When it comes to video game companies, you can probably name quite a few off the top of your head. You can name some publishers, some developers, some CG producers, and maybe a couple of miscellaneous others. How many of those companies are sound companies? The sound of the game is often one of the most underappreciated elements of game production. Then again, shouldn’t the role of a game’s audio be to draw the player in with ambience that may or may not be entirely noticeable? Sound is all about the mood of the game, right? According to audio specialists at dSonic, sound is in the background now, but in the future it may become as important to gameplay as graphics. We talk to Simon Amarasingham about what he and his brother/co-founder, Kemal Amarasingham, about the beautiful game music they play together.
Check out a couple of dSonic’s sound
tracks from Acclaim’s Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance.
Available on our Podcast
Underworld Vengence – MP3
Journey to the Coliseum – MP3
Advanced Media Network: First and foremost, we understand that you’re working on ‘adaptive audio.’ Can you explain exactly what that is and what it means for games in the future?
Simon Amarasingham: Adaptive audio is music and sound effects that change in real time, reacting to the game play. For example a music track in a FPS might change from a relatively calm vibe when you are walking around exploring, to something dramatic and upbeat when you get involved in a battle. Many games already do this by simply cross-fading from one track to another, but what an adaptive music track aims to make the transition seamless, as if it were a single piece of music, scored especially for the set of events that unfolded. There are only a small number of games that explore this approach currently, but in future we believe this will become the norm and players will come to rely on the cues in the music and sound FX to help them play the games.
AMN: When most people think of gaming, they think of graphics, they think of controls, they think of gameplay, and audio is usually on the back burner of gamers’ minds. Everyone knows it is there, obviously, but rarely is a game highly praised for its audio alone. What kind of things are you trying to do to make the gamer more aware and appreciative of the audio? Or do you feel that truly great audio will ultimately draw the gamer so deep into the game that they aren’t aware of it at all?
SA: It’s true that some audio is and should be like plumbing – if it’s doing its job you shouldn’t notice it and it should just make the overall game experience better. But as the game industry explores use of sound as part of the game-play, players will come to use sound to play the game just as they use the visuals. At dSonic we’re very interested in this sound-as-gameplay approach and are always looking for opportunities to try new things out.
AMN: What are some titles that we would be able to hear your audio in?
SA: Upcoming titles include work on Mage Knight: Apocalypse; some of our creature sounds can be heard in Elderscrolls IV: Oblivion; and we were involved in some of the work on Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Some titles that are out already include Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide, Zoo Tycoon II, and the record-breaking downloadable game, Luxor.
Simon Amarasingham , co-founder of dSonic
AMN: When it comes to audio, we’re speaking in the broad sense about the combination of sound effects, musical scores, and voiceovers. In your opinion, which of these elements has the most potential to truly heighten the experience of the gamer?
SA: I’d say the thing with the most potential to heighten the experience for the gamer is a 4th thing, the implementation of the audio. Great music, sound FX and voice acting are only as good as the way they are used in the game. For example, the best piece of music in the world is going to get annoying if you hear it looped repeatedly for too long, but if the piece can be implemented in the game in some other way – say by splitting it into sections, randomizing the sections and having silence every so often – the piece will work much better. It, of course, means that you have to write the piece differently in the first place, but it starts with having some implementation scheme in mind.
AMN: Which of these elements is your personal favorite to work on? Which is the most difficult?
SA: I personally enjoy writing music (especially orchestral stuff) the most, but in fact sound effects are more difficult. I think the reason for this is that with a piece of music, once you get going with a theme, that idea can sustain you for the length of a 2 or 3 minute piece. However with sound effects every few seconds of material requires another idea. If you have to create 20 sci-fi gun sounds the first few mightn’t be so bad, but coming up with the twentieth idea for the same type of sound gets really tough!
AMN: How much creative freedom do you typically have when working on a project for a publisher?
SA: I’m not sure that we’re ever deprived of creative freedom – we want to create the best experience for the gamer as possible and to do that we need to align our creativity with that of the game developer. The more we have worked with a team the less creative guidance and review they need to do as everyone’s on the same page, so in that sense we can expand our “freedom.â€
AMN: What sort of challenges do you have to overcome when a developer or publisher comes to you and says, “We have this title. Make it sound awesome.” Can you walk us through the thought processes of the audio specialists?
SA: We don’t always come in to a project at the same point, but from the beginning the whole process goes something like this…
We start with a general discussion of the scope of the game – for example the game might be divided into a number of levels, each level requiring some sounds for the environment, music, a number of cut scenes that need music and SFX, a number of creatures to battle, weapons sounds etc.
