet get more engaged. If your producer is asking for the “wall” approach, he’s in reality not asking for this. He just couldn’t hear something he wanted to hear. It’s now up to you to refocus the mix constantly to allow him to hear what he wants to hear, yet doesn’t take away from the rest.
Much more to come on this topic as there are many tricks to accomplish this.

Excuses

One of the other blockers in achieving an emotionally engaging soundscape is excuses. Yeah, the ones that every Sound Designer or sound-sup makes when he can’t achieve the needed result. We’re all guilty of it (including me). Yet, it’s one of the hurdles we have to overcome if we ever want our industry to excel above the film media’s level of engagement. If you know you can’t mix for an emotionally engaging soundscape, don’t do it. Don’t pretend you can learn it overnight. If you don’t have enough money to achieve the result, scope down, sell your ideas to execs or whatever you have to do. Don’t use’ em as an excuse why you couldn’t succeed. There are many reasons, many which are direct blockers, and many which can be overcome with creative solutions. I often hear “well, we don’t have the tools that some others have”…. Tools are a means to get to a result, but not the only way. Come up with creative ways to get the tools you need.

Wrap up

So what is the future of sound design ? It’s not some sort of new tool. It’s not a new console, it’s not a new “cool way” of creating sound in real-time. It is purely us overcoming our hurdles to find new ways creating emotionally engaging and believable soundscapes. Breaking out of traditional ways, learning what the human reacts to. How feelings and emotions tie in with sound is a must-know Content is no longer king, technology is no longer the queen. The combo of all of it, and the stimulating, game supportive result is what the player will be experiencing and wanting.

–end of part 1– We’ll look at “ear deficiencies” and “experienced sound”, including methods on how to use those to build an emotional soundscape, in the next few days.

Written by Charles Deenen for Designing Sound