[SFX Lab, the laboratory of sound effects, a place dedicated to experiment and explore sound libraries. The main goal is to hear what happens when sounds of a specific kind are combined, processed, and transformed in several ways.]

New chapter of the sfx lab, this time dedicated to explore high doses of resonance, with a quite special kind of sounds: bells and chimes.

These sounds are characterized because of their qualities regarding harmonics and detailed/subtle elements, so combining and processing them is always something interesting and very “musical”. I’m going to play with three different libraries, all of them full of elements that vary from the shortest and exotic, to pretty long recordings with beautiful/long resonant tails. The libraries used are the Bells and Animal Bells packages of Rabbit Ears Audio, plus the Chimes library Tim Prebble released at HISSandaROAR in the last year.

I’m going to do several quick experiments, trying to find different ways to process the recordings, and aiming to achieve different materials from the elements. There are so many things we can obtain from them, so as always we’re going to just experiment and listen. Remember this is not a tutorial or something to go into details regarding the tools. This series of articles are focused on listening to libraries and just playing with them.

We could use these elements to create a wide variety of sounds and layers which, alone or combined with other materials can generate sounds with a particular mood or emotional impact. Eerie atmospheres, nostalgic addons to the ambience, tension, mistery, wonderful drones! Resonant whooshes, magical powers and spells, extension elements for impacts, and lots of things more. They are also rich on tonalities, so the variations in resonance and dynamics can be very useful to give very musical touches to sounds and alter the timbre of designed sounds, in order to add more harmonics and details.

Bells

Let’s start with the big bells, from Rabbit Ears Audio’s sixth release, which includes bells fabricated in all kinds of material and recorded with several positions and performances. That approach creates a fascinating gallery of sounds, including recordings with heavy attack, along others which feature takes with long tails, perfect for stretching, freezing, shimmering, cloud making, and all kind of drone-atmosphere making techniques. Let’s explore that.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the early days of the musique concrete and experimental/electroacoustic movements, there were two experiments that led pioneers to develop a new world of sounds, and more important, new ways to listen and transform sound materials. The first experiment, coined by Pierre Shaeffer and his research team at GRM was called “closed groove”, which was basically a way to loop sounds as much as you want, so it could be heard repeatedly over and over again. That repetition was connected to the reduced listening experience, where sound is valued as material, trying to avoid the real casualties of the recording and its meaning/context in the visual/contextual world.

As Michel Chion tells in the guide to sound objects, the second experiment was important to further developments regarding the form of the sound, specially the attack and its relation to the timbre of the sound materials. That one consisted on doing the closed groove technique with a fragment of a bell sound’s tail.”A sound like a flute” was the result.

Below is a video with some experiments inspired on that, using GRM Freeze to select specific fragments of a bell’s waveform, and then changing the pitch/repetitions to create variations of the drones and tones generated. Although it’s something you can do manually on an editor, the plugin offers more controls and does the looping/multiplication instantly. I also added a couple of plugins more (eq and doppler) to explore different variations. Let’s listen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Although GRM Freeze is my favorite, there are also other alternatives and similar tools you may like to explore: Marc Lingk’s TimeFreezer, Michael Norris’ Spectral Freeze/Spectral Gate & Hold, ioplong’s flitchSplifter, and ndc’s Buffer Synth. Ableton Live users can find a freeze button on the default reverb, and also try M4L devices such as monolake’sGrain Freeze, beatwife’s creations, and ck’s m4l pack. Reaktor users checkout these ensembles: Twisted Tools effects (several of them come with freeze function) Fast FX (multi-fx, comes with the software), g-Transformer, Zero Kelvin,Travelizer FX, autoFreeze, and Freeeze. Even Reason users can have some fun with the hold option on the BV512 Vocoder. Anyway, sound freezing FTW!

