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Issue 18: Games November 2014

Virtual Soundscapes: The Art of Sound Design
By Janie Clayton

Take a moment to just close your eyes and listen to the world around you. If you are in an office, you
probably hear people typing and phones ringing. You might hear the drone of the heater or the air
conditioner going on in the background. You hear your coworkers. You hear their footsteps and their
conversation about working on a particularly nasty bug.
Sound is all around us. And it is such an integral part of our world that we just absorb and accept all the
ambient noises that fill our daily lives, without realizing just how many there are. Its no wonder that
people who have been born hearing impaired and later received cochlear implants have been driven insane
by all the sounds that we subconsciously absorb and process.
Because its a large part of our everyday experiences, sound is also becoming increasingly important in
game development. But one of the biggest challenges with fully immersive virtual reality is designing a
realistic soundscape. If you were in an immersive virtual forest, but didnt hear the sound of leaves rustling
and insects chirping, you wouldnt feel like it was real.
In some ways, sound design is a thankless task. If you do everything right, no one will notice, but people
sure as heck will notice if you do something wrong. As such, it is painstaking, detail-oriented work that is
virtually overlooked. However, the joy that you feel when you nail an awesome sound effect or a realistic
soundscape makes up for the lack of recognition you get for the hard work you put into it. Mostly.

Recording Sound
Recording sound is very similar to functional programming: you want to eliminate side effects. One
massive side effect that can ruin your recording is reverb. Reverb is the effect you hear when sound
bounces off of reflective surfaces and creates an echo effect.
If you want a good idea of what reverb is like, walk into a large public bathroom. Bathrooms have lots of
nice sound-reflecting surfaces and very little sound absorption. Drop something on the floor and talk really
loudly. Listen to how this sounds. This is a very distinctive side effect that, if your game does not take
place in a bathroom, would sound incredibly out of place.
Reverb is not something you can fix in post. There are no audio filters or plug-ins to eliminate reverb.
You can add reverb to a recording, but once you compile and render the recording, you are stuck with it.
Trying to take reverb out of a sound file is like trying to remove the eggs from the cake you just pulled out
of the oven. It really isnt going to happen, so you need to make sure that you try to isolate your recording
from as much of this as possible before you begin.

You dont need to go to a professional studio, but if you could, that would be awesome. If you are trying
this at home, do what you can to deaden the noise in the room as much as possible. I have seen people
cover the walls with blankets. If you want to embrace your inner Martha Stewart, you can repurpose egg
cartons by chaining them together and hanging them on the walls. If that seems like too much work, or
simply strikes you as bizarre, just be sure to find the smallest room you can.
Also, make sure your microphone is as close to your sound source as possible. You not only want to avoid
recording reverb you also want to avoid recording noise. Anyone who has been on a conference call
where the other team is in a room with one recording device in the middle knows that people trying to talk
into a microphone that is 10 feet away sound terrible. There is a lot of noise between the microphone and
the person, so everything sounds staticky.
We cant completely eliminate noise, but fortunately there are tools that can remove noise if you record
your sounds properly. One product on the market, iZotopes RX 4, can analyze the noise and remove it
from your recording. However, RX 4 costs more than Logic, so even though you can remove noise in post,
the cheapest solution is to avoid recording it in the first place. Noise is a side effect. Avoid side effects as
much as possible.
Additionally, when recording a sound, be sure to do some pre-roll and post-roll recording. Pre-roll is
recording a couple of seconds of silence before capturing your sound. Post-roll, like pre-roll, is recording
several seconds of silence after you finish your recording. This is important, because you want to make sure
that you capture all of your sound. Many sounds will have an acoustic tail, and it would be really
unfortunate to cut off the end of that tail. Remember that you can always edit more out, but you cant go
back and edit more in.

Microphones
If you are serious about making the best sound design experience you can for your users, there are a few
essential tools that I recommend you invest time and money into.
The first, and only, indispensable tool that you absolutely must buy is a decent microphone. Using your
laptop microphone to record sounds for your game is absolutely unacceptable. Your laptop microphone is
sufficient for talking to people on Skype, but it was never designed or intended for professional sound
quality or work. Your laptop microphone cant be tuned or modified. It cant be controlled or targeted in
any meaningful way. You need to have more control over your tools than you can get with the microphone
built into your computer.
There are several kinds of microphones out on the market, which range from $10 to thousands of dollars.
The cheapest and most primitive type of microphone is a dynamic coil microphone. If you were an AV
nerd in high school and helped set up the sound for school assemblies, the microphones you worked with
were most likely dynamic coil microphones. Dynamic coil microphones are very robust. You can drop
them off a building or run them over with a car and they will still work. As such, they tend to not be
particularly sensitive and wont pick up on subtleties and nuances. An external dynamic microphone, even
if you steal it from your Rock Band setup, is still a vast improvement over your laptop microphone, but it is
the minimum viable product.
Another type of microphone you probably wont see very often is a ribbon microphone. Ribbon
microphones were developed to make up for the weaknesses in dynamic coil microphones. Ribbon
microphones are super sensitive, but that increased sensitivity makes them incredibly fragile and expensive.
These microphones are great for high-quality vocal recordings, but for our purposes, they are not ideal.
The type of microphone I recommend you invest in is a condenser microphone. Condenser microphones
are the best of both worlds. They are far more sensitive than dynamic coil microphones, but they have

