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Five Quick Sound Design Tips from Game Sound Design

In July I attended Develop: Brighton, the UK’s biggest conference for game developers, held in Brighton, England. One day of the conference is dedicated to audio in games, with lectures from audio directors and sound designers covering everything from how to get the best performance from voice actors, to sound effects creation and video game music tropes.

Every year I come away from the lectures with useful tidbits which I’ve found can easily apply to sound design in general. Here are five short and sweet takeaways from this year:

It’s not always about the noise

I know I often fall into the trap of feeling a soundscape has to have a ton of layers to be effective. Shannon Potter (Formosa Interactive), who worked on The Last of Us and Uncharted 4 talked about how sparse sounds can help to enhance a particular emotion, and it was a good reminder that sometimes the most effective sound design for a scene includes a lot of space and silence. In a particular cutscene that she played from The Last of Us, a low drone, the background whistling of winter wind and an intermittent sink drip were all that was needed to create an intense feeling of isolation, which supported the bleak nature of the scene.

To get the best out of voice actors, tell them how to feel, not what to say

Line reads (where you perform the line to the actor and ask them to mimic you) will never give you a truthful performance. Experienced game voice director and actor Stephane Cornicard discussed how helping an actor to understand character location (outside/inside, far away/up close) and intention in a scene (what does the character want?) will produce a far more connected performance than saying “just read it like this.”

Transitions are your friend

Effective audio transitions can help maintain immersion in any media and particularly in VR, where scene transitions between environments can be jarring for the player. Listening to Andrew Quinn’s (Rocksteady) lecture about how he and his team used audio to support the story Batman: Arkham VR, I was reminded how important a seamless transition could be even for non-visual experiences like audio drama. It’s so easy to throw a listener out of the experience with a clumsy transition, and a classic whoosh won’t always cut it.

Get creative with your sources

Philip Eriksson (EA Dice) talked about creating unique audio signatures for the signature power move (weapon attack sound) for characters in Star Wars: Battlefront 2. Baby alligator roars, slinky movements, and kittens all contributed in some way, which certainly demonstrated some out-of-the-box thinking. I was particularly interested in Eriksson’s description of how he used his own vocalisations to capture a rough idea of the pitch and sound envelope, as a starting point for many of the eventual designs.

Make your music meaningful

We know that music should be more than just a background element in any narrative audio medium, be it film/TV, audio drama, or games. Effective use of music can transform the experience for the viewer or player, just as ineffective usage can destroy it. What I hadn’t considered is how the active integration of music within games can lead to a more meaningful experience. Watching composer Oliver Derivative’s examples of how musical elements were placed within the game environment for Get Even, I could clearly see and hear how the tight integration between the music and the gameplay (door knocks and gunshots timed with music, for example) really helped to draw you into the game as a player.

I’ve seen great examples of similar cohesion of music and sound design in film and TV, and it made me consider how the same approach could be applied to audio drama. Sound designers and composers often work quite separately on an audio drama – both liaising with the director about the design and music, but only with each other at the mixing stage. Are audio dramas better served by sound designers and composers working more collaboratively from the start? I’m sure there are several that work in this way already, not to mention the sound designer/composers that perform both roles. It would be an interesting exercise to compare the different styles of working to hear the differences.

I’m a big fan of learning from other disciplines and my day at Develop always inspires me to try new things in my own sound design projects. If you get the chance, go out and listen to experts in a different field speak about their projects. If nothing else, it could make you hear things in a different way – and that’s always worthwhile.

The Role of an Associate Theatre Sound Designer

I’m at the beginning of my third week of a six-week contract as Sound Associate, otherwise known as an Associate Sound Designer, for a one-woman play with a complex score and sound design. Associate creative roles are quite common in UK theatre, but as I’ve had a few sound people in the past ask me what the role entails, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to write about what you can expect if you take a job as a Sound Associate.