Now let’s take another approach to the tails of the bells. This kind of material is pretty incredible for convolution process, so you can use the characteristics of the bell sounds and merge them with other sound. In this example I’m going to use the bells as Impulse Responses, inside Altiverb, which since its latest version allows to use WAVs as IRs in a very easy way. The plugin now allows to drag&drop any audio file directly and use it as an IR. Pure quick fun. Let’s take a look at that feature on this video and listen to different sounds being processed “inside” the bells:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Animal Bells

The second bell release from Rabbit Ears Audio is quite unique and interesting, since the wide variety of sounds performed by these bells are really dynamic and diverse. Recordist Michael Raphael, who crafted this fantastic package, explains it in a great way: “The materials include brass, bronze, common metals, wood, animal horns, and even some gourds. So just imagine: ding, clank, ring, twack, rattle, clunk, click, and who doesn’t love gourds?”. All those variations were recorded in different perspectives (close, medium, distant) and include a wide variety of materials. Each bell features an specific type of sounds and includes different takes, with details, movements and lots of great noises you’d like to use on wood/metal articulations, foley tasks and any kind of heavy layering of elements in order to build big structures and rattling metallic sounds.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I specially liked the textures you can obtain with these animal bells. It’s incredible to listen how the simplest variation can achieve lovely elements, textures, movements. When you process sounds which have been performed in such detailed way, processing gets more expressive and fun. Lots of surprises occur when you perform with those sounds in a sampler or something where you can manipulate the files with more expression. Let’s listen to quick experiments I did using Alchemy processing different sounds from the library:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Chimes

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s play with HISSandaROAR’s Chimes, which includes sounds with a lot of subtle details and harmonics. Tim Prebble recorded the sounds inside an ADR booth, so you can hear pretty detailed recordings, with lots of variations and even more fun: sounds where recorded at 192k, saying you can go extreme with the processes and stretch them in fantastic ways. For that exploration, I wanted to use some delay/reverb effects in order to listen to what happens when you multiply those harmonics or just extend their tails with echos and feedback manipulation. For that, I’m going to use a pretty crazy delay (which also gets pretty unique chorus/flanging/reverb effects) called ValhallaüberMod, developed by one of my favorite plugin makers: Sean Costello, owner at ValhallaDSP. Besides this fantastic delay, he has also developed two amazing algorithmic reverbs I encourage you to try. They’re just fantastic.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Torture Chamber

So, it’s time to torture these sounds in random ways. There’s a new tool you probably already know about, called Iris, developed by the masterminds at iZotope. Although it really deserves a dedicated review (I’ll share my thoughts in another post), I’ve been working with it since its launch and I’m in love with it. It’s perfect for torturing these bells and chimes, since there’s a wide variety of things you can obtain with it. Iris uses spectral analysis/processing to visualize and transform sounds, offering a spectrogram view where time, amplitude and frequency are showed in the same canvas. That gives you the opportunity of isolating, extracting, filtering and combining sounds based on their harmonic content and spectrum.

As any tool you can have these days, it’s just a different way to transform sound. Nothing to compare with, just a different option. There’re several samplers making impressive things since several years ago, but one thing is sure: there’s no instrument like Iris. It’s fresh, fun, and has a pretty extensive path for experimentation. It’s a fantastic tool to extend/explore timbre and sonic morphologies. Although it comes with a pretty nice library and optional add-ons, the game, as always, is more awesome when you use your own sounds. Experimenting with the stuff you already have, or with libraries like those mentioned in this post, is wonderful. A gift for the ears! Let’s listen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

A collection of blog posts, and a special edition of the Game Audio Podcast, have been coordinated by Damian Kastbauer and David Nichols on the dense subject of racing game audio. The remarkably in-depth studies (which feature video examples) rip apart audio techniques for the racing genre, investigating subjects such as tire squeals, surface types, camera perspectives, and of course, the sounds of the engines themselves.

