As sound designers, our jobs usually entail creating a vivid sonic world to accompany a narrative. But often, the nature of the worlds we are creating presents some unique challenges; there's no doubt this was the case on ABZÛ, an upcoming underwater exploration game from Giant Squid Studios. In a recent blog post, Giant Squid's sound designer Steve Green delves into their … [Read more...]
News: SoundToys “Give a Little, Get a Little”
Want to score some excellent plugins from perennial favorite manufacturer SoundToys? Want to give to a worthy charity during the holiday season? Well, good news: you can do both, thanks to a great initiative SoundToys has recently started, called "Give a Little, Get a Little." The idea is, SoundToys will be offering one of their "Little" plugins as a pay-what-you-can … [Read more...]
Monthly Theme: Sonic Degradation
Sometimes the last thing we as audio professionals want is the degradation of the audio that we are working with, though often, we use sonic degradation for many creative audio endeavours. This month, we would like to explore the good, and the bad of sonic degradation within sound design. As always, we encourage contributions from our community of readers. Please feel free … [Read more...]
News: How to Create Horror Sound Effects
In an appropriately seasonal blog post over at A Sound Effect, Asbjoern speaks to Saro Sahihi of SoundBits, a boutique SFX library and sound design company. Saro, who has released some excellent gore SFX libraries, goes in-depth on how to achieve some truly squishy, wrenching, and disgusting gore sounds for all your horror needs. He even touches on some other horror mainstays, … [Read more...]
News: Behind the Scenes with Plants vs. Zombies 2 Neon Mixtape Tour
Considering the newest Plants vs. Zombies 2 release has the word "mixtape" in the name, there was never any doubt that music would play a big role in the game's experience. And as anyone who closely follows PopCap Games and their audio obsession, they're not a company that does something halfway when it comes to sound or music. That's why its a real treat that PvZ2 Neon Mixtape … [Read more...]
Monthly Theme: Film Theory
From time to time, while working specifically on the audio portion of film projects (this is true for other mediums as well, though this month is focused on film), a sort of "tunnel vision" can occur and it is easy to overlook the importance of film as a complete artform and its impact on the world around us. This month's theme of Film Theory gives us all a chance to take a … [Read more...]
News: SOMA – Behind the Sound
There's a common joke among game audio artists and designers: if you ask any number of sound designers what genre they'd most like to work on, the odds are good they'll all say "horror", twice. It's no surprise it's such a common answer, either; horror games offer designers some of the most interesting and diverse sound design opportunities one can come across. There's no doubt … [Read more...]