Designing Sound

Art and technique of sound design

Bellingham Audio in Games Event (BAIGE)

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Event playbill sketch credit jovietajane (https://twitter.com/jovietajane).
Event playbill sketch credit jovietajane (https://twitter.com/jovietajane).

Community spotlight on: the Pacific Northwest, a uniquely concentrated locus of game audio talent goings-on.

Every month, Vancouver and Seattle both host up an in- to semi-formal gathering for like-minded designers and composers, usually alternating developer showcases and bar crawls. Lots of cities do these, but it seems like these ours are particularly well-attended: upwards of 75+ attendees Eventbrite’d in for November’s behind the scenes look at the sound of Bungie’s Destiny, on site at their Bellevue headquarters. Each city’s been on a really consistent tear with these meet-ups for the last two years, but they’d never really come together.*

Until this weekend.

On Saturday, the Vancouver and Seattle Game Audio communities came together in the basement of Western Washington University, a graciously provided-for halfway point, for a collaborative afternoon of talks and panels. We ate donuts, shuffled slides, met our brothers and sisters from across the border and broke it all down over pizza.

I’ve been going to these things for a while, and I always leave them hazy-brained and grateful to be part of an industry so welcoming. And it’s just flat-out unfair not to spread that around. So here’s Designing Sound, bending towards Bellingham, for a bullet point recap of some of the knowledge that was shared.

Music Copyright 101: Music for Games

Sebastian Wolff (Loudr / @germanseabass)

Sebastian’s talk was definitely oriented towards the composers among us, focusing on the perils, pitfalls and complexities of copyright.

If there’s one thing to take away, here, it’s that this is a world unto itself, and probably best navigated with the help of a trained professional.

  • We’ve got a copyright as soon as we put something into a physical form, or create a recording; there’s no need to file anything to establish one, if you can prove you made what you’re claiming
  • Copyright lasts 75 years if you create it on your own time; 90 if you’ve created it as part of a work-for-hire
  • If the company who owns the copyright on a piece you composed as part of a work-for-hire goes dissolves, tracing the ownership can be tricky. It’ll likely fall to one of the principal shareholders, but companies like Loudr exist for the sake of demystifying these transfers and chasing things down (so that you can stay creative!)
  • Compositional (the music) and Performance (the recording) copyrights for a piece of music are separate entities, and treated differently
  • Compositions involving multiple collaborators have their copyright ownership distributed variably amidst all contributors
  • From covers, to rebroadcasts, to samples: royalties are almost always due
  • Twitch, “Let’s Plays” and the like are seemingly nightmarish new frontiers for decrypting copyright disputes

 

Audio for VR

Gordon McGladdery (A Shell In The Pit / @ashellinthepit)

Gord himself describes his experience with adventuring into VR audio as “[falling] on the bleeding edge,” which nicely headers the theme of this talk, centered around his learnings on creating the sound of Fantastic Contraption. The ways in which we create and implement sound and music for this emerging platform are still totally in flux, and best practices don’t always port.

We’ll need to approach designing for these experiences as we would a brand new medium–but in the meanwhile, we’ll all probably be trying to make game audio the way we always have, discovering that it’s not totally working on the other side.

I bet you this talk’s bound for GDC at some point, so I’ll leave some of the finer points to Gord for his next go-round. But here are some things that caught my interest:

  • Binaural audio’s an inseparable part of the VR experience, meaning the fight for audio worth vs. your development team, middleware licensing and budget is easier this time around
  • Big sounds, small sounds: the details really matter. Nothing gets to go without sound anymore
  • Realism in attenuation, falloffs, environmental treatments are more important than ever; as we cross the uncanny valley, these shortcomings are the things that’ll rip the user out of immersion
  • Positional processing algorithms steal a certain something from your audio; you’ve got to strike a new balance between the expected realism and the “designed reality” of games as we know them
  • Mixing for headphones as a guaranteed platform’s made that part of the process simpler, but a manufacturer-standardized set of them’d help even more
  • Non-diegetic music (e.g. score) doesn’t feel like it’s working anymore, and we’ll need to find new approaches for bringing composition into the picture

Gord’s got a giant wishlist for the next ten years of audio tech, and many cool ideas for bringing the player’s perception even deeper into the environment. I hope he keeps thinking critically on his work.

 

Roundtable: Field Recording

Andy Martin (Sucker Punch / @soundeziner),

Pete Comley (Microsoft, Oculus, etc. / http://www.petercomleysound.com/)

Robbie Elias (343)

Three professionals, three approaches. Damian Kastbauer served questions and got answers down the line.

