AA2 Game Sound week 7

My aesthetic analysis of this particular genre is the need for dramaticism in the soundscape. It is a game comprising elements of war and a soundtrack or effects on par with something like the film “The Sound of Music” simply will not cut it. I would imagine a soundtrack of deep droning sounds, percussive mechanical sounds, a quick marching feel to the tempo, something with a darker edge, etc. Some sort of music that draws on the emotion of war itself and represents conflict.
The sound effects need to bring a sense of reality to the game bringing the on screen images ‘alive’. To a certain degree, they must match our own physical reality to make a player connect to it. The vehicle and creature movements can be a bit imaginative in their sounds but the explosions themselves should remain modest in imaginative sound design to give the player something sonically recognisable.

Edward: (sound designer VO)

Doug: (composer):

Sanad: (sound designer FX):

Freddie: (sound engineer Effects and Mixing - Team Leader)




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Haines, Christian. 2008. “AA2 –Game Audio.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide.

AA2 Game Sound week 8

This is basically a penguin version of Super Mario Brothers. An adventure game of this type usually requires the creation of ‘cutesy’ type sounds and a ‘happy’ soundtrack. The assets consist of single sounds. There won’t be multiple versions of a jump sound for example in this type of genre. The assets list will consts of the usual sounds: jump, fall, explode, kick, squish, skid, lifeup, there are 20 in all. I will be using foley and sound editing software to create the sounds and placing them directly into the game overwriting the original sounds.

Haines, Christian. 2008. “AA2 –Game Audio. Asset Integration.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide.
“SuperTux” Bill Kendrick. Accessed 21st August 2008. <>

Again, this was rather straightforward this week. I did run into a small problem when I found having two separate buttons to operate the basic functions cumbersome. One button to open a destination place for a file/open a file for playback and then another to actually start the recording/playback was overcome by banging the two stages at once. This ended up opening up a save window each time the recording/playback was stopped so a select object was used so the second instance of pressing the keyboard shortcut of ‘r’ or ‘p’ when the user wanted to end recording/playback was only sent to the sfrecord~ or sfplay~ and bypassed the ‘open’ bang.
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MSP patch

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Haines, Christian. 2008. “CC2 – Creative Computing Semester 2.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide.
1990-2005 Cycling 74/IRCAM

Forum week 8

Get a haircut

After a good few weeks of interaction at Forum we reverted back to the old format of insomniac curing movie viewing. It is of my opinion that the ‘favourite things’ format needs reviewing. One could say you could take from this whatever you wanted and I would say yes. You could take absolutely nothing and yet you could take absolutely everything, and then some. Are we to be analysing the film? Meh. Everyone will no doubt do this in their blogs anyway. Are we to be analysing the presenter on their choosing of presented favourite thing? This could go pretty deep. Are we to be analysing students? This could go even deeper. Are we to be analysing the score? I wonder if anyone even blogs this. We are music students after all. Are we to be analysing anything at all? Are we to be awake? Or are we merely being entertained with a show and tell which brings me back to my review comment.

If something is being presented as their ‘favourite thing’ I would much like to hear about why it is their favourite thing. I am much more interested in hearing about what makes this particular thing appeal to the presenter than listening to a history lesson about this ‘thing’ or random tidbits and trivia. It would be much more entertaining to hear if this ‘favourite thing’ has inspired the presenter in some way directly or indirectly in their work or life. Most importantly, why is this a favourite thing of theirs? Was it life changing? How it influenced them. Did it change their career? Did it change musical choices, writing or listening? Simply stating that they like the sound of it, talking about some history and then pressing play and sitting back is a pretty easy way out if you ask me. Why could we not have focused on a few chapters only? We could have viewed those, perhaps one at a time, received a commentary on why this is significant and then possibly discussed them in more detail with the class.

Presenting something personal as a ‘favourite thing’ such as an own composition or artpiece is different as people, well most would anyway, already acknowledge the presenter as having a close connection to it and an audience would respect it as a favourite thing. A video, song, painting or whatever by some other composer/artist with no real personal connection other than perhaps sentiment does not pull the same automatic respect from an audience. Without an articulated explanation as to why the film Eraserhead is one of David’s favourite things, the mind is allowed to wonder as to the reasonings why, which in itself could be dangerous given the nature of the film.

