INTERVIEW
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DEVELOP SPECIAL: In Conversation with Garry Taylor
John Broomhall chews the cud with Sony’s audio chief Garry Taylor ahead of his 2014 Develop in Brighton Conference keynote address.
What does your job as audio director for the Creative Services Group (CSG) within Sony Computer Entertainment Europe entail?
I’m responsible for the strategy and direction of our audio provision. CSG’s a service group, which supports our game developers. It includes audio teams working on games embedded in our studios around the UK and we also do a lot for marketing as well as for Sony (SCEI) in Japan. My primary role is supporting our audio people in the ‘first party’ studios, looking at their projects, helping them decide what they’re going to do and how, and then facilitating the technical and content-related resources they need to make the best-sounding games they can. We have teams based at Guerrilla (Cambridge) and Evolution, plus our London studio – but I also have plenty of contact with key developers like Media Molecule and Guerrilla (Amsterdam). In addition, I’m closely involved with the Audio Standards Working Group (ASWG) – we publish guidance and technical papers on audio development for PlayStation platforms generally.
What do you see as the most common problems people in the game audio industry face?
It’s interesting, a couple of years back a lot of the problems we faced were technical. But that’s really not the case to such a degree anymore. Obviously, there are always technical issues that need to be resolved, but nowadays it’s more to do with communication between audio teams and the rest of the development disciplines. Technical issues like lack of memory, lack of voices, lack of resource are, to a greater extent, falling away but now, more than ever, we need to ensure our audio teams are involved very early in the design process, building relationships with the game team from the get-go. However, there’s no obvious catchall solution. Our teams are very different from each other in the way they work,
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the culture within each studio and the types of game they’re making, so there’s not necessarily a single production process to introduce that will work for everyone – it’s important to look at things on an individual basis and work out what’s specifically right in each case.
At last year’s Develop Conference, London Studios’ Joanna Orland (sound design) and Jim Fowler (music) talked about their proactive approach with the team on Book of Spells where they established a vocabulary and set of references to help non-audio team members to articulate issues about audio effectively – is that a good example?
We’re a service group and the game teams are ‘clients’ so we have to do our research and pitch ideas to get their buy-in. With Book Of Spells, Joanna and Jim thought very hard about what they were trying to achieve and put together style guides and show-reels, demonstrating what they believed would be best for the title – not just
“We need to ensure our audio teams are involved very early in the design process, building relationships with the game team from the get-go.” Garry Taylor
for consumption by the dev team, but also JK Rowling herself. Te pay-off for all the groundwork was that our presentations about audio direction engendered strong buy-in from the start, then during production, things went smoothly with a sense that the team had real confidence in what we were trying to deliver.
We won the Develop Audio Accomplishment Award for that
game – recognition like that really helps spread the word too.
So presumably, you’ll be talking more about communication in your Develop keynote… What else is on your mind?
I’m going to talk a bit about toolsets. Audio development tools have improved a great deal over the last three to four years – from being just ‘good enough to do the job with little sophistication’, to what you might describe as robust, professionally presented offerings with much greater functionality. It used to be the case that you’d put something into a sound engine and hope it would come out the other end as you intended it, whereas now we have tools to track signal paths with profiling tools showing us what’s going on at every stage. One thing I’ve been heavily involved with is the establishment of loudness standards, which have been rolled out across a lot of the industry. Our loudness standard is now supported by all the major middleware companies like WWise and FMOD and many third party plug-in manufacturers include an ‘ASWG’ pre-set in their tools.
What game audio has floated your audio boat recently?
For me, Te Last of Us was a work of art in terms of audio. I was speaking to
the Naughty Dog audio team about it and they were asking me for feedback – a critique – I found it very difficult because it all works so well. It’s very hard to fault. I must say I also really enjoyed Bioshock Infinite – fantastic content. Te music was brilliant. No wonder it cleared up at the awards!
What developments do you expect to see for audio on PlayStation platforms in the coming period?
Tere’s a bunch of stuff I can’t talk about yet, but I will say I’m very interested to see what people can do with audio for Morpheus, Sony’s new virtual reality headset, which has a real-time binaural 3D audio system. With the addition of head tracking, the sensation of 3D sound over a normal pair of headphones is stunning. We’re still working on the tech but I’m really excited about what other developers will make of it. Te demo we showed at GDC and E3 – Te Deep, where the player goes underwater in this big cage surrounded by sharks and various other marine life, sounds phenomenal.
Garry Taylor Will be giving The Audio Track Keynote Address at the Develop In Brighton Conference on Thursday 10 July 2014. For further details head to
www.developconference.com
www.audiomedia.com
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