From the Lost Chocolate Blog;

These informal game sound studies aim to expose the technical side of game audio by making an assessment of current generation titles. The assessment is then used as a way to better understand the differences in approach, aesthetics, and progression of techniques across a small sample. By turning the focus onto emerging details that arise during the course of the study we are able to identify area’s of significance and interest that help communicate the current state of the art. These finding are then represented in a content-rich report that includes: videos, article links, and specialized interviews. The goal is to help raise awareness for the technical side of sound design and help in the understanding of what is often not very well represented in current literature.

Check out the study in all it’s glory at the following links:

Vroom Vroom – A Study of Sound in Racing Games ( Introductory article in Game Developer Magazine )

TrackTime Audio blog – Racing Game Sound Study

Lost Chocolate Blog – Racing Game Sound Study

Game Audio Podcast – Racing Game Sound Study (with guests Mike Caviezel, Mike de Belle and Tim Bartlett)

GDC Vault has published the presentation materials from GDC 2012 online for free. There is a great wealth of information from a wide section of the game audio community, starting with Darren Korb‘s excellent keynote speech on his experience of creating the audio for Bastion in a New York closet. Thanks to Kenneth Young for tipping via the #gameaudio hashtag on Twitter!

All free Audio Track sessions are listed and linked below for your convenience;

(Video)

Build That Wall: Creating the Audio for Bastion – Darren Korb

(Slides)

80,000 Lines, Three Lessons Learned - Ariel Gross

Audio Boot Camp - Scott Selfon, Garry Taylor, Jason Graves, Martin Stig Andersen, Alistair Hirst, Sergio Pimentel, John Byrd, Bernard Rodrigue, Mike Caviezel

Authoring Soundscapes with User Generated Content and Automatic Audio Classification - Jordi Janer

Digital Orchestration for the Video Game Composer - Fletcher Beasley

From Minsk to London: How to make a live orchestra production in Europe happen - Pierre Langer

How To Ship a Game With Voices In 10 Languages? …On the same day? …And Keep It Consistent? - Alexandre Piche

Journey vs Monaco: Music is Storytelling - Austin Wintory

Orchestral Recording at Abbey Road for Lord of the Rings: War in the North - Craig Duman, Inon Zur, John Kurlander

Racing Games: A Semi-Formal Sound Study - Damian Kastbauer

Real-time Sound Propagation in Video Games - Jean-Francois Guay

Spot the Difference: AAA vs Indie VO Techniques - Michael Csurics, David Gilbert

Squeeze Play: The State of Ady0 Cmprshn - Scott Selfon

The Art of Non-Music: Crime Shooter Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days - Mona Mur

The Dynamic Audio of Vessel - Leonard Paul

The Emotional Puppeteer: Uncovering the Musical Strings that Tie Our Hearts to Games - Marty O’Donnell, Brandi House

The Weight of the World: creating massive destruction audio for  Red Faction: Armageddon - Stephen Hodde

What We Learned About Practical Audio By Going To Disneyland - Dwight Okahara, Chris Olander

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)

Ted Conley, Audio Director of EA Canada and the technical artist behind the RUMR (Realtime User Music Remix) system, has uploaded a video demonstrating how to utilize the custom soundtracks features of SSX, and the RUMR system. In the five minute video, Ted explains and demonstrates the various methods used to dynamically accentuate player performance, using runtime parameters, sampling, filters and a wide variety of DSP effects.

Skip ahead to 1:35 of the video to bypass the custom soundtrack ripping tutorial, and get straight to the action.

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

SPRINGS is a diverse new library of sound design source material released by HISSandaROAR and recorded by Tim Prebble.

Traversing from literal & very powerful trampoline springs & impacts through very strange bowed & manipulated extention springs all the way to abused outboard hardware (AKG BX5, Vermona Retroverb, Doepfer A199 with an Accuphonics tank) and of course, the classic slinky – but in this case stretched across a room and recorded with a contact mic at each end! Three sizes of thunder drums (long flexible springs attached to a drum resonator) were also hit, bowed & scraped to capture physically useful sounds as well as more evocative abstract material. This library is a diverse and inspiring collection of material that is incredibly fun to play with!