comparable sensitivity to ribbon microphones. Condensers are more expensive than dynamic coil
microphones, but less expensive than ribbon microphones.
For convenience purposes, I would recommend buying a microphone that can interface directly with the
computer via USB. When I was learning audio engineering, you needed to purchase an external mixer and
other hardware to get your microphone to interface with the computer. With the advent of podcasting and
home audio/video production, many easy and low-cost solutions have appeared on the market.
A decent USB-connected condenser microphone can be found on Amazon for about 50 bucks. You can pay
more for a USB microphone, but I have not really seen any that are more than $150. Considering that a
decent, non-USB condenser microphone was more than $500 five years ago, this really is not that bad. A
good microphone is worth every penny you invest in it.
Another thing to keep in mind when picking out a microphone is its polar pattern. Polar patterns are also
called pick-up patterns. Not all microphones pick up sounds all around them. The ones that do are called
omnidirectional. Omnidirectional microphones are not ideal for our purposes. Even if you are able to
isolate your sound source, your microphone will still pick up ambient noise.
A better polar pattern is a cardioid polar pattern. Cardioid patterns are heart shaped and have a dead spot
behind them. This pattern really helps you isolate your sound source. There are two flavors of cardioid:
super and hyper. Both of these cardioid patterns pick up a small amount of sound behind them, but both are
far better than plain vanilla omnidirectional.

Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs)

If you are serious about sound design, you will need to invest some time and probably some money into a
digital audio workstation (DAW). You have a free DAW included on your Mac, GarageBand. GarageBand
has improved greatly over the last few years, but it is still a rather limited piece of software. GarageBand is
primarily targeted at people who want to make music, rather than people who want to design sound effects
for a game. So, you can spend a lot of time trying to force GarageBand to do a job it wasnt really designed
to do, or you can spend a little more money and buy a much better tool.
I highly recommend purchasing Logic Pro X. Logic Pro is Apples upgrade to GarageBand. Logic Pro
costs $200 and, unfortunately, it does not have upgrade pricing. However, Logics price has dropped
significantly over the last few years. Back in 2007, Logic 7 cost $1,000 and required an external software
dongle. Logic 8 cost half that, and the last two versions of Logic Pro have stabilized at around $200. You
could buy the last three versions of Logic for less than the price of Logic 7.
Similarly, if we jump in the Wayback Machine, we can see that buying any DAW used to be incredibly
expensive. The industry standard DAW 10 years ago, Pro Tools, was prohibitively expensive. If you
bought Pro Tools, you also had to buy an external piece of hardware for the software to work. The
barebones Pro Tools setup was $2,000 minimum. Pro Tools also did not come with any plugins or
functionality. All you could do with a barebones system was record and edit sound. There were no filters,
no effects, and no virtual instruments. Everything came separately, and the cost of a tricked-out Pro Tools
DAW could run you $10,000 easily.
All of these things that you had to buy in addition to a Pro Tools rig are already included in Logic Pro.
Logic Pro comes with a large library of royalty-free special effect sounds and music loop components. If
you dont know how to play an instrument but would still like to put together your own soundtrack, playing
around with the built-in Apple Loops is a good way to explore. GarageBand has some Apple Loops, but not
nearly as many.

Logic Pro also includes 20 audio effect plugins to modify pitch, remove noise, and add the reverb that you
actually want to include in your sound. These tools are invaluable to crafting a unique set of sounds for
your games.
Another DAW that I have used and enjoyed working with is Reason. Reason is available as a free
download for trial use, but you cant save any of your projects if you dont purchase the software. This is
still great, because you can download and play around with it to see if you like working with it, without
having to invest money up front. Additionally, Reason has a lot of third-party instrument and sound
libraries available to it, making it incredibly powerful and versatile.
DAWs are kind of like programming languages. Once you master one, it isnt hard to take that knowledge
and apply it to other DAWs. In many ways, the one you choose to work with is all a matter of taste and
what clicks for you. Each of them have their own unique set of features, but much of the base functionality
is the same. The ones I mentioned are ones I learned and enjoyed using that also fit into an indie game
developer budget.
These are serious tools that take a bit of time to master, but there are a multitude of resources out in the
world in the form of books and online tutorials. If you had the patience to master either a programming
language or a gaming engine, you should be able to master these tools with some hard work and practice.
Once you have an understanding of how all of these tools work, the only limit to what you can do with
them is what you can imagine.

