My creations

Made by Thomas Maliszewski

Sound for Computer Games

Unit 73 

In this website, you are going to learn nearly everything about sound just by scrolling down and reading.

Overview

16+

3D sound is very useful for first person games as if you want to know which direction someone is coming you have to hear either left or right side of your ears. 3D sound makes the video more interactive in the way its watched by audience, most likely 3D sound could be used in horror movies because you as the director want to make the audience being scared and can hear sound all around the audience 360 degree. 


To enable 3D sound all you need is pretty good 5.1 surround headphones that makes the 3D sound, sound the right way!

















''Somnium is the first horror film that was shot in POV binaural. Binaural is a technique which recreates the human audition at 360°.'' This means that the film was recorded using more than one voice recorder that was placed around the actor to achieve the best possible 3D audio. Pretty hard to produce it, but it's worth to have the professional

3D / Surround sound 

While watching this gameplay, some time I didn't had to watch someone play it I just could imagine the image in my head what happens. Thats the positive benefit for the industry that has achieved it makes the game more interesting and not boring. ''Perfect ambience for perfect game''.

Ambient sound in horror video games are the most important thing to consider when making the product. The ambient sound is always used in games because the developers wanted the game to be interesting and making the game interesting, here the example would obviously be Silent Hills PS4, where you can hear ambient sound being usde nearly everywhere : light, doors, rain, walking steps, radio dialogue.

While sound is important part of amusements in video games, mostlikely to influence it to appear to be more sensible, music is in recreations for rather the inverse, rather than it placing you into the character's shoes it discloses to you what's going in on the diversion. For instance in case you're playing an activity rpg amusement and a rush of adversaries show up the diversion will put on it's battle music to tell the player that they're under assault. This utilization of music at that point rapidly enables the player to respond to this action and counter their assault. In recreations that have barely any storyline or are attempting to be reasonable possibilities are that they won't have music associated with it. 

















Super Hexagon truly uses the music well as it's addictive and motivate you to play. Not simply music can help set the scene but rather sound can as well, everything you can hear you can use with your sight (rhythm)

•Atmosphere  •Ambience •Music •Sound 

Game music/ audio environemnt

When playing an video game the music and sound inside it can change your mood and feelings. 

•copyright  •licenses  •royalties  •Intelectual Property

Copyright is very important to consider when artist is using already made making the audio for either yourself or company as it's the most valuable that the work you doing is clear and neat and legal to use in big projects such as AAA games as after your fault of not giving the credits will end up in court paying most of the game industry gathered money to someonelse. This also relates to the intelectual property, for example you have to give credits or sometimes you are even not allowed to use rhythm someone have created.

Legal & Ethical issues

Sad music will obsiously make our emotion go down because the brain gets the impulse of sadness. Sad music mood is used in games where the developer wanted the player to feel sorry for someone while they fighting in game.

Example of sad music in video games would be the guitar song from Last of Us 2 as the artist have used low strings in the guitar togeter with a voice of a girl who is trying to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Example of aggressive music would obviously be DOOM as their music tone is fast and uses instruments such as electric guitar + drums to make it sound like metal band. This music makes the player be inspired to shoot the enemies

Music together with sound is the most powerful form of art which is including emotional states in it that makes us either :

 •sad •fun •inspiring •aggressive or •scared 


Emotion & Mood

This video represents all sound of the ''Grunt'' enemy which are pretty much horrifying to listen.



Psychology of sound and music

Adaptive sound is used most likely in video games when the action is rising upwards to tell that danger is close.


For example in Amnesia when the paranormal thing is near the player. This is used to make the player notice that something is going on that will end up pretty bad if going close to this sound/noise and player end up dead. [Jumpscare] most popular known way to scare the gamer in horror games.




•mood •emotion •adaptive sound •

Basically how decibels work is if sound is very loud in front of your ears such as Jet engine, it will damage your ear drums because how loud it's actually is. 

Animated Speaker Diagram 

You're probably wondering why there's positive and negative + - coil wire. It gives the power to the speaker which after make vibrations by pushing the voice coil together with 'spider' that makes it move. Without + - electric the speaker won't work, all because of the movement the electricity gives to all parts. That's why the 10,000 watt speaker in cars are popular for people who love bass, it makes the bass vibration unbelievably loud that if someone has long hair, it will raise up.




Waveform can be represented in different ways. It can be high pitch for example squicky toy which the gain input is bigger and for low pitch it could be a truck horn which has lower amount of waves like its shown in wave generator, the bigger the wave, the more you can hear.


Waveform for my understanding is the invisible energy which produces vibration then it goes to our ears and brain that quickly translate it to the sound.


If you increase the frequency (Hz) more waves p/s per second will appear on the diagram, which ends up in more noisy sound.


Decibel is represented in noise way . . . if someone is whispering to you, its about 15 dB, normal conversation is about 60 dB. More loud something is, the more dB is has.


My experience for decibel level is when I always listen to music I am increasing the dB because it adds more bass to the song.