The basic role of a Sound Associate is to support the Sound Designer in realising the sound design for a show, when the Sound Designer has conflicting commitments or the volume of work required is too large for one person. A Sound Associate is more than an assistant. As well as often being a professional Sound Designer themselves, they have to be prepared to not only take on any sound design responsibilities that the Sound Designer can’t cover. These include standing in for the Sound Designer for when they can’t physically be at rehearsals, tech rehearsals, or a new venue.

I’ve hired Sound Associates in the past, because of this latter scenario: when a show I designed transferred to a different venue and I wasn’t available for the required dates. In these cases, I’ve entrusted my existing sound design to an associate, who then took on the responsibility of putting the show into the new venue. Their responsibilities included setting levels, making sure everything played out at the right time from the right speaker, and applying changes to cues requested by the director

Of course, all changes were fed back to me, because it was still my sound design. As it was the second run of an already successful production, I wanted my design altered as little as possible. I was aware that this didn’t allow my Associate to have much creative input, but then, the role of an Associate isn’t necessarily a creative one. A Sound Designer may ask you to source or create particular sound effects, and some sound designers may rely on an associate for a lot of creative input. However, it’s important to remember that the overall shape and realisation of the Sound design will always be the responsibility of the Sound Designer.

So why work as a Sound Associate? For one, if you’re at the start of your career, it’s an effective way to gain Sound Design experience or to work on a particular type of show. It’s also an opportunity to learn from more experienced Designers, and it’s a useful way to build relationships with production companies, directors, and creatives. For me, I wanted the opportunity to work on a unique production and immerse myself in a more practical, collaborative way of working with sound, which I hadn’t done for a while.

The responsibilities of a Sound Associate will differ from show to show, depending on what the Sound Designer needs. At a basic level, you should be prepared to do any of the following:

I think it’s this last point that separates a Sound Assistant from a Sound Associate. An excellent Sound Associate will protect the original design has much as possible and incorporate any changes without compromising the Designer’s overall aims. Whether an Associate is responsible for part of a show or from taking the show from rehearsals to the first preview, the Sound Designer has to trust that the show is in safe hands.

Speak Up and Record It!

Voice Recording and Spatial Audio as Tools for Empowerment

I am a Brazilian SoundGirl from Rio de Janeiro that moved to Berlin, Germany, in 2013 to study and work. During my first year in this new city, I started to feel alone and disconnected, like I was watching life passing by through a window: I was there, but I was outside. I would like to share here some of my experiences with you, and explain how I used audio as a tool for empowerment while dealing with my own feelings of alienation. I believe that many of us have gone or are going, through similar experiences. I hope I can bring a bit of encouragement, as well as proposing another point of view on using our knowledge as a weapon to overcome challenges.

In facing my feelings of disconnection, I found comfort in technology. I started to exchange voice messages with a close friend that was also living abroad. Speaking on the cellphone in my mother-tongue, while wandering through the streets of Berlin, helped me feel I was no longer an outsider. I was somehow functioning in that society. The streets were mine, as I walked through them. I was re-appropriating that place and contributing to its soundscape, by bringing my private discourse into the public space.

During this process, I noticed that I enjoyed playing back my recordings. I could listen to what I just said from a new perspective, and this was helping me reorganise my thoughts. I started to experiment with that, but without sending my recorded messages to anyone. In other words, I decided to talk to myself through the phone, and listen back to what I just said. This turned out to function as a fun (and reflective) practice, that I had developed spontaneously to deal with my issues of feeling disconnected.

This whole experience led me to develop a method for artistic research in the Masters in Sound Studies, at the University of the Arts (Universität der Künste) in Berlin. Through this method, I researched my own sense of self, while feeling “I don’t belong” – either to a place, to a group of people, or to both at the same time. This work culminated with the creation of an immersive installation, which I called ‘This Alienness and Me’.