We then ask about the tools available or planned for playing back audio in the game. We may recommend third party software to use or we may make requests as to any features we’d like to add to their existing system.
Some time after that we get a build of the game and start work on the assets, usually based on a spreadsheet provided by the developer. Since the game is in development, we may not be able to immediately put the sounds into the game, so we work from descriptions in the spreadsheet and our own sense of what’s going to work. When we eventually are able to start putting audio into the game we may find we need to rework some of the assets, and/or add some more stuff. Of course everything we do gets passed to the game developer for comments and for them to give the ultimate thumbs up.
AMN: On average how much time is spent on a project?
SA: There’s quite a range. For a full AAA title probably about a year, including about 6 months of ramping up by working out the technical issues and getting the creative direction right, then about another 6 months of more intense production with a larger team (say 6-8 sound designers & composers). But we can also come into a project just to provide, say, a few extra tracks of music or the game itself might be a small downloadable game, so the time frame can be as little as a month.
AMN: Over the years, you must have amassed an entire library of sound effects from footsteps, to creaking door, to treasure chests opening… any personal favorites?
SA: The ones that I like are things that are recorded for an entirely different purpose than what the sound actually is. For example Kemal (my brother & dSonic co-founder), created an animal eating sound by manipulating a bunch of small rocks cupped in his hands – it sounded like the animal was really chewing something to pieces. Also sometimes the recording process can be fun itself – for example I once needed the sound of popcorn popping, but I found that popping corn in a pot with the lid on didn’t get the right kind of sound…so I took the lid off – it sounded much better and I discovered that popcorn can fly a long way when it it’s unrestrained.
Kemal Amarasingham, co-founder of dSonic.
AMN: How do you typically create the sound effects? Is it all computer generated these days, or do you still tap together coconuts for a horse gallop?
SA: We have a range of approaches and tools that we use, but the process mostly includes finding some good starting material in our library or recording something new; then processing that material in some way using, for example, the sound design system Kyma; from there we bring together the processed material in some multi-track software such as Cubase where we pull out the pieces of sound we want to use, layer sounds on top of each other, cross fade from one sound to another, add additional effects and so on; finally we mix down the sound and take it into a wave file editing system, such as Sound Forge, to make some final, tidy-up adjustments to the finished file.
AMN: What’s the strangest sound effect you’ve ever had to generate and how did you do it?
SA: Well one group of sounds that the process was quite unusual and I was particularly pleased with the result, was some growling creature sounds, where I used the Kyma system I mentioned before. Kyma has a thing called a REResonator in it, which splits a sound into 2 parts – an Exciter and a Resonator. You can then take the Exciter part of one sound and apply it to the Resonator of another….it doesn’t always generate usable results, but in this case I found that I could “Excite†Resonator sounds of a lawnmower with growls and vocalizations of various animals. It turns out that lawnmowers have a throaty kind of sound to them that is quite like that of a growly animal, so the result had the tone of the lawnmower with the modulation of the animals – a nice cross between mechanical and organic.
AMN: High definition gaming has been a big selling point for the 360 and likely will be for the PS3. Do you see a specific surround sound format becoming the “1080p of audio?” An audio output type that will become the standard?
SA: I guess Dolby and DTS have been on the scene for a while and it seems the balance of power between the two is reasonably steady. Most people probably think of those formats as an alternative to stereo sound – sound formatted to come out of 6 speakers instead of 2. However the real story with games is that the sound is not preset to come out of the speakers in a particular way, as for example music CDs or DVDs are. In a game the sounds are being balanced and placed in the environment in real time by the game software – this is the part that we’re involved with – setting up the music and sound to work with the game software in real time. The systems and methods for doing this are still being developed so there’s lots of room for creativity.
While we’re on this subject I’d like to give a plug for playing games with a surround sound system if you haven’t already – the world of a game grows from beyond the window of your TV or computer monitor to a space that surrounds you!
AMN: What is the best sounding game you have played this generation? And it can’t be one you worked on!
SA: First thing that pops to mind is Half Life 2 as it really puts you in the environment.
AMN: Now, for fun….if you could have a personal sound effect or theme song play every time you walked into your office, what would it be?
SA: There’s a piece by Penderecki called “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima†– it’s quite disturbing and he uses the orchestra with the approach of a sound designer…a random snippet of that would wake me up in the morning, I think.
