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

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"When you're watching on television, the number one thing they're wanting to hear is the announcing, so you're hearing a lot of talk but you're not hearing a lot of action. When people play the game they want to feel like they're making the game happen. When they take their linebacker and slam into a running back and put them on their back, they want it to feel like they did that. The challenge for us is to take it as far as we can without stepping on the announcers we have in the game, because John Madden and AI Michaels play a big part in the game."

Indeed, perfecting the Madden/Michaels interplay was a challenge for Hodges when he started to work on Madden 2003. "We had to go through all the audio and find a way to normalize so the volume was even and also treat the equalization of each file separately so that the files blended together better and you could hear Madden articulate these things when all the sound effects were firing off as opposed to a bunch of low-fi audio," he explains. "That was a big task, because there's somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 lines in the game."

To get the on-field sounds that pepper Madden, the EA team uses a Fostex PD-4M portable DAT machine with an Audio Technica AT835ST stereo shotgun microphone. "We record either directly to Pro Tools or directly to Sony Vegas with the Layla 24 audio card," Hodges reports. We use a list of plug-ins too long to mention, but included are Waves and TC Tools and Digidesign." There are also a fleet of proprietary audio tools developed by EA that offer power and flexibility in their sound design. "What I can say about the tools that we've developed internally is that most of them are developed in a way that the goal is to put more power into the hands of the sound designers," Young explains. "Things that in the older days of game development you needed a programmer to implement, we're trying to lay down the low-level code of that and put the power of how game events and parameters affect audio." The game was mixed either with Pro Tools or Vegas and the music was mixed in Logic Audio.

Starting with the introduction of CD-based games, both Young and Hodges have seen an upward trend in quality. "That was where you could start getting full resolution voice and music," Young explains. "Now, with XBox you've got your first system with digital surround and no hit to the processor in terms of system resources. You're going to see that from now on in other systems." In PlayStation 2, Hodges adds, there is an option for Pro Logic 2 that is growing in popularity.

Just setting up a digital multitrack recorder and a stereo shotgun mic isn't the key in getting good tracks for sound design, and Hodges offers this tip: "To get a discrete surround sound recording we use two microphones with one guy at the 27-yard line on one side of the field and the other guy at the 27-yard line on the opposite side of the field at a diagonal angle. The two recordists then roughly point the microphones at each other's directions, but up a little," he says. "Although they are shotgun mics, the dispersement gets so wide by the time you're going from one end of the stadium to the other it becomes a pretty wide pattern, and you do pick up a lot of neat details. So, when you're listening to the recording it almost sounds like you're standing on the field of play rather than being on the stands."