unit 73 - sound

----Audio-----

We all had to add our own music and sounds to our games.
This in turn gave each of our games a unique sound and original sourced sound.

So I set off to the sound rooms to record audio for my game, I accomplished this by using a Zoom microphone, which each time that I recorded a sound it was split into a new audio file which I then sent to audacity and tweaked to fit my needs.
A similar process to what I did for my 'Zero Hour' zombie movie project:
http://kassianzerohour.blogspot.co.uk/
During the production of 'Zero Hour' the dialogue was recorded post production to ensure the cleanest cut of audio possible without any background interference, a similar method to what I did for my game sounds. 

A selection of the audio clips I gathered for this project using the zoom microphone.

Tristan and I recorded a variety of sounds for our projects ranging from pushing toy cars for a rattling sound to a metal screw falling onto the floor to emulate a coin sound, through the miracle process of foley effects I was able to get sounds that sounded like other things and make parts that already worked well into smaller segments so that I could work with.

For example; blowing into an empty bottle provided a nice ambient wind sound effect, this could have become part of a level to give it a more open and wild feel. That is the basic principal of Foley effects and a technique that is used as an industry standard among radio, film and interactive media.

In addition to the recorded sounds I had created I also had various music that I had made in garage band which I also added into my game.
as no game is complete without music i didn't want to leave this one unchecked, and the music creation process for garage band was simple enough to get some nice sounding tracks with ease.
Garage band has a repository of audio samples that I was able to put together to create music for my project ranging from drums, classical piano to more elaborate instruments such as japanese flutes.
and using the short pre-recorded clips (averaging at  a second to 2 seconds) I put it together to make fitting music for each of the games.

After recording I had a bountiful selection of different sounds that all had practical uses, however, I found that a lot of things I had recorded didn't have any place within the games, maybe I could keep them for a later project or maybe they were utterly pointless, I didn't know. but it was definitely good practice to have a wide selection of audio i could use and play with in hopes of getting stuff I could utilize.

Once i had finished recording the audio it came down to the process of trimming the RAW audio down into usable segments.

Starting with the full audio segment i select parts i don't need and cut them out, (this includes such things s describing the sound before recording it so i could name it post editing)

Once trimming was done I had to edit the clip.

Now, i'm net exactly an expert so most of what I did was very basic, changing pitch or tempo to give the audio a different feel.

 With the trimming and editing the original raw audio that was comprised of yawning during a conversation has now been altered into a blood curdling dinosaur roar.

the whole process i had done before on another scale when i did a short radio play with friends, having used audacity in the past did help to create these sound effects
https://soundcloud.com/kassiantyler/public-transport-man

once editing was finished I ended up with a few sound effects of about 1-3 seconds long

in fact i was able to get more use out of sounds that were not originally intended to be recorded thanks to editing effects of audacity.

With sound effects acquired i applied them to my games and was set to go from there.
Although the process of using original sounds does give the game it's own unique sounding appeal doing it myself is both time consuming and taxing, and another reason why game companies are often comprised of many people working with different aspects.
i do appreciate this method of gathering sounds but it's definitely not for everyone.

Essay:

Sound, well we all know what sound is to an extent, it's anything we hear, but there is more technical variations on sound. for example, sound is considered to be a wavelength, that travels through means of air pressure. causing vibrations in the air which our eardrums can recognise as sound.
and as a vibration it is a myth that an opera singer can sing at a pitch that would shatter glass, all though impossible it can be done with sound.

Now, to a recording device, sound is picked up in a wave format which is often visually represented like the below picture.
if you could hear said picture it would become louder as the intensity of the lines grows.
so if you were to listen to the first few seconds it would be louder than if you were to sample the last few seconds.

A more easy to show example would be a file of mine hosted on sound based website soundcloud/
https://soundcloud.com/kassiantyler/public-transport-man
as you can see, or hear, the volume increases or decreases at the spikes or drops in what i like to call "the audio mountains"


This graph shows amplitude over time. “Amplitude is directly related to the acoustic energy or intensity of a sound. Both amplitude and intensity are related to sound's power. All three of these characteristics have their own related standardised measurements… Amplitude is measured in the amount of force applied over an area. The most common unit of measurement of force applied to an area for acoustic study is the Newtons per square meter (N/m2).” - http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/acoustics/amplitude.htm - 05/03/14

so that leaves us with the all important question, what is the meaning of life?
OK, maybe not that question, more like, how is this relevant information with interactive media and games design?
quite simply because sound can express a lot of things visuals cannot.
say you wanted a game where a player walked down a spooky hallway to a scary skeleton that pops out and gives the player a right fright, sure it may make you jump a little bit if you did it without sound, but if you had footstep sounds or even a faint beating heartbeat you would increase the tension dramatically.

Sound can be used for so many things, in fact Hollywood have twisted our perception of sounds in some cases, something like a gunshot would be different when fired, much quieter in fact.
granted fortunately most of us don't hear gunshots frequently, but it's still a notable point where sound overcomes reality in film.

“Up to 40% of a film’s emotional impact is being caused by its music.” Tristan remains unsure where this quote is from, though i myself have heard it over the years.
but the idea that 40% is sound, it's very much a significant thing in film.
and as games have become a lot more cinematic and more advanced than a simple side scrolling platformer, it stands to reason that sound is definitely at that 40% point in video games too.

As sound editor Marvin M. Kerner says in The Art of the Sound Effects Editor, "the function of sound effects is three-fold:
To simulate reality.
To add or create something off scene that is not really there.
To help the director create a mood.
-
http://www.infoplease.com/cig/movies-flicks-film/sound-effects-functions.html


that's a lot of detail about sound in industry, time for some more nitty gritty stuff.
on the technical side of sound there are different types of audio, analogue audio and digital. Now what are they? “It all has to do with how you record a sound. An analog recording copies sound as a continuous electronic signal. A graph of an analog signal might look like this.”

now a days, advances in analog-to-digital conversion methods have vastly increased the quality of digital recordings. it's often stated that high sampling rates and increased precision remove any distinction between digital and analog. all though you can find a sizable faction arguing against this, some should be refereed to as "Audiophiles" people who want the highest quality in sound systems possible. they often tend to say that an analogue system would provide better sound than a digital system.

“Generally, the air pressure variations are first converted (by a transducer such as a microphone) into an electrical analog signal in which either the instantaneous voltage or current is directly proportional to the instantaneous air pressure (or is a function of the pressure). The variations of the electrical signal in turn are converted to variations in the recording medium by a recording machine such as a tape recorder or record cutter—the variable property of the medium is modulated by the signal.” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording - 05/03/14

Two prominent differences in functionality are the bandwidth and the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N); however, both digital and analog systems have inherent strengths and weaknesses. The bandwidth of an analog system is dependent by the physical capabilities of the analog circuits. The bit depth of the digitisation process first limits the S/N of a digital system, but the electronic implementation of the digital audio circuit introduces additional noise. In an analog system, other natural analog noise sources exist, such as flicker noise and imperfections in the recording medium.

A digital recording is produced by converting the physical properties of the original sound into a a sequence of binary (or something similar). This sequence can then be stored and then decoded and played.
mostly you're looking at digital sound being a wav, mp3 or any other digital file format, preferably if you're working with making a sound you want it to be in a file format that is the least compressing, so an mp3 would lower the audio quality, whereas a Flac file wouldn't as much.

in closing, audio is a strange world that is intertwined with almost all forms of media, aside from something like print, but that's a given.
but you will find audio in almost anything.