Harris, David. 2008. “Forum.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 18th September

Forum week 7

Bombings and a bit of boob wobbling? All on September 11? Again? It really seems of little point to merely repeat here what was presented in Forum or voice an opinion on each presentation with a couple of sentences so I shall explore a slight ‘trend’ that appears to be happening lately. Maybe it is just my imagination, but it appears the boundaries of humour have been tested in recent weeks. I just hope we are not stepping too close to the edge with what is perceived as humour. I guess as long as we all laugh together it is funny, if people are offended or the class goes silent it is not.

Quoting good old Wikipedia (which may be humourous in itself), humour occurs when:
1. An alternative (or surprising) shift in perception or answer is given that still shows relevance and can explain a situation.
2. Sudden relief occurs from a tense situation. "Humourific" as formerly applied in comedy referred to the interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous, a relation also known as as bathos. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective.
3. Two ideas or things are juxtaposed that are very distant in meaning emotionally or conceptually, that is, having a significant incongruity.
4. We laugh at something that points out another's errors, lack of intelligence, or unfortunate circumstances; granting a sense of superiority.

Well there you have it. People can do with that as they see fit.

Anyway (and not intended to be related to the above paragraphs but it will appear to be so)…this appears to be evidence that Sanad should have perhaps played this composition in last weeks Forum instead of what he then improvised. This piece seems to have gotten a lot more emotional response. :)

Whittington, Steven. 2008. “Forum.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 11th September.

MSP shakes head in disbelief. LOL!!

After all these errors coming up, I guess in the end MSP gave up on me. Hilarious.

CC2 Week 6 Sampling 1

This seemed a lot more straightforward than previous weeks. This is more like routing and patching of real audio equipment so was more familiar to me in my mind. I am still a little lost as to the actual difference between groove~ and wave~. Judging by the reading, wave~ seems to be more usefull with waveshaping. I am probably wrong in this thinking. It would not be the first time. Happy smile.
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MSP
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Haines, Christian. 2008. “CC2 – Creative Computing Semester 2.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide.

1990-2005 Cycling 74/IRCAM

AA2 Game Sound week 6

Well I am now officially confused with all of this. I am well aware that an asset is merely a timeframe taken from one particular sound file but here we are looking at modifying a games audio files with about seven separate audio files representing one weapon all being referred to as assets as the example. It seems that the term ‘assets’ is a term used loosely and I shall take that onboard.
I have used three separate texture sounds of walking on various substances (wood, metal and swamp). I assume from the readings that these will all operate under the same global volume settings and will be triggered by the programming code as to what surface is being walked on and at what speed. This is about my understanding of this, and I know it is not very much. What a shame I am not a mathematical genius also. To be honest there are far too many letters and numbers floating about in our classes this semester for my peanut to take in. Give me lateral over logic anyday. So…when are we moving from programming and going back to sound and music again?
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MP3
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Haines, Christian. 2008. “AA2 –Game Audio. FMOD.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide.

FMOD, 2007, 2006, .

Forum Week 6

Today was the most fun and enjoyable forum I have been involved in to date. A lot of this had to do with the direct interaction between presenters and listeners and the relaxed nature of class discussion, although some may just call this clowning around. Instead of listing my opinions on each presenters choices I will now elaborate on my own choices and waffle on a bit more.
The third year students will probably recall my presentation last year on so called formulas in music and generating particular emotional responses with sound. Since psychoacoustics is already an area of interest to me I found this forum very enjoyable.
It is my understanding that the Indian emotions are to trigger a direct emotional response in the audience and not simply to project an aural cliché* of this emotion, therefore I made a conscious decision to not simply play musical sounds or manipulated sound effects. I wanted my audio choice to be a single subject with many possible interpretations based on timbre, pitch, frequency and generally on how it made me physically respond. I wanted the sound to be organic so as to relate to humans more. I considered various animal noises, and then realised what the creature was that spurs the most emotional response from other human beings on the planet. Babies.
Instead of repeating what I said at forum, I will move on at this point. It would appear that to get a ‘true’ emotional response from a sound and not a mere cliched memory of a sound, one would need to be in a Theta state. In other words, you would not need to think about it. It would just happen. You have suddenly gotten goosebumps while hearing something for example. Quite often during todays presentation we needed to do a lot of thinking or simply guess as to what emotion the sound was representing. This is sending us up into Beta states. So does that mean a piece of the puzzle of emotional response in sound lies somewhere around 5 to 8Hz? So emotion in sound is based on sub frequencies? Possibly, but I am only speculating. If there is a way to identify what makes us respond a particular way to certain sounds, could it be extracted and included in non cliched 'off the wall' music to create the same intended emotional response as the cliched music? One thing I forsee in a future such as this is that music would lose all melody and harmony. Would this be a good thing for music? Perhaps deep down we all like the cliches and familiarities in music and would not want it any other way.