Available at $79 until December 25th (Regular price $99). Delivered at 24bit 96kHz. Includes 1,100+ sounds (6.9GB).

Below is a q&a with Tim, talking about the springs and some HISSandaROAR news:

What inspired the library?

Tim Preble: Being a bit of a dub-head I’ve always been into spring reverbs – I bought an AKG BX5 off ebay a decade or more ago, and I always remember almost blowing my speakers when I had it cranked up & accidentally moved my rack! But it was when I was working on the Cirque De Soilel 3D film that I had an epiphany. There is a scene in the film with some super hero characters doing totally outrageous moves on trampolines and despite being told the scene would be a music montage, I decided to try augmenting the rhythm with trampoline sounds. Next door to my studio is the rehearsal space for local circus group Fuse Circus, so I borrowed a small trampoline from them and recorded it using contact mics as well as normal mics. As soon as I listened to the contact mics I realised it was basically a large scale spring reverb – every hit made the all of the springs resonate! We did end up using some of the recordings in the final mix, and after I uploaded a video of recording those effects a few people contacted me, wanting access to the sounds. I couldn’t give them those particular sounds as they were specifically for the film, but I made a mental note to revisit that particular prop. And as always I started researching other elements I could record….

Click here to view the embedded video.

What else did you find?

TP: Good characterful springs are not actually that easy to find, but one source that proved useful was from exercise equipment – I disassembled a few chest expanders, and spent a bit of time attaching them to objects in ways that would encourage resonance… I also bought an old kids toy – a ride on horse, that was suspended by nice creaky springs. I explored other spring reverb outboard effects – I also own a Vermona Retroverb which is great – it actually has a ‘crash’ button on it that sends an impulse to the springs, but it also has a really nice resonant filter. My modular synth has a spring reverb, a Doepfer A199 module, so I bought an old Accuphonics 3 spring tank and used the module to get clean audio output from it, and I beat the hell out of that tank! I’m surprised it survived, but it was worth it. Some of the short sounds make me think of retro weapons, but some of the flickery sounds I got from it by applying friction along it, I have never heard before!

And of course I messed around with some slinkys – I hunted for the biggest/longest one I could find and then tensioned it horizontally across my studio, with a contact mic at each end, 20 feet apart. Another device I messed with are called Thunder drums – I bought one when I was in Bali a few years ago, its basically a long small tightly wound spring that is attached to the skin of a drum. If you shake it, it makes a sound a bit like thunder and hitting the spring has an almost flangey tone to it, but I discovered a few other interesting ways to extract sounds from it. Bowing the spring while varying the length created some really interesting pitch bends, but so also did rubbing or scraping your hand along the spring. A few times I’ve had to make sounds for someone suddenly abseiling or lowering down & I’ve always struggled for source material with that constant descending friction, but I’ve found a great element now!

Were they difficult to record?

TP: Some props really took some thinking about, because the sound they produced was acoustically very quiet but attaching a contact mic to the primary vibrating element meant the mic itself would absorb and/or stop the resonance. I think there is a concept in physics, where the act of making an experiment alters the circumstances or environment to such a degree that the experiment itself is no longer valid – it was a bit like that! I also soon learned that it is difficult to keep a contact mic attached to moving objects, so it took different setups and strategies depending on the specific sound I was after, even within the same prop. That little wood block with the tiny spring at the start of the video is a good example. I could get tone from it but I couldn’t record it – it just didn’t vibrate enough to excite the wood it was attached to. It was only when i clamped it down & actually attached the contact mics between the wood & the spring itself that I got interesting results. But, as you see (backwards) at the start of the video, it eventually flew to bits!

What are your favourite sounds? Any happy accidents?

