George Spanos has published a new article at Game Sound Design talking about the implementation of sound design in video games, an interesting reading especially for those who are just starting in this world of sound design for video games.

Sound design for video games is quite a different animal than sound design for other media. Film, television, and other linear formats require the sound design to unfold at a very deliberate and controlled pace. After all, the outcome of linear formats is always known. The sound designer can therefore create sound-scapes and sound effects with the very deliberate intention of telling a story where the exact outcome is known to always happen the exact same way.

In video games we do not know the exact outcome of every scene. Sure, we know that the player has to perform ‘A’ to get to ‘B’ but we don’t know how long the player may take to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ (in most games). For example, the player may choose to go down a route that is an indirect way of reaching the end of a level, thereby encountering any number of enemies or alternate paths. The main thing to realize is that, in games we usually cannot control the exact sequence of events that a player may experience. This is obviously called randomness.

It is for this very reason that designing and implementing sound for a video game should not be based upon events that “happen next” but rather, “events that may happen next”. This is why the great majority of games have their sounds broken down into chunks that are easily played back at the exact moment they are needed; at run time.

Contents:

• Sound Creation
• Sound File Creation
• Integrating Sound Design Into The Engine
• What Now?
• Conclusion

Full article.

Symbolic Sound has expanded the real-time sound-computing power of its Pacarana sound engine by making it possible for Kyma sound designers to chain two or more multiprocessor Paca(rana)s together via the built-in A/B Expansion ports. To the Kyma software, a network of Paca(rana)s appears as a single sound computation engine with multiple processors. Kyma automatically detects the number of available processors and schedules the execution of DSP-intensive signal processing and synthesis algorithms across multiple processors.

How it works

Two or more Pacas, Pacaranas, or combinations of both can be connected by plugging the orange cables, provided by Symbolic Sound, into the Expansion A and B ports on the backs of the units. A combination of audio and control signals is transmitted over the orange wires from each Paca(rana) to its neighbor. One of the Paca(rana)s is connected to a Macintosh or Windows computer (running the Kyma sound design software) via FireWire 800 (or 400). A single FireWire audio interface on the same bus handles all of the analog and digital audio inputs and outputs and, depending on the audio interface, MIDI. (A list of compatible converters can be found here). The composite super-Pacarana shows up in Kyma as a single sound computation engine with extra processors. To the sound designer or musician, the expansion is completely transparent; Kyma automatically takes advantage of the additional real-time processing power and memory.

Pacarana Wormhole Teaser

Who can use it

Anyone, from large sound design studios (which may set up a rack of Pacaranas as an audio compute-farm for intensive sound modelling operations) to friends getting together and temporarily hooking their Pacas together for some sound tweaking fun, can enjoy the benefits of the newly enabled expansion ports and orange connector cables. Audio engineers or sound designers managing complex signal processing and sound design requirements for live shows or theatre productions can assemble a rack of Pacaranas, all controlled and sequenced from a single computer. Supercomputing centers can offer scalable real-time sound computation and data sonification as an adjunct to the computer graphics rendering and dynamic simulation modelling already being offered to researchers and artists. Game design studios can set up a sound-design rendering farm for creating special sound effects for cinematics and voice processing for game characters. Anyone who ever finds themselves running out of real-time sound computation power could benefit from this new technology.

Pricing & Availability

The Paca, Pacarana, and “orange wires” for connecting two or more of them together are now available at the Symbolic Sound store. Current multiple-Paca(rana) owners can request a free set of cables from Symbolic Sound. Every Paca or Pacarana comes with Symbolic Sound’s innovative Kyma X environment featuring its unique set of sound synthesis and processing algorithms and a powerful way to easily re-combine these algorithms to create sounds that have never been heard before.

Symbolic Sound.