I would like to talk a bit about this process, both technically and conceptually. The research project was initiated in December 2015 and lasted until February 2017. The installation was exhibited on 7th February 2017 at the Wave Field Synthesis Studio, at the UDK.

Installation: ‘This Alienness and Me’

In the installation, I used spatial audio to juxtapose my personal voice recordings, made with a cellphone. The process of composing the sound for my installation was executed by using object-oriented audio. Through a Wave Field Synthesis system (WFS), I was able to position sound objects and organise them spatially, around different parts of the studio. According to Brandenburg, Brix & Sporer (2009):

“Wave Field Synthesis is a method to recreate an accurate replication of a sound field using the theory of waves and of the generation of wave fronts…WFS controlled loudspeaker arrays reproduce wave fields that originate from any combination of (virtual) sound sources like an acoustic hologram. When driven properly, the system recreates wave fronts approaching perfect temporal, spectral and spatial properties throughout the listening room.” (p.1)

WFS Studio at the UDK

I will explain later how and why I used low-quality recordings in a high-end technology system, as well as talk about my experience with composition and mixing in the WFS. At the same time, I would also like to open a dialogue concerning the sense of self and female discourses. I believe, that through the use of our knowledge, we are able to shift perspectives on how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others.

Inspiration

The main problem I have faced in the few last years is to realise that the way I perceived myself – and what I understood as my identity – was different and disconnected from the ‘images’ of myself that I perceived through the eyes of others. I felt for example, that my personal history was not important (or almost worthless) to the new people I met. Conversely, the categories I would be put in as a first impression – woman, foreign, chubby – seemed to be overestimated. Another example concerns my auditory reality. My efforts to communicate were aggravating those feelings. I heard myself talking imperfectly in two different languages, neither my mother tongue: English and German. The situation was complex because it was surrounded by different issues related to self, identity, perceiving others, listening, talking, language, speech, communication, different kinds and degrees of relationships, and new and strange environments.

I had started to find some comfort in speaking on the cellphone – in my mother tongue – while wandering through the streets of Berlin. I felt empowered as if I had a secret weapon to deal with my problems. In 2014 I suggested to a friend, Fernanda Sa Dias, that we exchange mobile voice messages as an act of mutual comfort and ‘free self-analysis’. Fernanda is also from Brazil and was living in Bremen. We would record ourselves talking about our lives, experiences, insights, feelings, and send these recordings to each other. Further, we listened to each other, not specifically giving advice, but commented freely and gave emotional support if necessary; and we listened to our own voice messages. This was an agreement that we made as friends, to see if this could help us emotionally.

The writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1980), in her essay ‘Speaking in tongues: a letter to third world women writers’, writes “our speech, too, is inaudible. We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane” and calls on third-world women writers to speak up: “Because white eyes do not want to know us, they do not bother to learn our language, the language which reflects us, our culture, our spirit” (p.165). For Lydia French (2014), professor of English and director of Mexican-American/Latino Studies at Houston Community College-Central, Anzaldúa brings attention to “social invisibility and inaudibility for [those women]” (p.3). For her, Anzaldúa is emphasising “how some in positions of power implicitly ‘close their ears’ to the voices of women of colour, voices frequently cast as unmeaning noise” (p.3).

Additionally, while analysing Bose’s noise-canceling headphones, Mack Hagood (2011), a researcher in digital media, sound technologies and popular music, discusses how mobile technology can act in favour of objectifying the sound of women’s voices into noise. According to Hagood, “voices – particularly women’s and children’s voices – are referenced in reviews [of Bose’s noise-canceling headphones] almost as often as the sound of the jet engine [of the airplane]” (p.584). For the noise-canceling headphone buyer, there is no difference between the noise sources: all of them are unwanted and unpleasant noise. Hagood takes into account both Bose’s commercials and the users’ reviews on the product. According to him, in male-written newspaper pieces, women’s voices are perceived as “emotional, distracting, and annoying – generally too young, feminine, and irrational to silence themselves” (p.584).