All over the internet we can find an audio software which you can experiment with, changing pitch, decibels, convert to another Hertz note. The software is called Audacity, free to use which has huge list of effects which makes the sound different. 


Wave generator

Theory of sound
• Waveform (wavelength, amplitude, frequency), • decibel levels, • sound generators (speakers). 

The Art Of Noise

The Tech of Noise

Bunch of ideas for sound


 No

   Name:

How the audio will sound:

Production notes:

Purpose:

Duration

 1.

1. Opening doors

1. Squeaky old fashioned doors

1. Rope + Wood

Or

Throat voice saying O, slow it down, then change pitch



1. When the player will collide with the doors, the doors will push the character inside making squeaky sound.

+/- 3 sec

 2.

2. Voiceover/Dialogue

 2. Jigsaw

2.Use pitch modifier in Audacity to make it right + distortion

2. Dialogue when the project is loading saying what you have to do.



+/- 10sec

 3.

Jumpscare

3. Loud scary sound

3.Loud scream/noise

3. Name speaks for itself, it will be a some kind of loud sound, most likely scream.

+/- 5sec

 4.

Fluorescent lamp

4. Basic pitch bass

4.Using my guitar amp + electricity when touching the jacket (6.35mm)

Or

Use FLstudio +Xpand!2 plugin for saw sound



4. For the environment / player is close to lamp it starts the sounds.

Loopable

 5.

Shamanic didgeridoo

5. Like being in the shamanic temple

5. Using my throat 

to make it sound like Didgeridoo then add reverb + paulstretch

5. Intro ambient music after coming through the last doors.

Short

 6.

6. Piano (Music)

6. Scary



6. Using my keystation 49 MIDI I will use flstudio Xpand!2 for piano notes.

Detuned piano.


7. Old houses used to have piano. Will make the demo more interesting.

  Loop

 7.

Walking

7. Wood panels

7. Shoe + Wood panels

+Randomize the pitchin UE4

7. Everytime you walk in game the sound is playing every half second.



+/- 1sec


*Under Construction*

Final Audio Asset list

Interface sounds

Music styles

My project is going to be based for importing sound effects I make to a game you or a classmate made last year. I will create a pretty straight forward first person demo project, a person is locked in a corridor with lot's of doors

Environment sounds

Player Action

Style

Theme

Scary

Peaceful

Energatized

Psytrance


Final theme I’ve chosen is : Scary because I like scary things such as ghosts, ufos and obviously jumpscares.




Realism -forest walking -breathing -jumping

Cartoony -duck voice -running -water gun

Horror -scream -squeaky doors -voice -jumpscare

Sci-Fi -Electric gun -laser

80’s -megaphone -vinyl -8bit


Final style I’ve chosen is horror because my hobby is to watch horror movies, some people say that if someone is enjoying horrors he/she is crazy but creative.




Walking on metal

Jump

•Shoot


From player action I’ve chosen to make sound effect for walking on metal because this will add the scary atmosphere to the environment (near the doors), and jump as without it the demo level in unreal engine won’t be scary as for some point you’ll have to jump.




Horn

•Flickering light

•Jumpscare


For the environment sound I’ve chosen to develop further the Horn, Flickering light and jumpscare because those 3x sounds will combine very well into the demo level. It will be very mysterious experience once player goes inside.




Fast

•Slow

•Piano

•Not loud

•Radio song

•Relaxing


For the music style I’ve picked a Slow, Piano, Radio song and relaxing

this will bring the image alive by listening to relaxing music not knowing that the darkness is hidden.




Mouse click

•Hovering button


I will definitely use the microphone to record sound for the Mouse clicking because this will be used in the future for another assignment as well as this one.



Task 3- Planning and Creating Audio

More visible version of gantt chart + planning document

*Under Construction*

Timeline for Creating Sound Assets for a Computer Game
+BLOG(Bank holiday)Week 2 (03/11/17)Week 3Week 4Week 5Week 6Week 7
Create piano [music]

 week 1
Skueaky doors [SFX]

 week 2       week 3
Fluorescent lamp [SFX]

 week 1 week 3
Walking on wood [SFX]

 week 4
Jumpscare [SFX]

 week 5
Shamanic temple [ambient]

 week 6
Jigsaw voice [dialogue] week 7

Project planning (timeline)

Walking sound screenshots

Left step and Right Step (walk)

Without Editing

*Video will be here*

Walking sound video

Final Jumpscare

Jumpscare screenshots

Final Horror Ambient

Horror Ambient Screenshots

Final detuned piano song

Detuned Piano Screenshots

Making temple voice 

This video shows the creation of ''The creator voice'' - unknown voice using paulstretch effect in Audacity which makes it sound creepy, reverbed and mysterious. Representing the ''Shamanic Didgeridoo''

In this section I will write and show you how I managed to create my sound effects for the purpose of after importing these to the demo project I am currently working on.


All of my sound effects are over Creative Commons 0, that means that it has no copyright, person who is going to listen to it can download it and edit they own way.


https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/


Creating audio - BLOG