  • On gear: a great and unsurprising show of support for the likes of Sound Devices’ recorders, the Sony PCM-M10 for covert ops / portability, Sennheiser, Schoeps and (wishful) Sanken microphones. Quirky mentions included using camera mounting equipment instead of the stuff you’d buy specifically for mics; a collection of interesting / other purpose microphones like ones that translate light into sound
  • On subliminally broadcasting the “don’t bother me, I’m recording” vibe to passers-by: try idly thumbing your phone or M10. That’s a clear social signal that you want to stay in your world.
  • Sometimes, you go looking for the subject; sometimes, it chooses you. Be prepared to revise your game plan as more interesting sounds emerge
  • People behave differently when they know they’re being recorded. Some ways to keep your recording undercover: station your tripod and windscreen inside a soft cat carrier; don’t wear your nice headphones
  • Patience is a virtue. Wait, wait, wait for that right take, that clean train by, or you’ll go home with your substandard recording for the rest of your life
  • Travel refreshes your ears: the assault of so many new sounds will pull you out of any recording inertia, and has the nice afterglow effect of waking your ears up to the common sounds of your usual environment after you return. What you considered mundane while stuck in the daily grind might seem like something worth capturing after some time away
  • Be friendly. Kindness and genuine interest will get you access to strange devices and after-hours sessions around areas you’d like to record
  • Bonus round tip from Matt: you never need a permit to record sound (whereas it’s common with video), so don’t be shy about declaring your intentions

 

Managing Audio Performance: Lessons Learned from the Production of Halo 5

Chase Thompson (343 / http://www.chasethompsonaudio.com/)

Halo 5‘s kind of a big deal game, fraught with all the optimization challenges necessary to keep things sounding great and running at a steady 60FPS.

Chase’ll be presenting this talk at this year’s Game Development Conference, so I won’t say much beyond that 343’s system for daily bringing the game’s evolving script to life into the game as automatically integrated temp audio is mind-blowing, and I’ll want it wherever I work next. Additionally:

  • Plan, plan, plan for your target platform. Know what your limits are going to be, and keep a running update of where you are
  • Speak to your devs in terms of time spent on the core instead of confusing, audio-centric terms like “voices.” It’s much easier to say “an average PvP with 3 players and 3 opponents is going to need 16ms of processing time from the CPU on every game frame” than “we’ll be using 120 voices when things get hectic.” Of course, being able to speak on this stuff authoritatively requires a technical mind and a lot of scoping out–but it’ll pay off in dev support and eventual performance gains
  • Clearly define the types of performance-related audio bugs you expect to run into to your QA team so they don’t conflate things like distortion, delays, hitching, drop-outs etc. and can give you precise feedback on what they see going wrong

 

3 Interesting Things About 3 Interesting Games

Matthew Marteinsson (Klei / @mattesque)

These were little chunks of information that weren’t enough to sustain an entire talk, but were too good to keep secret. Or so Matt thought. We all agreed.

Invisible Inc: Voice Processing

  • Was done differently for lines playing back in different areas of the game and involved many, many plugins, even just to get things sounding “normal.”
  • Incognita’s voice was created by recording three takes of each line, performed back to back, and editing them into rough sync for a natural chorus effect. Each of these lines was processed differently for a complex but organic end result

Don’t Starve: Procedural Ambience

How do you create the ambience of a world whose biomes will change on every playthrough? In the case of Don’t Starve, the game would draw a rough radius around the player (corresponding to what he could see), within which % values of how much of each visible terrain type was on screen, then feed those %s to the mix volume levels of the ambiences associated with that terrain type for an evolving blend.

2D Occlusion in Mark of the Ninja

Sound dampening’s pretty important in a game about stealth, but not many 2D titles use occlusion and obstruction. Do any? Mark of the Ninja did, by tapping into the same pathfinding information created by the game’s AI system. The game would simulate an optimal path from sound source to listener in the same way it’d do so for an enemy. It could then pass the sonically useful parts of that information (distance traveled, objects crossed through, corners rounded) to tune the sound’s attenuation at runtime.

 

Micro-Talks

The organizers closed out the event by polling the room for topics they’d like to hear something on, figuring we’d pull together a panel of volunteers for the one selected. But in the end, it seemed cooler to do a lightning round panel on every topic, with two volunteers going off-the-cuff until Matt rang the gong.

Seriously though, he pulled up an actual gong sound and a timer and stressed us all the heck out.

