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February 2013 l 17


technologyfeature


Then EA managed to get the rights to make the game. From that point they recognised how big it was and wanted it to be as close as they could be to the film, so they found the money [for the music].” The other half of the gaming


experience is the in-game audio, roughly consisting of SFX, Foley, dialogue and atmos. According to Garry Taylor, audio director at SCEE, game audio has “changed out of all recognition. When I started in games I was the audio guy, and I did everything. That’s just not viable these days. Budgets have grown and now there’s a huge amount of people involved in the production.” Actually creating the audio


differs slightly from the sound design for a film or advert, requiring a bit more consideration of the final product because “it’s not linear. The way a game is built, the player might end up triggering several sounds at once that


PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER Up to 400 cars were recorded For the GranTurismo4soundtrack


might not be used in the way you intended. You have to be very aware of where things are going, and also where things might clash,” says Anthony Matchett, head of gaming at Wave Studios in London. As an example, during a


voiceover session Matchett will use a close-miked Neumann U 87 in the vocal booth, but add


a Sennheiser 416 a metre or so away “to avoid it sounding too isolated and give it more of a performance feel”. Editing captured audio can involve everything from Adobe Audition, Sound Forge or WaveLab to Pro Tools, depending on the developer and the scope of the game, with the majority of the


Pong’s beeps and boops were generated from a General Instruments AY-3-8500 chip driven by a simple processor and a 512-word ROM. Today a growing number of audio middleware and


implementation software, and/or in-house versions of both are used to implement the audio into the game, and trigger it based on in-game events. Popular middleware software includes Firelight Technologies’ FMOD and Audiokinetic’s Wwise, though a developer is just as likely to program its own depending on the needs of the game. “It’s horrifically complex these days,” says Garry Taylor of SCEE. “The sound for a game is approximately 50% creating content, 50% implementation. There is a huge amount of programming resource that we have to put on all our titles now, and a large number of different subsystems that we have to deal with. Not only do we have to deal with the content for dialogue, music and sound effects but we also have to write all the systems that run those things.”


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