Comments on: A Modular Creature Design System

By: Varun Nair

Varun Nair — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 09:17:49 +0000

Hey Beau,

Getting a computer to replicate human choices is difficult — even for simple sound design systems like these, let alone larger AI systems. With more time dedicated to it, this system can be made better (more natural, less mechanic), but definitely cannot replace a human and the happy accidents of creative sound design. Bear in mind this system was built for a computing device of limited technical capability.

With interactive mediums we tend to train/force computer programs to make decisions that sound good. As Randy pointed out, this system is still very far from sounding natural, let alone recognisable and iconic. The control we gain on a timeline is lost when creating a system with some amount of intelligence.

Varun

By: Beau Anthony Jimenez

Beau Anthony Jimenez — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 01:44:05 +0000

Varun,

This technique would be an incredible achievement, but I feel like there’s nothing stronger than the human ear.
We have the ability to audition sounds and, as animals ourselves, sense the emotion that our animal vocalization sfx convey.

We can tell if a pig squeal is more ‘angry’ than ‘scared’ or (vise-versa) through our instincts.

And a great ear/editor will be able to mix and mesh these vocalizations on a timeline in a way that could create something genuine, creative, and iconic.

Creature sound design is the most challenging type of design I’ve encountered in my career… But it is a fascinating topic!

Sorry for being so late on this thread (almost a year and a half) but I’d love to continue to discuss it!
E-mail me at [email protected].

Best,
Beau

By: Chris Polus

Chris Polus — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 12:42:34 +0000

I’m just starting out having to soon do some creature voices for a computer game. I struggle with it sounding great and authentic. You seem to have put much thought into it and even built a system to intelligently select samples you made.
I won’t have that luxury as I will only be able to trigger sounds for specific events, statically. Meaning: creature was hit, play a random sound of set “hit”. Creature dies, play sound of set “death”… Things like that.
But I tried to spend some time and see how others did creature voices. A lot of samples, also commercial samples seem to be drastically slowed down human voices and screams. Often mixed with some lion growls and others.
Then I also heard about granular techniques to get more freedom than with static recordings that are just slowed down.
Other techniques involve the use of vocoders that are able to impose the performance of once wave onto another. Does anybody know of vocoders that do this well? I experimented with many but it seems I didn’t really understand them well enough yet to be able to predict the result. Most of the time it’s disappointing, I guess because of the source material?
Also a good idea is just envelope following. So one has a monster sound, but you can control it with your own voice. Make a loud voice sound, and the volume envelope is transferred to another sound, maybe a steady lion growl. So you have control over how violent and loud the lion growl is, instead of hacking together many different samples.
A tool that I play with and I’m impressed by is by sound designer Orfeas Boteas (dehumaniser.com). It unites many of the above techniques and adds some synthesised voice sounds to create really great sounding creatures. It was written in Max. Maybe worth a look.
I haven’t found many useful articles about sound design techniques for creature voices. Does anybody have other sources? I would be interested to learn more about it, like the techniques used in Orfeas’ tool.

By: Varun Nair

Varun Nair — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 23:32:43 +0000

In reply to Richard Gould.

Getting audio and video systems to talk to eachother in games is relatively straightforward, usually it is just about the different departments collaborating — as mentioned in that article.

I haven’t tried this system for other kinds of sounds and it would be difficult (read impossible) to make it work for everything. In my experience wind can be easier to get away with and a lot of it can be accomplished by having good models that control a few filters. Water is difficult, even when recording it with microphones!

It depends on the context though. The perceived quality of a sound changes depending on what it is used for and when.

By: Randy Thom

Randy Thom — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 19:23:27 +0000

In reply to hzandbits.

Actually there are human voice elements in R2D2. Ben Burtt used lots of humming and cooing in addition to the synthetic elements. I hope it goes without saying that when I refer to “creature” voices I mean “organic” creatures, not robots. R2D2 is clearly a robot, so there is no burden to make an entity like R2 sound “natural.”

Randy

By: hzandbits

hzandbits — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 19:12:18 +0000

Very interesting project. The best creature voices or sound always somehow balance the familiar with the unfamiliar/exotic – or so it seems to me. The insectoid aliens in District 9 struck me as taking that balance about as far toward the exotic as you can get – while still successfully communicating relatable emotion. That was excellent work to my ears. But then, that was a feature film with a finite number of script “lines” to be performed in alien language – not a game environment where players may crave much greater variation.

@Randy: Your use of the word artificial made me think of R2D2: Completely artificial sound; not a trace of human voice there – yet we love it (because it works).

Great post – can’t wait to hear more about this project, Varun!

By: Varun Nair

Varun Nair — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 18:32:07 +0000

In reply to Randy Thom.

Thank you Randy. I hugely appreciate you taking time to leave your thoughts. Quite often I find myself getting caught up in the process rather than the outcome and you have raised a *very* valid point.

Continuing the struggle,
Varun

By: Richard Gould

Richard Gould — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 18:30:37 +0000

Very interesting work, have you considered how this system might also be applicable to other scenarios? I’m thinking of stochastic sounds such as adding quasi-random variation to water, wind, ambient birdsong and the like based off of defined parameters. I did an installation work using Max MSP (similar to PD) that selected between two sample pools, natural sounds and manmade and depending on the level of noise in the space created by those in it, it would switch between them creating an increasingly agitated or calming space.

You might be interested in this article regarding some of the work done within Advanced Warfighter 2, a rare case where a audio system, not dissimilar to what you’ve created, actually controls visual components, in this case, fire.

https://designingsound.org/2010/10/audio-implementation-greats-9-ghost-recon-advanced-warfighter-2-multiplayer-dynamic-wind-system/

Audio is usually ‘reactive’ in games, systems like that and yours offer the opportunity to pass data to visual systems as opposed to just handling the playback of audio. Very exciting.

By: Randy Thom

Randy Thom — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 17:56:11 +0000

Creature voice creation is the most difficult kind of sound design. I have enormous respect for anyone who gives it a serious try, and this is obviously a serious try. I’ve spent many years fabricating creature voices, and regardless of the methodology used to get there, in the end all that matters is what the results sound like. The main trick with creature voices is to make them sound organic, real, and natural, while also giving them an exotic twist that makes them seem unique and in some sense unfamiliar. There are very nice moments in this sequence, but to me most of it sounds like a perfectly good set of human voice samples that have been made to sound artificial. The most frequent criticism sound designers hear from directors is that a given piece of work seems unnatural, inorganic, synthesized, electronic, etc. In my opinion too much of this sequence falls into that category.

with deep respect,
Randy