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For anyone interested in the video files I used today, here they are in the order I played them in flash format.
bhayanaka (fear/terror)

krodha (anger/furious)

veera (courage/heroic)

bhibasta (disgust/loathing)

hasya (happiness/joy/comic)

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Whittington, Steven. 2008. “Forum.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 4th September.

* Edward Kelly had stated that we [the public] had grown used to Hollywood’s cliched use of the same chord progressions and sounds to express a particular emotion.

CC2 Week 5 Synthesis 2

I do not know why this does not work. I divided the modulator with the carrier as the formula stipulates. The ‘FM test’ works without the harmoniser as the sideband pics in the earlier blog demonstrates but I fail to see where the error lies now. Perhaps in future I should just copy the tutorials into my patches as other students are suggesting.
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Although this is now late, this patch is now working if anyone is interested. Apparently there was conflicting patchcords sending extra data to the same place.

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Patch
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Haines, Christian. 2008. “CC2 – Creative Computing Semester 2.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide.

1990-2005 Cycling 74/IRCAM

Forum Week 5

Negativland. Do they have a point?

What the!? Negativland is a group that rebels against corporate America and its social and political influences (or simply because they feel like being a pain to a particular celebrity on any given day) by taking videos, music or advertisements owned by these corporations and editing them to reflect Nativland’s own personal and/or political views instead? What the!? Who’s trying to brainwash who? Pfft. Honestly, if a satirical approach on copyright protected works is what they were simply trying to accomplish I think they missed the mark as artists such as Weird Al Yankovich has satirical pieces with just a tad more humour. And I do mean just a tad. I think Nativland has no point at all much like films such as Flying High but I guess I could find people ready to queue up and tell me all about the cinematic genius of films such as these. I am certainly not offended by them, I simply do not find them amusing. I guess I am hard to please.

And the use of the above pic is in no way meant to reflect these opinions back on the presenter. The forum was about Stephens favourite things, and each to their own. I just didn't want to waste the pic to be honest.

Whittington, Steven. 2008. “Forum.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 28th August.

AA2 Game Sound week 5 Audio Engine Overview

“Most new users simply want to add a set of wave files and start building things. However, this is not how the FMOD designer workflow is structured.”[1] This statement literally made me moan out loud. I really hate unintuitive programs. The tutorial is difficult to follow in places. The section “Using the Auto-pitch feature” stated to select the option ‘sound definition properties.’ Unfortunately this menu is actually named differently and again I wasted time looking through dropdown menus until I found the right one. The Simulating Distance tutorial was completely confusing. There did not seem to be an undo function which was also annoying. Maybe there was one but was simply unintuitive in its location. I got there in the end and played around with the sounds slightly to recreate an old plane dogfighter game. I did find the FMOD Flange always distorted the cross the fades so I reduced the overall levels. Once again it boils down to myself getting familiar with these technologies so they can simply be used as creative tools. I did find this a lot easier than learning MAX/MSP which still continues to cause stress.
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FMOD save file

MP3

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Haines, Christian. 2008. “AA2 –Game Audio. FMOD.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide.

[1] “Overview and Workflow Philosophy” Chapter 2: Getting Started. Creative 2007, FMOD DESIGNER:
USER MANUAL, page 19, Creative Labs, 2007, .

FMOD, 2007, 2006, .