Foley
Foley is the art of reproducing and recording everyday sounds to add into your game project. One of the
more famous examples of foley that all geeks should be familiar with is the use of coconuts to reproduce
the sound of a horses hooves.
With the above example, it is clear that you do not have to record the exact sound in order to get an
approximation of it for your game, and sometimes its even the better choice. One great example of a time
when you would not want to use the direct sound source is when you have a gunshot. If you have ever
heard a real gun shooting, you might have realized that it counterintuitively sounds fake. Instead, you want
to look for something that creates a nice, sharp popping noise. One common tool used for this is a staple
gun, but my personal favorite is to use a sheet of bubble wrap, the kind with the really large bubbles. I
freaked out a bunch of people in my distance learning class when I popped one of those right next to the
microphone before class one day. In retrospect, that probably wasnt the wisest idea in the world.
There are many tutorials available for the budding foley artist, but the best tools you have as a foley artist
are your ears and your imagination. I had a sound design project where I had to recreate the sound of
several objects rolling across a screen. I remembered when I was a child that I had a marble machine that I
would drop marbles into and they would roll down several tracks before landing in a bucket at the bottom
with a satisfying plop. I bought some marbles and recorded the sound of them traveling around and
dropping. I then went into Logic and I pitch shifted the sound of the marbles so that the sound was lower
for larger objects and higher for smaller objects.
Think about what something should sound like, and try to think about whether you have any memories of
sounds that could work. Keep your ears open for anything you hear or observe that makes interesting
sounds. If you are looking for inspiration, read a bit about how Ben Burtt designed the sound effects in Star
Wars.

Apple Loops and Other Prebuilt Sounds

Since we are all busy game designers and software engineers, we dont necessarily have a week to spend
futzing around with Logic and carefully handcrafting our own custom sounds. That said, there are resources
out there for the busy software engineer who just needs the sound of a dinosaur roaring right away.
I have already briefly mentioned Apple Loops. Apple Loops are royalty-free sound snippets that come with
both GarageBand and Logic. They used to be sold separately from Apple, but as of Logic 8, all Apple
Loops come with Logic.
These can be used as is without royalty or attribution. Even though there are a few thousand loops to
choose from, there will probably only be a few that meet your needs. It is helpful to understand audio
filters, so that you can modify these sounds to make them unique, but it will be a little bit like the Taco Bell
menu, where you have five ingredients that can only be combined in a finite number of ways. These are a
great starting point, but after a while, all of your sounds will be the same, and nothing is going to stand out
from anyone else doing the same thing. As such, you will probably want to explore some more specialized
sounds.
There are many websites that have both free, open-source sounds and proprietary sounds that you would
pay a nominal licensing fee to use. Two for-pay websites with a good selection of sounds are Big Fish
Audio and Audio Jungle. There are many free sound sites online, but they will not have as good a selection,
and you will probably spend a lot more time looking for what you want. Convenience has a cost, so figure
out how much time you will save and how much that is worth when making the determination about
whether you will make, buy, or find your audio.
A word of warning about online sounds: Make sure you understand the rights you have associated with
those sounds. Make sure you have a license that permits you to include the sounds in your project and that
you pay for such rights if you find a sound you want to use. The people who are creating these sounds
worked very hard on them. We want people to pay for our software, so we should be willing to pay for a
sound that can really set our game apart from the rest of the pack.

Audio Filters
I have mentioned audio filters a few times already in this article, so now seems like a good time to begin
explaining what they are and how you can use them in your projects.
There are a lot of really cool effects filters out there on the market, but generally speaking, you will be
using filters to clear out noise and tune your sound more than you will to create really wonky sound effects.
Lets go over some of the more common audio filters you will be seeing and using most frequently.
I have mentioned trying to eliminate reverb from your audio projects, because it can be added in later in a
way that you control. One important set of filters you will be dealing with are reverb filters. You can design
a reverb pattern around general and specific types of architectures. Some reverb software was created by
taking response patterns from specific places like the Sistine Chapel and Grand Central Station. If you are
writing a game that takes place in a real location, it is possible to design your reverb to exactly match the
location your game takes place in. You usually dont need this level of detail, but if you are a massive
audio geek, knowing this is possible is a really exciting thing.
Additional audio filters you should familiarize yourself with are high- and low-pass filters. These filters are
pretty self-explanatory. A high-pass filter lets higher frequencies go through, and a low-pass filter only lets
lower frequencies through.

