AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 10

Ambience sound.
At the moment I am writing this, my game is not yet approved; and it does not have ambient sound! Thus, I will imagine an ambience with some relevance to the game.
Since the game goes on in a relatively "creepy" environment, I have come up with a background in this kind of a sequence:
- The main character is running to find someone in the dark night; a tiny alley. Location: eastern Los Angeles!and
- The main character is under heavy influence of drugs. His tourturers have put him in a chamber. He is totally tripping!This is my concept of a game like The Godfather (by Electronic Arts). I read about it last night actually! It sounds pretty cool.

DOWNLOAD THE 2-PART MP3.

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 10." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 15/10/2008.
- The Godfather, The Game. Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather:_The_Game) [Accessed 18/10/08]

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 9

SciFi & Horror films; the crystallisations of "All the things I hate".

The exercise was to take 4 sounds from the game which we plan to do for the project and modify them according to the principles of readings (a) and (b) mentioned in the footnotes.
I have not yet finished the proposal sheet, so the game is not really approved but as far as I am concerned, this is what I want to do and if nothing changes, yeah here we go..

In the game, some "father" hits others with a baseball bat. I changed one sound which I had downloaded from freesound.org and compressed and equalised it. The result is the first part of the final MP3.

This father dude will eventually kill some chicks; hence the screaming sound. Honestly I found the original sound in the game pretty low-quality. Yet again freesound.org, compression, fade-in and fade-out,.. etc; 2nd part of the MP3.

the "bad guys" of the game are sometimes dogs, and they growl. This was pretty tricky 'cause I had to shift the pitch and stretch the time; 3rd part of the MP3.
The 4th part probably took the longest time to finish. As you can see in the picture, I quadropled the initial sound (glass breaking, also from freesounds.org) and changed the pitch of the 3rd and 4th part, panned them, compressed them and basically did so much to the poor sample.

By the way, all were done in Audacity; challenges: zero.

Downloadables:
1: the ORIGINAL sounds in order.
2: the MODIFIED sounds in order.

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 9." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 08/10/2008.

Readings:
(a) : "Chapter 5 - Sound Design: Basic Tools and Techniques" and "Chapter 6 - Advanced
Tools and Techniques". Childs, G. W. 2006, Creating Music and Sound for Games, Thomson Course Technology.

(b) : Kelleghan, Fiona. 1996, Sound Effects in SF and Horror Films, 2006,
.

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 6

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 5

Designing sound for game; first practical step.

This week's story is about a software introduced to us by Christian. FMOD Designer is one of the first steps of ours towards manipulating the sounds and preparing them for a game. For the first part, we just tested few basic functions of the software and observed the outcome.

Most of what I did for this was basically to get acquainted with the way the software is programmed to organise stuff (i.e. sound files in various formats of WAV, MP3, AIFF, etc...)
Probably because of my zero familiarity with this field and my lack of previous experience in this, I had a bit of work to realise what was going on. In reality, it was not very complex; the interface gave me the impression of working with my files in Microsoft Windows explorer and organising them in that way. Nevertheless, -very much like Firefox indeed- the software follows the principle of window-in-window or tab-in-windows.
The only thing that I could not get to work was to make the software play the sounds I had defined for it to play; I had to play the result of the manipulation manually.

the MP3 is right in the box in the right side, or HERE..

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 4." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 26/08/2008.

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 2

Game Sound Analysis: Need for Speed; High Stakes (1999).

This racing game is based on the idea of running away from the police[1] listening to heavy metal music; hence the sounds of sirens, police helicopters, etc (which were new to the series of NFS games).

Much attention is paid to the detailed sounds and noises of the cars including their engine, their breaks, other parts of car bodies, etc.. Other cars also sound with respect to their position (left, right and in surround systems in front and back) in relation to the players(’) car(s). Most of the sounds can be categorised as hyper-real.

Another aspect of the sound in this game is its theme music; like many other themes in this time period (and beyond), there would be no pause in the music if the player paused the game; there are (even more than) two separated layers of sound going on at the same time. However, when the game completely changes the scene (eg. from “playing” to “choosing a car”) the music changes as well as all other effects, indicating the entrance to a new environment.

Not much narration in this game, except for policemen talking on their walkie-talkies.

(Video reference: seconds 6 to 51)

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[1] It’s much more pleasant to me than kill-kill-kill games highly regarded as the sources of development in the game industry.

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 2." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 05/08/2008.

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 1

Game music.
First things first; I have never been into gaming, I have never understood the concept of wasting time in front of computer ... anyway the point is that I am totally stupid in this field!

For the 1st week analysis of a game sound, I picked the game "The Pawn" by Magnetic Scrolls published in either 1985 or 1986!The Pawn is a text-adventure game (which I gave up playing in almost 5 minutes) and having known its age, has a relatively good environment and graphics. More importantly however, the significance of this game is it being a pioneer in the field of digitised computer game sounds. For the first time, the developers utilised Amiga's Paula sound chip, which was revolutionary at that time!
The introduction theme (which I never got to hear anyway, but I read that it actually exists!) is fully stereo, MIDI-sounding, multi layer and extremely relaxing tune by John Molloy. Since Paula has been used for this game, it is made using 4 DMA* -driven 8-bit PCM** sample sound channels.
I couldn't find any video of this game anywhere on the internet; my torrent client doesn't work either!

For your sonic experience, you can either check the box at the right side of this page or download the music from HERE.

* Direct Memory Access
** Pulse Code Modulation

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 1." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 29/07/2008.