notesdontmatter

Audio Arts – Week 10 - Game Audio Design (1) - Ambience

Creating ambience was an interesting task, not my forte really but the ideas were forthcoming nevertheless. My approach involved starting with vocal weirdness and building things up from there. There is a lot to be said for taking advantage of the dead room and decent microphones, but even more to be said of the Eventide harmoniser. It seems as if the Eventide was designed for this very purpose, and it excels when applied to sound enhancement and distortion of original reference sources.

I can make my voice go quite low anyway, but having the Eventide on hand to drop things a couple of semitones (not too many, as I suspect the GAE will do the same thing again) and retain good quality (a rare triumph in Pro-tools) while creating a rich and powerful sonic landscape out of just one vocal track makes things quite painless. The only trouble I faced was in the area of bouncing. I created many vocal narration samples to maximise the studio time I had and Pro-tools has a most annoying feature when bouncing with complex TDM plugins switched on. It likes to jerk and peak at the start of the sound file, so one must give it half a second of ‘run up’ to gain a clean bounce (where would we be without Cubase?). This equates to a long drawn out session comprising just of individual bouncing.

I have gone for two contrasting sonic backdrops, namely one that favours higher frequencies and whispers, and another that favours low rumbles and growling. Both turned out well, so hopefully they will integrate into the game environment seamlessly.

Click here to link to online folder containing MP3s and this week’s asset log upgrade.


Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Audio Arts – Week 10 – .“ Lecture presented at Tutorial room 408, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 9th October, 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 3:05 PM