TP: This library is full of happy accidents! Someone on my blog asked how I go about choosing what sounds to record, and I had to confess its half intent and half happy accidents – experimenting & being curious. The last prop I recorded for the library was when I revisited that trampoline, and having spent so much time recording other springs I had a few more ideas about how to get some new sounds from it. One aspect I now know is that to get ‘big’ dynamic sounds often requires gentle technique and hitting that trampoline gently with a gong beater, and being mic’d up and gain staged accordingly allowed me to get some huge subby sounding impacts, which feel more powerful than the hardest hits that I did later. But going back to that tiny spring, I now knew that attaching the contact mics on to the spring itself led to interesting sounds (it just couldn’t be the spring that was doing all the work, or the mic would detach) So the last sound I recorded was one of my favourites: attaching the contact mics directly to the springs and then very gently hitting other springs & elements of the trampoline. I swear there is an entire gamelan orchestra inside that trampoline when it was rigged this way – I could have sat & played it for hours. Over-recording was actually a real problem with this library, not over-level but content. I’d find a sound that I loved, that was really evocative or interesting and I could easily keep playing with it for hours! Must. Stop. Recording.

It’s been a great year for independent sound libraries – do you think its reaching saturation point with all these boutique library start ups?

TP: To be completely honest I think we’re barely scratching the surface. If you combined all of my libraries with all the great libraries released by Frank, Michael, Chuck & all the new sites, we would hardly match 5% in terms of quantity of the old school libraries such as Sound Ideas CD collections or whats on the Sound Dogs site. But in terms of quality, resolution and providing unique, characterful and interesting sounds I think at times we surpass them… Every time someone releases a new collection of recordings, whether you buy them or not, you know they are a resource waiting to be called upon. I sometimes dream about the huge library resources studios like Skywalker Sound must have, and while we’ll never get close to that, at least we’re slowly providing more diverse options, and they are options available to anyone.

Whats next for HISSandaROAR? Are you having a holiday??

TP: Indeed. This is my last library release for the year. As 2012 is a busy year with films for me I’ve deliberately been recording as much as possible and I have another couple of libraries recorded. The last task for me for the year is to finish the HISSandaROAR Christmas present, which is a free 24bit 96kHz collection of Tortured Cymbals, a preview of a library for next year. It will get sent out to everyone on the mail list next week, as a small gesture & to say a huge thank you for all the support this year. And thanks to you, Miguel and everyone at Designing Sound for an inspiring year!!
Happy Holidays!

I wanted to write a different kind of article, one that indulges my more geeky-tech side. While the main source for material remains great recordings, there are lots of times when we find solutions to problems in processing; these days that mainly means plug-ins, but that was not always so.

Sometimes, looking back, I see creative sound design moments as being more like a place you might visit, as opposed to a method you might use over and over. Time has shown me that the tools will constantly change around me. My main editing platform has changed three times during the course of my career. And so, some great tools become obsolete or unavailable. For this reason, I always encourage designers, when they find their way to an interesting combination of source/processing, to keep going and record lots of material; the next occasion you may want to repeat the process might not be so easy to get back to !  Some examples from my past follow:

The Ionizer

This was a great, if somewhat hard to master, plug-in. It did lots of stuff, eq-wise. One of its tricks was to be able to analyze the frequency profile of one sound, and then to impose it on another. I used it in the film “Wanted” to make some design-ey glass breaks in the convenience store scene by imposing the frequency spectrum of glass windchimes on some explosions:

The Ionizer was so widely cracked that its makers decided not to carry it forward to OS-X; so it has become inconvenient to use, to say the least.

Vokator

While the NI vocoder Vokator still works, I notice that NI no longer sells or supports it, so it is only a matter of time before it too, becomes unavailable. I have had great luck in using it for creatures. In short, I like to put a series of animal sounds on a software sampler, under different keys, put some under midi fader or foot pedal controller, feed that into Vokator as the carrier, with a mic as the modulator. Set up so you are listening on headphones to your output only, and using lots of gestural control on the faders and pitch wheel, while making ridiculous sounds and screaming into the mic, start to work your way towards interesting sounds. Record your output so that you only have to get it right once, for any given moment ! Record lots of stuff, go through it and pick out the good bits, then edit it together as you would for any creature.