Humans generally can hear sounds up to around 20,000 Hz. If youve ever wondered why the sample rate
for CDs is 44.1 kHz, it has to do with science. There is a formula called the Nyquist Theorem, which states
that if you want to accurately capture a sound, you need to sample it at at least twice the highest frequency.
Sound is a wave that has both a compression and a rarefaction. If you think back to high school
trigonometry when you programmed a sine wave on your graphing calculator, you noticed that the wave
traveled above and below the y-axis. If you wanted to measure that wave, you would have needed to make
sure to capture both where the wave went above the axis and where it went below it.
As we age, many of us lose the ability to hear sounds at these higher frequencies, especially if we have
destroyed our hearing blasting death metal and cranking the volume on our Call of Duty sessions.
However, not everyone loses the high end of his or her hearing. I personally know someone who can hear
dog whistles. There are a lot of sounds that most of us cant hear, but there are people out there who can. It
doesnt hurt to run your sounds through a low-pass filter and filter out anything over 15 kHz, just to clear
out some of the garbage that might bother our supernaturally ultrasonic listeners.
Likewise, filtering out some of the wonky lower frequencies can clean up your sound. Utilizing both a
high-pass and a low-pass filter is called a band-pass filter. You are specifying that you only want to use
frequencies within a contained band of frequencies.
Speaking of frequencies, I wanted to briefly mention a little bit about pumping the bass. I know that back in
the day when we used to listen to our music through stereo systems, the popular thing to do was crank the
bass. You might be tempted while creating your sounds to crank the bass in your equalizer, but dont do
that. Here is a pro tip: It is easier to remove frequencies than it is to add them in. If you want to increase the
lower frequencies in your sounds, decrease the higher frequencies. Frequencies cancel one another out, and
by directly removing the frequencies you dont want to hear, you are increasing the ones that you do want
to hear.
Depending on what DAW you are using, you should have access to a bunch of audio effects plugins. There
are plugins that speed up and slow down your sounds, either with pitch shift or without. I used to have a
plugin that would smear two sounds together. Another iZotope product, Trash 2, lets you selectively
distort and mangle your sound in a highly controlled way. There are so many awesome effects plugins out
on the market that I really cant go into all of them. The best way to work with these effects is to just play
with them and see what they do. Again, your ears and your imagination are the most valuable tools in your
toolbox. If you look for plugins and you find one that looks cool, see if you can have a trial playing around
with it to see if you like the sounds you can create with it.

Realistic vs. Unrealistic Sound Design

I know, you might be wondering why you would want to create unrealistic sound design. Hear me out.
Your approach to sound design is going to be radically different between a platform game like Super Mario
Bros. and a cinematic game like Heavy Rain. Trying to create realistic sound effects for Mario bashing his
head against a brick isnt going to work as well as the cute 8-bit sounds created when Mario jumps and
collects coins.
Meanwhile, when you are dealing with a cinematic game, it is vitally important to pay a lot of attention to
everything going on in your scene to make sure you are including anything that your player might be
hearing. If your game takes place in a forest, think about what sounds you hear when you are walking
through the woods. If your game is a first-person shooter where your character is running through a
hallway, remember to add footsteps and the appropriate amount of reverb.
Note that even within a realistic game, it is sometimes necessary to take some liberties with making
everything sound exactly realistic. There are a multitude of various TV shows and films that take place in

