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]

BLITZ DIGITAL STUDIOS

While many post houses concentrate on console games, the team at Blitz Digital Studios (www.blitzds.com) builds the animation and audio for Internet games in either Shockwave or Flash. Mark Cohn, executive producer at Blitz, is working on a number of games, including a new one based on the movie Sky Captain and a game for Nestle. The challenge for Cohn is making sure the audio sounds good during play. "For Sky Captain most likely I'll get music from the movie, so we'll loop that," he explains. "That game will be downloadable and we can be a little more free with what we do as far as file sizes and compression. The Nestle game is more of a straight online game, so we'll have to be smarter about how loops are cut up."

Almost more than that, Cohn faces the challenge of working on sounds that will be delivered on a widely divergent set of platforms. "If you're doing something for XBox, there's specific hardware and specs that you can follow; there's things that you can do with the hardware," he reports. "We have to make sure that everything is going to run on anybody's machine. There are still people using computers they bought a couple years ago. There are still 56K users with really slow computers that can still handle playing the game. There's also the balance between decoding an MP3, which is pretty CPU heavy, at the same time as graphics things that are pretty CPU heavy. We have to shuffle that around."

While writing music for games, Cohn turns to Logic on a Macintosh G5, which is relatively new for him. "I used to have Pro Tools, but I've gotten rid of it because it pretty much [got] in the way of writing music," he says. He's hoping that in the future he'll be able to use the compression scheme Oggvorbis for his Macromedia work. "There are issues with the loops while using MP3s with Shockwave and Flash because of the way the thing compresses," he explains. "Not being able to use it is a huge issue for me, because often programmers don't want to pull something externally. They don't want to do something tricky."

That said, there are a few compression tricks that he uses to get the job done. "I'm able to set compression rates for each sound individually," he says. "For sound design stuff, the way MP3s compress is the first thing it rolls off is high end, obviously. I keep that in mind and I'll use more high frequencies and make it a lot shorter, whereas an explosion, I can make it long if I want, but I just compress it like crazy. I just want to make sure the balance is still good."

JAMES HANNIGAN

Composer James Hannigan (www.jameshannigan.co.uk) is challenged every time he starts to work on a new videogame versus a film for one simple reason. "It's all very different, because the application of music isn't the same," he starts. "I mean, you can't plan exactly what you're going to do with the music. It's much easier in a film, because it's going to be locked to picture." How he moves beyond that is coming up with very general segments of music without a narrative. "It's quite inhibiting not working with picture. When you're working with picture you have to make sure the music will work with the picture. So, really, the challenge is working with the playback system and tailoring the music to work with that."