Secret Weapon Plugins

Luca Fusi (PopCap Games / @lucafusi)

Jesse Rope (Bungie / @beacomedian)

I gushed about Melted Sound’s WHOOSH ensemble for Native Instruments’ Reaktor, for which I’m becoming I guess a pretty visible proponent. It’s a wonderful sounding sampler and doppler engine useful for jamming textures together and creating ungodly amounts of source. It, like S-Layer (for which Jesse went to bat), is a true “happy accident machine” which shines most brightly when loaded up with your own personal samples and bits you’ve already designed. That loading can be a pain, but man, does it turn out some cool stuff when you fire it up. I use it for movement, whooshes, loops, impacts and all sorts of bits; it’s become one of my design daily drivers this year and I highly recommend it.

Jesse spoke out on:

  • Twisted Tools’ S-Layer, a sampler, which lends itself seriously to bus-crunching impacts and totally unique UI. He “never makes a UI sound without it” anymore!
  • His mid-side mastering chain concept is pretty rad: everything in a session’s routed to an MS bus, and a C and LR aux listen to that before heading to the print tracks. This lets him apply different effects, punch, spread and EQ to the meat of the sound and the airy detail on the sides while tackling potential phase issues that’d crop up on different systems
  • Finally, a vote for Filter Freak 2 and its fast-acting punch up / down envelopes–Jesse flips between a couple of presets here (specifically, which frequency range the plugin’s clamping down) as he bounces his sounds out to make sure he’s always carving space for the other sounds in the sequence to shine

[Your] Coolest Implementation Lately

Wilbert Roget (Lucasarts, Roget Music / http://www.rogetmusic.com/)

Chase Thompson (343 / http://www.chasethompsonaudio.com/)

Wilbert talked about his experience designing music for a multiplayer Star Wars title–the type of thing you don’t usually want to run a flat bed of music throughout. He and the team nonetheless wanted to be able to score each player’s experience with longer cues that reflected how well or poorly they were doing in the match, settling on evolving, 45sec ambient stingers as a paradigm that made sense. Instead of composing a million of these, though, he took a step back and considered the elements of one of these long stingers, then wrote variations on the elements that really made it come together (the intro; the punctuating moments; the ending swell); when implemented, this turned one 8min orchestral session into something like 45min of in-game music.

Chase Thompson came back up to give more details on exactly how their automatic temp VO system worked, scouring the depot for the writing team’s script revisions, converting those into audio via text-to-speech and throwing them into Wwise and the game. All offline. Automatically. Did I mention I want this?

“RJ in the Chair: Unity Tips”

RJ Mattingly (PopCap Games / @rjmattingly)

It's RJ, in a chair. What more do you need?
It’s RJ, in a chair. What more do you need?

The man so nice they gave him twice…as long as every other speaker to talk. RJ is a Technical Sound Designer at PopCap who has subclassed deeply into the Technical part of that title, bringing incredible tools and automation to the stuff PopCap audio works on every day. He spoke about a few scripts he’s developed for an upcoming PopCap title and the Unity engine that’s powering it:

  • One tool brings all the chaos of checking out, viewing and tagging animations with audio events into a centralized graphical interface, making it quick for designers to grab the objects they want to inspect and do everything they want to them in one place
  • Another script automatically creates a text file of the current audio event “tag” state of every prefab audio’s concerned with, daily comparing it to the previous day’s text file (via Perforce’s “diff” operating) to spot things that have been broken or moved. And letting the audio team know exactly who busted it
  • The final tool handles playblasting or exporting reference video of animations from Unity, for offline use in a DAW or passing to an external team. Grab a prefab, drop it onto a box, and the script spiders through that prefab’s associated animations, playing them back in faster-than-realtime and capturing the Scene’s video at 1/30 intervals into a folder full of .jpgs. Then it passes those to a command line video encoder (ffmpeg), which stitches them together into Pro Tools-compatible Quicktimes
  • His preferred hair product? “No showers.”
  • “Automate everything.”

