SVG has published a short article on the sound of ‘Madden NFL 12‘. It primarily features Jesse Allen, the audio director, describing how the crowd sounds were recorded and engineered in to the game.
The crowd-ambience sound on Madden 12 was culled from such sources as the local Jacksonville Panthers games and a number of NCAA contests. (EA’s NCAA title includes some audio assets provided by ESPN, which has an ongoing collaboration with EA Sports, but no ESPN audio appears on the Madden NFL series.) What you hear on Madden NFL 12comes from a total of about 50 hours of interactive audio files programmed to engage depending on the play.
“The crowd levels and nature change based on situation,” says Allen, “such as whether it’s a rivalry game or the Super Bowl, where the crowd sound gets huge, or a lopsided blowout, where half the crowd has left halfway through the game.”
The audio also follows the play around the field, with general crowd noise turning into more specific yells and hoots as the POV moves from the stands to the field. Logic programming takes all the circumstances into account and pulls and plays the appropriate files, as well as putting more information (i.e. volume) into the left or right channel as the player POV moves side to side the across the field.
All of that audio was gathered by a crew of freelancers, including Watson Wu and Chris Latham, who record stadiums in quadrants for 15-20 minutes at a time, using some gear that would be familiar to their broadcast counterparts and some that might not……
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Its always a pleasure to work with Watson in any capacity. EA forgot to mention me as being part of that recording, but I will take one for the team. Again, may you be so lucky as to work with Watson, the crowd sounds he gathered were simply amazing sounding in game.