After hearing what my brother later described as a 'synthesizer' the wheels were set in motion for a never-ending adventure to push the sonic envelope. After seeing a demonstration on a prototype Emulator II at Cabrillo college in Santa Cruz, I found my true calling. Sampling and computer editing of audio was the way of the future and I wanted to be a part of it! Over time the Emulator turned into Emulators, PPG WaveTerms, and even a Series II Fairlight. Now I knew what I wanted to do, but how do you go about making a living at it?? Not too much work in Central California for audio editing! So, I loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly........
Here I am giving a talk at this years GDC conference in San Francisco entitled "Sound Design for Next Gen. Games"
Topics included SFX Recording, Foley, Creative Sampling Techniques, Extreme Pitch Shifting, Frequency & Amplitude Modulation, Futzing, IR Manipulation, Granular Synthesis, and Spectral Modification with KYMA.
Here is a screen grab of a 5.1 ambience that I made in the SCEA sound tool, SCREAM.
Top left is all of the sounds and their representative scripts that I have made to form the 5.1 ambience.
Lower left is a list of all of the actual sound files that I have loaded into memory for this 5.1 ambience.
Right side is the actual sound 'script' that was made for the Frogs layer (sound) that is one SFX layer in this ambience.
SCREAM reminds me of Digidesign Samplecell with BASIC logic scripting with a little MIDI controller data (0-127) thrown in.
The entire sound is a Jungle/Swamp ambience that plays a 4 channel bed of insects along with various scripted layers that randomly play in the 5.1 surround field.
Here's a screen grab of a Sound Definition that I made using the FMOD Designer application.
Basically there are three unique sound files that compose this sound definition.
Each time this event is triggered there will be a random selection of one of these three sound files.
Each sound has a random pitch variation of a half an octave (+/-) on playback as well.
Here's a shot of the FMOD Event Editor.
I've set up this sound to change in real time using the Distance parameter with a range from 1 to 500 feet.
Depending on your distance to this sound the volume, filter and reverb level values will change.
The further you get from the sound object the volume will attenuate, the filter will roll off the low end frequencies, and the reverb level will increase.
The closer you get to the sound it will get louder, have a lot of bass frequencies and have little reverb.
Real time parameter control (RTPC), yeah I can do that...
Here's a screen grab from the FMOD SandBox application.
In this shot there are two 3D sound emitters and one 2D sound emitter.
The 3D sound emitters are seen as the orbs that are visible in the 3D space.
The 2D sound emitter is not visually represented because it is playing from everywhere at the same time so there is no distance filter or volume based attenuation depending on where your position is relative to it.
However, the 3D emitters have been set up with both filter and volume attenuation so the closer you get to the object the louder and brighter the sounds will become.
Here's another Fmod SandBox screen which shows the same two emitters from above (with the distance filter and volume attenuation) along with two more 3D emitters.
However the difference between these two new 3D emitters is that they are directional in which you only hear the sound if you are aligned with it's source orientation displayed here by the blue cones.
If you are off axis from the sound source you will either not hear the sound or it will be very attenuated.
Fun stuff!
After hearing everyone and their grandmother talk about the UnReal Game Engine I decided to pick up a copy and dive in.
This is a screenshot of the second level that I have built so far and I really find it interesting and fun to work with.
Unreal Editor 3 reminds of making my own dungeons on sheets of graph paper back in my Dungeons & Dragons days, maybe that's why it's so second nature to me????
Here's a basic sound script using the Sound Cue Editor in UnReal Engine 3.
Basically two sounds are triggered one being a constant bed and another being one of five sounds that is randomly triggered over it with pitch and volume modulation.
This a a screen grab of one of the KYMA patches that I made for some dialog processing for a main character in God of War III. As you can see it looks very similar to the layout of the Unreal Sound Cue editor. However, as you can see in KYMA the signal flow or execution order runs from left to right where as in Unreal Sound Cue it runs from right to left. Both tools use an algorithmic or module based sound processing process.
Here are some Greek temples that I made in Maya to practice my skills with.
While Maya is not an audio tool, some video games are built around Maya created levels and being able to navigate through them is a skill that I know will come in handy one day.
Update 11-09-09:
Just returned home from a nuclear aircraft carrier to record sound effects.
I'm truly thankful for being given the opportunity to do this again (thanks everyone!!!!).
This was a good distraction from the main project that I've been working on which is cinematic audio post work for the SCEA game God of War III.
