Outrage Bandwagon

Stephen Tolito of Kotaku recently posted an article:  'The Year I Gained the Courage to Ignore Video Game Music'.

I couldn't let this pass without comment.  He's missed the point.  If he can play the game without music and feel as though the experience has been uncompromised, there's something wrong with the music, not that music is 'unnecessary' for the game.  It can't lose something it never had.  Music should be creating mood, warning of danger, reassuring the player of safety, building tension, rewarding them for good performance. And that’s not just for RPGs or survival horror or shooters – puzzlers, platformers and racing games should all be doing this.  If it's not doing these things, something has gone wrong.  How much of the high from finding a rare collectible or fighting a tough battle comes from the victory sting?  How much tension from a puzzle game, when the music changes as you get too close to the top of the screen?  How much energy in a racing game, when the music speeds up for the final lap?

The only games I can think of that are improved without music are those who use the absence of music for effect - much like how the starkness of the aural landscape throughout most of Ico further enhances the player's loneliness.  And if you're listening to podcasts in games like that, you're losing that, too.

An excellent response was written here on Cruise Elroy - he eloquently covers a number of other issues in regards to Totilo's article, and is worth reading.

As one last note, so as to avoid beating a drum everyone else has already had a fairly good whack at, I'm not too sure if I want video game opinions from somebody who is more interested in multi-tasking than immersing themselves in the full game experience.  It's rather like reading movie reviews from a reviewer who watched the movie on TV while talking on the phone and baking a cake.  He has things to do, sure - everyone does.  But if you're so worried about all the things you have to do and resort to listening to podcasts while gaming to maximise your time, is it still recreation?

Libraries VS Recordings - the Never-ending Sound Design Debate

After my last post, I was giving a bit more thought to library sounds versus original recordings.  Conventional wisdom in the sound design industry is 'if you have the time and facilities, always record your own first'.  It's a good adage, and proves true 90% of the time.  But it also feels like a bit of a beat up of library sounds sometimes.

For the most part, sounds are put into and sold in libraries because they are great recordings, and often also because they are recordings that would be difficult for a lot of designers to collect on their own (exotic animals, gunshots, fire, ice, large impacts, etc etc).  Yet collectively, sound designers tend to look down their noses at them.

I've used library sounds a lot - more than I probably should have, in fact, since time is nearly always an issue.  Even for basic foley I could easily record myself, the temptation to grab a sound from the library and modify it to fit the intended purposes is strong.  But considering hardly any sound designers plonk a sound into a multi-track without editing it first, why is it such a problem?

Perhaps the source of the issue is that sound designers as a block wind up drawing from the same libraries too often.  Series 6000 is an amazing sound collection - which is maybe why it's been so overused that now its sounds are stale. The same way X-Ray Dogs' snippets of music have been so terribly misused by so many TV stations, movie trailer editors, and advertisement agencies.  Beautiful music - but less so when the new Narnia movie is using the same track as a discount travel agent advertisement.

Libraries are expensive, and not always as useful as you think (Wild World of Animals comes to mind, where a good portion of recordings are only useable for ambience due to the constant presence of interfering wind, background birdlife, or insects).  I've been seeing a lot more specialised sound libraries pop up lately, though, which I think is a great step to curtailing this problem.  The increasing accessibility of the necessary software and hardware, not to mention the new ease of distribution thanks to the internet, is providing more choice in the sound library market.  This is going to be a great boon for the designers without the facilities or time to build their up their own stock of custom recordings.  

Recording your own sounds will always be a source of pride for sound designers, but we should be careful not to let it become a form of snobbery.

Finding Sounds In Humble Places

I have a terribly old fridge with a busted light that probably chews up more than its fair share of power, but its unexpected worth lies in the freezer.  Specifically, the lack of 'frost free' capabilities.

After six months without defrosting, I have a winter sound wonderland ready for recording in my kitchen.  Northern counterparts might scoff, but it's extremely difficult to get snow or ice sounds in Australia, even in the dead of winter.  It's simply not economically feasible to cart yourself and a recording rig up to a ski resort in the remote reaches of Victoria and New South Wales - or waiting until Winter to do it.

This is typically what sound libraries are for - the sounds you can't go record yourself.  And certainly sound libraries do a good job of covering a wide variety of snow types with footsteps, but we've all heard those sounds a hundred times, and even if you dress them up differently, in the end you're just skinning the same cat in a hundred different ways.  And while the standard footsteps and snow sports are covered fairly well, they can't cover everything.  Human footsteps, certainly - what about a fox?  Or a horse?  A Yeti?  Or the sound of a hand brushing away frost from a frozen metal nameplate?  And even if you can create these sounds by hodge-podging something that sounds right out of what you have, you'll often wind up turning that nice clean high-end crackle we associate with ice and frost into a mash of white noise.

This is where the freezer came in.  After a bit of experimentation with microphone placement, I discovered stabbing a butter knife into a centimetre of hard frost can sound just a convincing as a stock ice pick recording.  Maybe even better, in some cases.  In such a small space, you can't get particularly large scrapes and impacts, but I came away with some lovely high end ingredients to layer on top of those staid library ice sounds, and a good collection of smaller icy foley that work well on their own.

Moments of discovery like these, the sound equivalent of smoke and mirrors, are some of the most rewarding and satisfying for a sound designer.  It reminds me of back when I was a kid at Movie World, and seeing the foley artists running around a sound stage, occasionally using the most unexpected of surfaces to create the desired effect.

What's in a Title?

I've started work again, in the building next to the old one, with a team comprised largely of people I've worked with before, doing more or less the exact thing I was doing at the previous company.  Funny the way things work out sometimes.

My new contract listed my position as an 'audio engineer', instead of a 'sound designer' as I've always called myself.  While I was job hunting around various studios, I saw both titles turn up in almost equal measure.  Some of the 'audio engineer' listings were, of course, advertising for DSP engineers and sound programmers, but just as many seemed to cover sound design with no programming requirements whatsoever.

What then, is the difference between these two titles?  Is one purely concerned with asset creation, and the other purely concerned with implementation?  This makes the most sense, but in the games industry I'm not sure if any one role should exclude the other.  (And indeed, many companies only employ one soundie, so the separation of roles is impossible.) Will this splitting of syntax cause confusion in the industry in the future?

Or possibly I'm overthinking matters, and in terms of job listings 'sound' and 'designer' are both such common words that it makes looking through sub-par search engines onerous at times.