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Cross Platform Design

This instalment is going to delve into what differences and similarities exist when you make audio for the PC, or console, or handheld. Gamasutra has an interview article entited Planet of Sound: Talking Art, Noise, and Games with EA's Robi Kauker. I will be using this article as my base of research. 

Robi Kauker is the audio director for the EA Play Label at Electronic Arts and for almost ten years he's been helping create the multilayered soundscapes that make up the Sims world.

Robi Kauker has a wide variety of games he has worked on. He mentions that although they go across platforms there is a suprising amount of similarities between all the projects. The aspect of when this happens this sound is played and so on are exactly the same. The major difference he points out is the variety of sound and quality.

And in The Sims 3 world, it might be a two-second, three-second, four-second bird call or bird song to build the ambience. In the DS, it's a tenth of a second and I have to create the birdcall through programmatic, data-driven stuff, not just preset samples. In the certain way, the DS titles are probably going to have more interesting ambience -- at least for the geeky.

When developing a game for the DS your sound will never be heard in 5.1 surround sound. There are two miniture speakers that the player will hear the sound out of. Kauker mentioned that he had a DS game where he was alloted 512K for audio, including music. He said that the process of creating the sound for that game was exactly the same as any other. This shows that although there are drastic differences in the technology used, the basic principals remain the same. It is more important to understand the underlaying factors of audio design rather than to just simply know the equipment.

Althouth this video is about the sims on the whole, you can hear some of the sounds and music that he has created for the game.

Classical Music of the Future?

Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, all these words evoke the image of riding in an elevator and tuning the radio to that random easy listening AM station they always have. Tommy Tallarico, Martin O'Donnell, Taizo Takemoto, Video Games Live, and Mario could have very similar effects in 200 years.

I have always wondered what music would be played on the "oldies station" when I have kids. Then, after writing my first article and starting to think more about the music, I realized it is the exact same as 400 or so years ago. Although the names, notes, and purpose have changed, these songs have the possibility to be timeless classics. Listening to a top 100 list of the best video game music, I can imagine these songs being listened to in years to come and the composers to be thought of as geniuses of their time, even though society doesn't necessarily agree with that now.

Categorizing these new songs will most likely create a new genre of classical. This genre would have similar patterns in which each song was designed to be looped and played a countless number of times without the listener becoming bored of the same 4 minute clip of music. I was curious if anyone else had the same thoughts as me, as it turns out I am not alone in this. After googling I found an article Video Game Music: Tomorrow's Classical Music on About.com. They share the same views as me and propose that if orchestra's were to make room in their repertoire  for video game music that it would successfully draw larger and younger crowds to their shows.

Call it a case study if you will but the article mentions Nabuo Uematsu, the composer for the final fantasy series. The article states...

Perhaps the leader in video game music, Nobuo Uematsu, creator of the music of many Final Fantasy titles, played his first concert in the U.S. at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Final Fantasy concert sold out the very same day tickets went on sale. Because of the concerts overwhelming success, Uematsu arranged a second concert “Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy,” which played in select cities across the United States.

However, Uematsu is not the only one video game composer to play a concert. Shows such as Video Games Live, and Taizo Takemoto's Super Smash Bros. concert have all gone on to have great success and sold out shows. Gamers hear these songs so often while playing, hearing them out of context brings back memories of endless hours spent gaming.

The Job of the Audio Lead

Musician, Manager, Public Relations, Human Resources, and Technician are just a few of the responsibilities of the Audio Lead. Gamasutra has an article entitled The Three Rs of Audio Leadership. This is an a column that was published in Game Developer magazine and was written with the help of LucasArts' Jesse Harlin. The Three Rs that the article talks about are Resources, Representation, and Responsibility. 

Resources deals with the audio lead needing to interview and hire additional sound designers. These designers, depending on the scope of the project, could be on site employees or they could be an outside team contracted for the game. Resources also deals with the physical technology that is used in the studio. Hardware and software alike must fulfil the needs of the audio team. The lead must look and see what technology is already available in the studio, then determine if it is sufficient or if additional technology must be purchased. The lead also needs to do all the administrative work, from e-mail, to signing required documents and time cards, to providing a road map of what the audio team is doing. Lastly the lead is responsible for making sure the team gets properly paid for the hours they work.

Representation is the public relations aspect. The lead is responsible for representing the audio team at meeting, relaying messages to other departments, and being the visible face of the team. They are the person that anyone goes to if they have some inquiries about the audio progress.

Responsibility is the last, but certainly not any less important R. The lead is responsible for everything that comes out of the speakers. They are responsible for delegating tasks, making sure the team is on track, and making sure the employees have a positive attitude.

Being responsible for everything that comes out of the speakers means no longer simply safeguarding your own reputation, but being entrusted with the reputations of your audio staff, your development team, the game title, and your company.

Sound: The most important part?