Inspired by my experience with mobile voice messages, I decided to explore this ‘talking out loud to myself on the phone while feeling alienated’ as part of my research. At the same time, I aimed to reconceptualize the sound of my voice into the soundscape of an immersive environment, which would function as a medium for communicating the results of my research to others.

Recording, Composing & Mixing

During the time of my research, I produced a total of 24 recordings with my cellphone. In all of them I’m describing my feelings of alienation in different conditions: different places, different times of the day, either moving through the city, sitting somewhere or laying down on my bed. Later, I used those recordings in my immersive environment, by further mixing them using the WFS.

Through the Wave Field Synthesis System, I was able to position sound objects and organise them spatially around different parts of the studio. To begin with, twelve different recordings were being played. The use of object-oriented audio allowed me to find a space in the room for each sound source. I mixed the audio by spreading the sound sources around the space, and focusing both on the  macro and micro level simultaneously. It means that I should be able to produce an ‘acceptable cacophony’, where sound objects superpose each other, but have also their own space inside the room. Sounds happening in the micro environments should be more or less independent from each other, by telling different stories in different places of the room, at different moments. At the same time, the macro environment should still be reasonably perceived as a whole system.

During the compositional process I was able to hear myself speaking about my feelings of alienation and play with volume automation. I increased the volume in the moments where I felt I was saying something important and decreased the volume of the recordings where I was saying something not so relevant. This helped me guide the listener into the ‘acceptable cacophony’ mentioned above. Although the listener, most of the time, had the feeling they could choose what they heard inside the installation, those choices were limited through my mix. I guided the listener through my intimate thoughts, by choosing carefully what moments I would  like to raise more awareness of.

Next, I included some voice recordings I made while reading written descriptions of my feelings. These were also recorded with a cellphone but, instead of walking through the streets, I was on my bed, in my room. Spatially, the sound of those recordings weren’t fixed in the studio room, as I worked circularly with the localization of these sound objects. I felt that the circular movement was providing a clearer way of continuing to ‘tell the story, without drawing the visitor’s attention to the technology and equipment.

Installation: ‘This Alienness and Me’

The composition needed to be so that the visitor could choose what and how they wanted to listen. They could also choose to listen to the environment by focusing more on sound quality, colours and movement, and less on spoken words. The idea was that the visitor should be free to make those choices. The audio was played in a loop and the visitor could move inside and outside the room at any time.

“If it is only through the other that we know who we are, then interacting with others is always a presentation and renegotiation of the self…” (Hagood, 2011, p.578)

Conceptually, and following Hagood, the idea was that the visitor would need to reassess themselves over and over, either by interacting with the installation – and, in consequence,  being confronted with my voice and my words – or with other visitors inside the installation. Every time they made a decision to move inside the room, stay, leave, or even of changing their awareness from some mode of listening to another, they were responsible for how and to what they listened, as well as for which images of themselves emerged while inside the installation.

Additionally, a dialog between private and public was taking place. On a macro level, the cacophony produced through the superposition of my recordings was inspired by the cacophony present in urban spaces. Depending on the visitors’ interactions (either through movement or shifting auditory awareness), this was slowly intercalated with the private: the intimacy of my personal recordings happening in the microenvironments. Temporally, the composition also slowly changes from the macro-level to the micro, more interiorised level, when the recordings made in the streets stop, and the audio I recorded on my bed start to play. Visually, I decided to include some personal objects in the room: carpets, lights, a cushion. The contrast between my personal objects and the studio room was also contributing to this dialog, by bringing my private world into the university’s studio.

In the installation, the lights are spread out around the carpets and one chair is positioned in the middle of the room, while seven other chairs are positioned in the circle peripherally, facing the chair in the middle. On the chair, the visitors found glasses with a tag that said “Try Me”. Each chair brought the visitor to a particular perspective and a new approach to the environment. The glasses had mirrors that pointed to the floor. If the visitor chose to sit on the chair and put on the glasses, they could see themself seated, while the lights made interesting reflections back to their eyes. If they decided to walk around and/or sit on one the peripheral chairs, then according to their own perception, awareness and movement inside the room, they were able to interact with the space in different ways.