Favorite Field Recording Locations

Gordon McGladdery (A Shell In The Pit / @ashellinthepit)

Andy Martin (Sucker Punch / @soundeziner)

Gord got to go to Peru as part of his work with the Smarter Every Day web series and brought his binaural lavaliers along with him. Those mics are on strings. He fed those strings into the holes things lived in and got some seriously cool sounds

Andy preached the proximal natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, urging the meetup to get the heck out there and capture it! The Cascades, Vancouver island, and more. Get a car, get on a ferry and head out into some of the best wilds the continent has to offer. Another pro tip was for booking Air BnB stays at remote places such as farms, which’ll get you close to some awesome recording situations in a totally legal and paid-for way

Sound Library Organization

Beau Jimenez (Bungie, Wabi Sabi Sound / @thebeauanthony)

Pete Comley (Microsoft, Oculus, etc. / http://www.petercomleysound.com/)

Beau submits that there’s no best way to organize your library–it’s whatever works for you, whatever lets you know where sounds are ASAP. Folder hierarchies and unconventional, personal categorization (“From Friends” / “From Myself”; tagging a recording’s filename with the address of an apartment you recorded it at, since that’s the way you always think of that apartment in your head) will let you get to your sounds quickly by leveraging the connections you have to those sounds in your own mind.

Pete Comley: “How to organize your library: as soon as I find out, I’ll let you know.”

  • Pete championed Izotope RX and the spectrograph view for quickly profiling and editing your recordings. After some initial cleanup, he’ll bounce the recordings out and work with them over the course of a few projects–and as the parts of those recordings he finds most useful emerge, he’ll revisit the original RX session to isolate and export those bits.
  • On filenaming: YYYYMMDD, since it sorts nicely in Explorer, and header things by Type_Adjective.

Best Sound Design (*in a game that’s not yours)

Erick Bryant

Andy Rohrmann (Galak-Z / @scntfc)

Erick spoke to the environment sound design of Alien: Isolation and the voice of one of the game’s real principal characters: Sevastopol Station. The controlled chaos of this space station (“distant klaxons” / “rustling bulkheads”) are initially chilling, but become a familiar but forgotten voice in the mix as the game rolls on–until it’s broken up by the movement of the Xenomorph stalking you from room to room.

Andy went to bat for:

  • OlliOlli2 amazing licensed soundtrack and Hohokum’s record label partnership which nonetheless produced tracks that feel like they were meant only for that game
  • And, of course: the sound of Destiny, and how its best sounds make you want to do things outside the goals of the game, just so you can keep hearing them. Special mention to the Sparrow vehicle and several of the game’s guns, which he professed to using past the point of their usefulness just because they sounded cool

 

 

Matt closed the event out with a public airing of Klei’s crowdsourced Beefalo Song, which idea came to him at PAX and wouldn’t leave his brain until he manifested the video below:

Copyright discussions amidst all the song’s contributors are presumably ongoing.

 

Cheers again to all speakers for sharing; Matthew Marteinnson, Jon Bash and Damian Kastbauer for helping it all come together; Designing Sound for hosting this up!

*There’s a full set of recordings that hasn’t been edited down yet, which may or may make it up into the public domain. Video as well! And if they come together, I’ll amend this post to include them.

 

Bonus Round: Aftermath and Wrap-Up

Around half the attendees keep the party going over New York Pizza Bar & Grill.
Around half the attendees keep the party going over New York Pizza Bar & Grill.

*(Not counting Klei’s Matthew Marteinsson, who makes the same-day / same-night cross-border haul down from Vancouver almost every time. What a trooper.)

Comments

  1. Great write-up of what was a fantastic day of sharing and caring in the game audio community! The graciousness of the presenters and speakers who were willing to share their experience with the attendees was overflowing. The strength of these meetups continues to be the level-playing-field of discussion that recognizes each persons perspective as a part of the conversation.

    It usually only takes one person to pull together a meetup between like-minded folks. (It could be YOU!) A flag-on-the-moon to rally people together in a shared space. The scope and depth of the Bellingham meetup stands as a testament to what collaboration between communities can accomplish.

    Cheers to all the communities across the globe pulling people together in the name of game audio!

  2. Great summary for those of us who couldn’t be in attendance. Looks like there was a great, unassuming generous vibe at the event. Keep up the great work maintaining the strong community up there!

  3. Thanks for the write up! It was super fun to get this off the ground and certainly think we’re going to do another one in 6 months.

  4. So bummed I couldn’t go. Was looking forward to this one and it seems like it was incredible!
    Good Job on the write up!!!

  5. Thanks for the write-up, Luca! I’m glad to have been a part of the whole thing and hope at least something I blathered about was useful to someone somewhere.

    @Richard Gould, that’s the special thing about this community. It IS so generous and unassuming. There’s a strong “we’re all in this together” vibe in the NorthWest that makes any get together somewhat magical.

    @Matt M and @Damian kasbauer, this community wouldn’t run nearly as smoothly as it does without you. Thanks for wrangling the whole thing together with John Bash!

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