You are Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, a SPARTAN-II super soldier fighting for the UNSC on an unknown ring structure. As you sit on the Pelican drop ship waiting to land on a nearby beach filled with Covenant Grunts, Elites, and Jackals eagerly awaiting your arrival to the battlefield. Sitting next to you is Private Riley, as you approach your drop off you can hear over the roar of the Pelican engine and Private Riley's squeals of terror the distinct sound of Covenant plasma weapons being fired in your direction whooshing past and slamming into the side of your heavily armored Pelican. As you get closer the pleasant music that is playing in the background has gotten progressively more energetic. When you land an explosion of sound ensues.

I would argue that the visuals of a game draw the user in, but the sound has a greater impact on how "real" the game feels and keeps the user playing. It was interesting to me that many of the scholarly databases provided by the Bentley library provide very little information at all about video games. It is very possible that video games do not interest many scholars, or perhaps scholars don't find video games to be research worthy. I did find what appears to be a great book titled Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design, which conveniently doesn't seem to exist at the library.

Marty O'Donnell is the man responsible for much of the audio that goes into the games developed by Bungie. In his interview for halo.bungie.org he talks about the importance of sound and how it can more deeply immerse the player.

"A dark room is spooky, but add a creaking floorboard and rats skittering in the walls and it becomes really creepy. Add a bit of low ambient music with the sound of faint whispers and you can't help but start looking over your shoulder. Life isn't silent but you are always gating the sounds around you. Games that have sounds that skip, drop out, or have periods of silence tend to loose my attention. That's one of the reasons we even have sound during loading screens."

I did however find some books in the library on video games that include some research on sound. Game Development Essentials: Game Project Managementdoes include a history of sound and discusses sound in games. All quotes and research, unless otherwise noted before, will be out of this book for the next few paragraphs. The book starts with the early era of sound in games. The use of "low-cost samplers, sequencers, and waveform editors" along side with "actors [who] lent their voices" allowed video games to talk to the audience using "quality sound via MIDI and 16-bit stereo on the consoles and PC." 

This video give you a look behind the scenes and a glimpse of what went into making the music for halo. As Marty mentioned in the interview, he would first look at the game and then he would start thinking about an appropriate song that would go along with and be a companion to the game play. He wanted the soundtrack to be a part of the narrative and for the player to feel as though they were creating their own soundtrack without knowing exactly what it was they did in order to trigger the change. This idea of having the music and sounds as an integrated part of the development rather than at the end is also known as "L.A.T.E." (Late Audio Sounds Terrible). The book suggests a sound design document (SDD) in order to successfully embed the music. The SDD is a document that is made before the game has even been started. It allows for the music developer to understand the underlying aspects that make up the game and to better adapt the music to properly effect the players emotion.

The main purpose of the audio director and sound designers is to "help define the mood and tone of the game" through sounds, samples, and music. Any object in the world can be used to create game sounds. People like Dee Baker can mimic natural sounds with their voices. Other things from kitchen utensils to rope can also be used in various fashions to make new sounds that are not found in nature.

Sound gives the game life. As Marty had mentioned earlier life has sound. There is never an absence of sound in life so there should never be an absence of sound in a game. "Sound effects can [also] help give direction" in a game. "The groan of a beast behind a locked door" can give subtle hints to a player who may otherwise not know where to go next. The simple addition of ambient noise, such as wind in an outdoor environment, or the sound of light bulbs to an indoor environment can make the gaming experience infinitely richer.

MC 300 Paper

These next series of posts will be my research paper for my class. The main focus of the research is to delve deeper into the audio of video games. I play a little guitar and piano very terribly, I cater for most of the big bands touring through Cleveland, and I have made some very horrific techno songs of my own. I am by no means a composer nor a scholar on the subject but it intrigues me and I want to know a bit more about it so I decided to do my research on that.

My IT 101 Class Roundup

The take home message that I recieved from my IT 101-X class was that there are many possiblities on the web, many uses and creations are still to be found/discovered. Also knowledge of the web, and use of it are essential tools for a sucessful modern buisness life. Google has many powers and if you google your name and things show up that you do not want people to see, you cannot delete this content.

I learned many things in this class, more than I could have expected. I learned much more about the web, some more programs, and learned that no matter how extensive your knowledge of the web is, you still don't know the half of it.

Learn about the CIS Major and Minor

CIS Presents:
Learn about the CIS Major and Minor

This CIS presents was the most fun, and most entertaining of all the presentations I attended. Not only did I get some free pizza and soda after the event, but I also enjoyed what some of the alumni had to say about the jobs. The event showed the diversity of the major and I am planning on signing up for the Minor. I am not sold on the Major but the Minor does seem like a good idea.

del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a program, that liek twitter, is something that I do not think about. In these past few weeks my life has had very little time to browse the web and find random websites. If I found the time to browse websites and stumble upon cool things, the last thing to come to my head was to de.icio.us it. The bookmarking tool has great potential for some other people who want viewers to only read certain websites, but just like twitter I feel as though this application has little use for me.