Synclavier

Ah, the synclav. While I have so much to say about how the interface on this wonderful machine shaped the outlook of so many sound designers, for now I will mention only one detail. There was a button combination that would allow you to use the big wheel control to change the octave ratio of the keyboard tuning. This meant that on each side of a breakpoint, as you turned the dial, the sound would pitch up to the right of the breakpoint, and pitch down to the left, by as much as hundreds of semi-tones. It was useful for making some sci-fi type turbine sounds; like this Minbari engine made for the tv series Babylon-Five.

Hyper-prism

It’s not that the plug-ins in Hyper-prism did things other plug-ins don’t, it was more of the interface it presented you with. In particular, the pitch-time widow let you move a dot around in a 2-d box in a way that made interesting ‘warpy’ sounds; here is some warped out bg vocal stuff from “Exorcist the Beginning”

PCM 80 Doppler

Once upon a time I actually made doppler bys by waving a mic past a speaker. Then came the Lexicon PCM-80 with a pair of doppler algorithms that could be mapped to a mod wheel controller. While not as realistic as say the Waves or Grm plug-in, it was much warpier. This is some warped out metal used in “Spawn” made with the PCM 80

Sound Hack

This program is still available, though I find lately that it has problems with the headers on lots of my sound files. While not real-time, I found that I could still have some ‘lucky-accidents’ with the convolution and mutate functions. Here is a bit of screeching metal mutated with a slow masking tape-pull, used as the antennae freezing in the Super-Freeze scene for “The Day After”.

Max-Msp

This wonderful program is very deep, and I will never totally master it. But it does unheard of things with sound. There is a free-ware player only version available, but it is hard to adjust your inputs and outputs on the free version. There is also a freeware language called Pure Data (PD) that has the same functionality; but MAX is the one I was introduced to and became familiar with. Here is some granular type stuff made with MAX, for the smash movie hit “Apollo 18″

There are tons more to list. While there are more plug-ins for Pro Tools than I will ever have the time to truly explore; it’s good to remember that there are lots of other interesting platforms and programs and hardware to check out when looking for sound solutions to design problems.

Let’s get started with this month’s special. Below is an interview I had with our guest Harry Cohen, talking about the general aspects of his career.

How did you get started in sound design and what’s been the evolution of your career?

I backed into sound design by accident; I showed up at EFX studios in Burbank to do some piano overdubs on a new-age-y album, and met the staff. They were a music studio just getting into post production. The owner asked me if I would help with some sound effects for game shows they were posting, since I knew synths pretty well. Three days later he asked me out of the blue if I was interested in trying my hand at doing sound fx for a film. (a super low-budget film !), and for better or worse , I agreed. I stayed with EFX for about 12 years, and slowly we built a reputation and started getting better films. Looking back , it was like a rare alignment of the stars or something; so many talented people were associated with that place. (Paul Menichini, David Farmer, Ann Scibelli, Tim Gedemer, Tim Walston, Mike Kamper, Gary Rizzo, Mark Fishman, and on and on). Later, I accepted an offer from from Wylie Stateman and Lon Bender to join Soundelux. Except for a 6 month period where I was ‘on loan’ to Soundstorm, those are the only 3 facilities I have worked for. I’ve been with Soundelux for more than 10 years now.

What are your biggest influences inside and outside the world of sound?

Well , of course , all the great sounding films over the years, and, all the other sound professionals I have worked with. Many people are so open and willing to share what they know, and that is probable the greatest resource we can tap.

I think also that being a musician has had a lot of influence on how I hear things.

How you deal with deadlines and creativity? Is there any special method you have for staying creative?

Aha ! Deadlines and creativity… I find that fear and panic have great effect on your productivity ! But seriously, my thoughts on it are that when you are crunched, you tend to work longer hours, and that after several hours of working with the problem and your material , something ‘clicks’ in your brain , and you go into this mode of being focused and productive. So often we go back to the stuff we did in a hurry when under time pressure , and realize that it is good ! Unfortunately, this is not a great way to work all the time; it tends to take a toll on your life. But I am not one who can be creative all the time; it comes and goes, and I have to take advantage of it when I am ‘in the mode’.