space. Nearly all of them utilize some kind of sound design, even though space is a vacuum and
realistically there should be no sound. Sound is generated in these films because we psychologically expect
to hear noise when something explodes.
One cool thing you can do if you are using AV Foundation for your sounds is use the pan property. The pan
property determines how much sound gets directed to either the left or right speaker in the case of stereo
sound. If you have a rocket or something than generates sound and travels across the screen, you can tell
the program to set the pan to the projectiles location so that your player can hear the rocket whizzing
through his or her head. Setting this property and paying attention to positional sound design really brings
your soundscape to the next level. Anything you can do to immerse your player in the virtual world you
have created is a good thing.
In some ways, realistic sound design is simpler than unrealistic sound design. You know what a gunshot is
supposed to sound like. You know what a car crash is supposed to sound like. There are a lot of sound
libraries out there that provide common realistic sounds. Creating a unique sound style for your game can
be incredibly challenging. However, if you are able to accomplish something unique, you will give your
game a tremendous boost. Think of how many instantly recognizable sounds came from Star Wars. No one
can use any of those sounds without instantly bringing the film to mind.
I highly recommend becoming familiar with synthesizers if you are working with unrealistic sound design.
Many highly recognizable sound effects are a series of musical tones. Synthesizers offer you a great deal of
customization and flexibility to develop a sound personality for your game. Both Reason and Logic come
with several highly capable virtual synthesizers. Synthesizers are powerful, complex tools, but like all such
things, take some time and patience to master fully.
Another tip I want to pass along is to utilize natural sounds. There is a fairly well-known hoax that claims if
you slow down a recording of crickets, it sounds like humans singing. The track passed around was created
by layering the sounds multiple times and manipulating the speed and pitch of each layer. Slowed-down
crickets may not sound exactly like humans singing, but with a lot of work they did sound radically
different.
Modifying natural sounds by speeding them up or slowing them down and shifting their pitches up and
down can create completely unique sounds that still have enough of a familiar undertone that they dont
sound wholly unrealistic or out of place. The sound effect that the TIE fighters make as they fly by in Star
Wars is a modified howler monkey cry. The sound is unusual, but it is also familiar. We dont think about
what its base component is because we are taking it out of its original context. There is a lot of potential
and flexibility to take modified animal and insect noises and place them in completely different and
unexpected ways. Most of the time, your player wont find the sound out of place if you did your job right.

Ambient Sounds
One alternative you have to composing or commissioning a soundtrack is to generate an ambient
soundscape for your game.
The best example I can think of for this is the game Myst. Myst had some short bits of soundtrack, but one
of the big selling points of the game was this idea that you were wandering around this virtual world.
Standing on the dock listening to the waves lapping against the shore and hearing the dock creaking under
your feet created a far more realistic feel than you would have gotten if the game designers had had a
relentless looping soundtrack in the background.
Ambient soundscapes work really well if you have a story-based game. Strategically withdrawing sound
during intense moments in your story is a great way to build tension. You know that moment in the movies

when everything feels a little too quiet and it makes you uneasy? Sound is as much about what you dont
hear as it is what you do.
One thing to watch out for when creating ambient soundscapes is to avoid overdoing things. Think back to
our introductory example of the ambient sounds in an office. It is really easy to go crazy adding a lot of
ringing phones and slurping coffee. Coco Chanel once famously said: Before you leave the house, look in
the mirror and remove one accessory. Have fun going overboard generating your soundscape, but be sure
to go back through and tone it down a lot before you ship your game. A little goes a long way. You want
your sound to be subtle and not obtrusive. It is there to enhance the experience, not overwhelm it.

Sound Mixing
One problem I have observed, especially in media that has voice acting, is that not enough care has been
taken with sound mixing. A major complaint I hear from a lot of people when I tell them I do sound design
is that when they are watching something, they cant hear the dialogue because the soundtrack is too loud.
I know, you have an awesome, kick-ass soundtrack. I know your soundtrack is the most amazing
soundtrack ever. I know that you love to blast the killing music that plays during your final boss battle
when you are coding like a rockstar. I get it.
People are not playing your game to listen to the soundtrack.
Your soundtrack, no matter how awesome, should never overpower the rest of the sound in your game,
especially if that sound is dialogue that is necessary for your player to hear to understand what is going on.
Right now, go to your game. Adjust your soundtrack to how loud you think it should be relative to
everything else. Do you have it where you think it should be? Good. Now make it half as loud. Now it
should be about where it needs to be in order to do its job of enhancing your game rather than
overpowering it. You may adjust it upward again if your beta testers tell you they want it louder. If you are
not using beta testers, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Takeaways
If you looked at the article and determined that it was too long but would still like a few tips to help you
along your way, here are a few takeaways from the article:

Buy decent tools.

Take the time to learn how to use them.
Noise and reverb are the enemy. Avoid them at all costs.
Determine whether you want realistic or cartoon-like sound effects.
Dont let your soundtrack overwhelm the rest of the sound in your game.
Close your eyes and open your ears. You can learn how to master every single audio tool on the
market and it will all be worthless if you dont use your imagination to think about what
something should sound like.

Sound design is an awesome, fulfilling, creative art. Being able to walk into a world that didnt exist before
and dictating what it sounds like is an amazing thing to be able to do. I went into programming for the same
reasons I love sound design. It gave me a chance to start with nothing and create something that didnt exist
before.

We all got into this business to create new worlds. Too often we focus just on what that world should look
like without thinking about what it should sound like. Show your world a little bit of love and give it its
own voice.