Audio for games: composers are being asked to come up with movie-like scores while sound designers are providing 5.1 effects

Post, May, 2004 by David John Farinella

More and more these days, videogames are captivating both fervent and casual fans with a sly mixture of graphics and audio. As audio hardware is constantly upgraded--some now boasting 5.1 capability--sound designers and composers are being called on to deliver sounds on par with their peers in the feature film business. Many of the aural professionals we spoke to for this month's feature on videogame audio, in fact, view feature films as their main competition for the hearts and minds of gamers worldwide.

At the same time that demand for more dynamic titles is growing--reports suggest that console sales fell last year by 2.7 percent. That decline belies the $10 billion in sales companies such as Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft had last year. That decline could be chalked up to a number of factors, most obvious is that Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's XBox 2 won't be released, at the earliest, until late 2005. The good news, for those who were concerned about having to prepare audio for four different consoles that had divergent audio requirements anyway, was the fact that Sega left the market-place when their Dreamcast was discontinued.

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Whether these pros are working on sports, action or fantasy games, the challenges continue to grow in this market. This is what six facilities had to say when it came to working on audio for videogames.

BAY AREA SOUND DEPARTMENT

The audio team at the Bay Area Sound Department (www.basound.com), or BASD, has been busy providing sound design and music on a number of titles for LucasArts (Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic), Blizzard Entertainment (Starcraft: Ghost) and Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts). Music director/composer Clint Bajakian and audio director/sound designer Julian Kwasneski are former members of the LucasArts staff who opened their doors in 2002. Last year Bajakian scored the game Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb for LucasArts.

"The challenge in videogames is that you have to master all the different aspects of the production process," Bajakian reports, "and it calls upon really different fields. You have to be a competent audio engineer, but you also have to be an artist and a talented composer or sound designer and know how to create high quality music and sound." Additionally, he says, being a team player and having the technical background to understand hardware and memory constraints are crucial.

BASD has stocked its San Francisco area studio with all of the conventional audio post tools: a Digidesign Pro Tools Mix Cube system, a pair of Digidesign 888 I/O interfaces and a TASCAM TMD4000 digital desk. Bajakian recently moved over to Steinberg's Cubase SX on a PC. "The reason I moved to PC is because the technology, largely led by Steinberg, is so cutting edge," he says. The switch wasn't just one machine in a room; rather BASD added six machines that are linked via a gigabyte LAN. One PC is the Cubase host, one holds Bajakian's woodwinds, one holds brass, two machines hold strings and the final is a LAN-based GigaStudio from TASCAM. He uses the East West Quantum Leap Symphony Orchestra library.

Based on his experience, Bajakian has a number of tricks that he's found to work in this market. The first is the design and creation of music and sound effects, and making sure they all work together. "The other area that is critically important is how to interact with the people who are actually building the game, because you have to represent the interest of the audio quality while you are simultaneously designing and creating the audio," he explains. "You have to be an advocate and be proactive in working with the team to push through really cool things that may require some of their work to make it happen.

"The third trick is that you have to meet with them personally," he continues. "It's the only way to get truly involved in the project, to get excited about the project and to understand what they're really all doing and the pace of the production process."

SOUNDELUX DESIGN MUSIC GROUP

Sound designer Peter Zinda at Soundelux Design Music Group, which is part of Ascent Media (www.ascentmedia.com), was challenged by the variety of scenes in Atari's game Shadow Ops: Red Mercury for XBox. "It's a very dynamic environment," he says, "The game puts the player in a first-person shooter perspective and depending on the level it can be very busy with things going on. For example, in the beginning of the game you're dropped into a firefight that's going on in a Middle Eastern town where there are mortars exploding all around you, people are shooting at you and teammates calling to you. It's a very intense environment."

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Coming up with the sounds for the game was fun for Zinda, who borrowed some gunshot tracks from the movie Blackhawk Down, where he served as a sound recordist. "We were able to do some things that we've been wanting to do for a long time and the technology has finally developed to a point where we were able to do that," he says. "We did three versions of every gun because the sound of a gunshot changes depending on the environment it was fired in. So, we had an indoor, outdoor and urban version of every gun that is designed specifically for those environments. For example, the interior gun has a short interior sound and for a large space we used the reverb that's inside the XBox to provide a longer reverb. The outdoor guns echo off the surrounding hills and valleys and in the urban settings you can hear the gun shots slapping back off buildings."