DS: What are your favorite tools in the studio and the field?

In the field , I love my Sound Devices 722. The small portable Zoom type recorders are also super convenient for casual and ‘stealth’ recordings. I have been doing most of my recording with either a Sennheiser 416 or 418; I also love the Neumann 190i. This year I intend to try some larger diaphragm mics. In studio, pro tools of course is the main platform, but I also work in Logic, Max msp, Reason, and other standalone programs. Kontakt has become an important tool for me.

DS: What’s your take on technology and how do you think it has affected the way you design sound today?

Well, looking back, I used a synclavier and a rack of outboard gear. Complex patch-ups were often hard to re-create. Now, if I need 3 more eqs and 2 more compressors, a couple of pitch shifters and some reverbs and delays, the computer isn’t even breathing hard. Also , there are constantly new plug-ins and
new sound technology coming out. I try to experiment with new stuff when I can.

How would you define sound design? What is the essence for you?

Sound Design has really come to mean two separate things. In the larger sense , a sound designer can be someone who is involved with the whole sound of the film; the creation or supervision of all the elements,(except the music) and how they fit together, the arc of the soundtrack, actively working with the mixers to realize the directors wants and vision for the film. But, it also means the guy(s) (or gals) that are tasked with creating and organizing the cool sounds themselves.

Much of what we need does not exist in the real world; or there is a creative ‘re-purposing’ of real world sounds to be something else. Its hard to be both of those people; they are both very time intensive. In practice, my work falls somewhere in between the two, which is to say that I am usually present during the mix to contribute a voice to the shaping of the track , and to manufacture lots of last minute adds and fixes.I do a lot of work with supervisor Wylie Stateman , and we tend to see a lot of things the same way, in terms of what we are trying to accomplish with the sound.

Harry Cohen and Michael Keller

What have been your most challenging projects and why? Any favorites also?

Challenge can be lots of different things. Earlier this year I helped out on Green Lantern, doing the evil monster, his thrall, and any ‘evil energy’. My first day on the project was also the first day of predubs ! That was a particular kind of challenge. Each film presents its own challenges, and while that sounds like a cliche, it is very true. I once told Wylie that if I was really honest with a director at our first meeting, I would say that I have no idea what I am going to do for his film. The film will tell me what it needs……to which Wylie replied “You’d better let me do the talking at that first meeting !”

As far as favorites; the first ‘Blade’ and the more recent ‘Wanted’ are two films that sound very close to my intentions.

What are your favorite type of sounds or scenes to work with and why?

I like creature sounds; I love the subjective type of sounds that are somewhere between sound effects and music. I enjoy doing things that affect the audience emotionally.

DS: Would you like to give an advice to other sound designers out there? What would it be?

My advice to up and comers would be to seek out other people to learn from. One of the things that made EFX such a special place was the continual sharing of information and techniques; its hard to figure everything out yourself. Build your own custom library full of your own recordings and creations. When you are making new sounds, make more than you need, and save some for later. When you wander into an interesting area (design-wise), explore it and record some stuff, even if its not what you currently need. And when playing with processing or plug-ins, I always think ‘how do I know if I’ve gone far enough until I have clearly gone too far ?” Listen to stuff you like and try to figure out how to do some of that. Heck , email the designer , and ask him !

What are your favorite films for sound? Any special recommendations?

Well , I am old enough that Apocalypse Now , the Star Wars films and the first Indiana Jones totally re-defined film sound for me. But advances in recording technology have engendered a whole new era of ‘high definition’ sound that is equally as exciting.

DS: What are you currently working on? What’s next for Harry Cohen?

I am currently working on “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter’ for director Timur Bekmambetov. Down the road for us is Oliver Stone’s ‘Savages’ and Quentin Tarrentino’s ‘Django’.