Binaural version of the audio – Listen with headphones and close your eyes for a deeper immersive effect:

Video documentation of the installation:

Final Thoughts

Anzaldúa (1980), facing an imposed silence, calls women to speak up. She speaks up through writing. She is compelled to write, “[b]ecause the writing saves [her] from this complacency [she] fear[s]. Because [she] ha[s] no choice. Because [she] must keep the spirit of [her] revolt and [her]self alive” (pp.168-169).

Facing my feeling of alienation, I also decided to speak up. I spoke, recorded, and turned each narration into a sound object inside the studio room. I layered, organised spatially, and played back all tracks containing my voice. My secret weapon to deal with my issues of disconnection was being upgraded to a new level.

I talked about my feelings on the cellphone while wandering through the streets of Berlin, or while in the comfort of my room. I brought my low-quality intimate recordings to the public through the use of hi-end technology. The mixing possibilities provided by the WFS enabled me to create a sound piece in which my cellphone recordings were reconceptualized into high-quality audio processing. Through this work, I could resignify the noises of my alienation into speech, by juxtaposing discourses and reshaping them into the soundscape of my created environment.

In the end, it was not only about myself. I hope to encourage Sound Girls into using their knowledge to feel empowered and motivated to speak up, reclaim acoustic space and reconceptualize their own notions of self.

References:

Anzaldúa, G., 1980. Speaking in tongues: a letter to third world women writers, in: Moraga, C., Anzaldúa, G. (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Persephone Press, Watertown, MA, pp. 165–175.

Brandenburg, K., Brix, S., Sporer, T., 2004. Wave Field Synthesis: From research to applications. Presented at the 12th European Signal Processing Conference, IEEE, Ilmenau, Germany.

French, L., 2014. Chican@ Literature of Differential Listening. Interference. [WWW Document], URL http://www.interferencejournal.com/articles/sound-methods/chican-literature-of-differential-listening (accessed 4.1.17)

Hagood, M., 2011. Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal Space. American Quarterly 63, pp. 573–589.

I’ll be developing and presenting these ideas further at the Symposium Sonic Cyberfeminisms in May 2017, in Lincoln, UK.

Mariana Bahia is a sound artist and researcher in digital media and audio technology. She is particularly interested in understanding the sense of self through sound recording and audio reproduction. She likes to explore the intersection between hi-end and low-quality technology, from cellphone recordings to spatial audio. Her work is based on composing sound pieces and installations using superposed voice and self-designed instruments. Mariana is a research assistant in immersive audio in the TiME Lab at the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut and is finishing her Masters in Sound Studies at the University of the Arts (UDK), Berlin. www.marianabahia.com  www.sifonics.com

The Encounter: A Sound Design Review

 

Part 1: The system and the show

A man is whispering into my left ear. I turn my head to face him but the guy on my left smiles and shakes his head. It’s not him: my first experience of live binaural sound has confused my ears. On stage, sound designer Pete Malkin is talking into the left ear microphone of a binaural head and consequently, into the left ear of my headphones and the headphones of other members of the Association of Sound Designers. I’m at the Barbican Theatre in London to learn about the concepts and execution behind the sound design for Complicite’s The Encounter. (more…)

What you’ve always wanted to know about being a Theatre Sound Designer

 … but didn’t know one to ask.

Recently, I was invited to teach a seminar on sound design to the Stage Management and Technical Theatre students at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA) in London. During the Q&A, I realised the questions they were asking are ones I’ve been answering for most of my career, and not only from students. Directors, producers, other designers, and colleagues in other sound disciplines all have one question in common: what does a Theatre Sound Designer do? (more…)

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