Audio is key to providing a completely immersive gaming experience. The chair pictured above was a popular stop in the Intel booth. It reacts with motion, vibration and subtle positional changes as the gamer drives around a racecourse. Notice the surround speakers built into the back near the gamer’s head.

Three music supervisors and the director of audio at Sony Computer Entertainment America put on a stellar panel titled MUSIC: Design, Production and Implementation. The presentation revolved around the three legs of a triangle, design being the most time-intensive. Using cues form God of War 2, Syphon, Socom CA and others as examples, they touched on topics from working with orchestra, educating composers, budget and planning, working within a team, gameplay and testing. It seems far-flung when i write the range, but they nailed a coherent and tutorial presentation. The most interesting part to me was examples of how they create submixes, essentially an A-track and a B-track of the same composition, and blend them as the game changes. Then they showed versions with multiple streams, multiple streams with priority-based playback and single-stream playback, where they introduced the concept of chunkification, a means of moving between chunks of music occupying high-medium-low in frequency and action. Great panel. Great-sounding music examples.

It was close to standing-room-only at Radical’s Rob Bridgett’s session on sound design and mixing for the Scarface game. The unique thing about the process here was, the team collaborated with Randy Thom and the audio group up at Skywalker to employ a traditional movie post production model. Placeholders were ultimately swapped out with high-quality sounds produced offline in a schedule that paralleled a typical film project: The plan was, a week of offline sound design, another week with Thom, and two months for integration-and they stuck to their timetable as best they could.

In a video interview, Thom explained the creative goal for Scarface sound design as simple: exaggerated reality, no sci-fi effects, just a heightened version of Tony Montana’s “real” world. As someone at the crossroads of film and game sound, Thom is confident that the gap is closing: “The biggest limitation in sound for games is technology: The sampling rates are half of what we’re used to, and that just means the sound quality is lower. Fortunately, technology is headed in that direction; in next-generation games I think the sound will be very similar to what you see in a movie.” We agree, and we can’t wait…

Check out our recent feature on sound for Scarface.

Dave Murrant of Sony Computer Entertainment America led a panel that brought some first-hand experience from the, let’s face it, still relatively new platform. Murrant was joined by Charles Deenen of EA, Marc Schaefgen of Midway, and Rex Baca and Monty Mudd of SCEA, and the consensus was that the platform, being new, has yet to reveal its true potential. That and the audio crews need a bit more time to take real advantage of the 48 k across the board and 7.1 Dolby True HD. It’s underused as a platform, perhaps, but the potential is there, all agreed.

There was talk of RAM allocation and larger budgets, data sets and throughput, compression schemes and occlusion. But tucked into all the tech was the very real acknowledgment that jobs are changing! The next-gen consoles, all agreed, have allowed the industry to begin creeping toward job specialization. Once, there were just one or two audio people on a title, and they did every job, from field recording to edit to implementation. Sometimes they were the programmer. Today, however, the demands and capabilities are so much greater that a variety of jobs can exist. And though implementation has always been a part of the authoring, today it is the job in most demand: the technical sound designer, for lack of a better phrase. Someone with great ears, solid tech, a creative mind and works well with others. Students, are you listening?

Nice job from first-party and third-party developers. I expect that next year this will be a lively panel with lots more examples.

This video is an amazing demonstration of how good the capture of human gestures and digital animation has become. In the upper right hand corner, you can see the original video and then the end result on screen synched in real time. Of course, good video begs for great audio to make the experience complete. Even though the audio is poor, you can see how powerful this could be in the framework of a game or film.

Day Two Podcast from the 2007 GDC with interviews from THX, Edge Acoustics, Audiokinetic, The Conservatory of Recording Arts and VMC GameLabs. Click here to listen.

photo caption: You can see all kinds of things at the GDC, even manly men in kilts

photo caption: Steve Clarke of Minnetonka Audio

Minnetonka Audio was showing some very cool new software at the show that will make a lot of people in Post, game development and engineering very happy. Batch Pro is a tool that allows the user to string together a group of plug-ins and processes (such as sample rate conversion), assign settings and tasks, then walk away and let the software do all the work. The end product can even be sent to a destination of your choice making it a breeze to organize your pre- and post-processed assets. Be sure to check out other Minnetonka news in our show Podcast.

photo caption: Rich Heimlich of Edge Acoustics



photo caption: Rich Heimlich of Edge Acoustics

The importance of quality audio output devices can’t be underestimated when you’ve got someone lurking in your MMO ready to cut your throat. No one knows that better than Rich Heimlich of Edge Acoustics, a division of Etymotic Research. As part of advance marketing for a new line of in-ear monitors for gamers, they enlisted 30 gamers worldwide to compare traditional over-ear monitors with Edge’s new product, and found that the combination of isolation and flat frequency response offered in their products made a large difference in the outcome of a gamer’s ability to score points and escape an early demise. The new buds will be out Q2.

Austin, TX based Gamecock Media Group was recently in the news announcing the formation of an Indie publisher for small game developers. One of their projects in development is a game titled Hail to the Chimp, an animal fighting game. The rooster pictured above was strutting about at the GDC picking fights with the other roosters in attendance. Be sure to stop by their website to hear some of the great audio that goes with their game Mushroom Men, and Instecticide.