Master Of Sound

Tyre Textures & Indiana Jones

2010-09-06T21:02:00.003+01:00

New Post on Master-of-Sound: Tyre Textures & Indiana Jones http://aquinn.co.uk/wordpress/?p=301

Pigs are Awesome

2010-09-03T23:07:00.003+01:00

Recently done some recording of pig vocals;

http://aquinn.co.uk/wordpress/?p=274

Includes short discussion on pigs in film

GAT Weapons

2010-08-24T17:20:00.003+01:00

New blog post; GAT Weapons http://aquinn.co.uk/wordpress/?p=3

New Post On Master-Of-Sound: Dino Design

2010-08-10T09:03:00.001+01:00

There's a new post on master of sound on some dinosaur vox i have been working on;

http://aquinn.co.uk/wordpress/?p=134

Master-of-Sound Is Moving

2010-08-09T19:57:00.002+01:00

Master-of-sound is slowly being moved over to a wordpress blog. This is going to take some time but eventually my entire site will be run from wordpress. In the meantime all new blog posts will be made on the wordpress site and I will post the links to the posts here.

Whilst you're wating have a look, most of it is placeholder but new content will be up soon.

http://aquinn.co.uk/wordpress/

Waves & Trains

2010-07-27T14:09:00.008+01:00

Whilst I was down in Brighton for develop I decided to go record some waves.

Here's a couple of examples of what I got, all recorded @ 24bit/96k NTG-3 into a Fostex FR-2

The first file is a mix of two perspectives;
Perspective 1: Pointing towards the sea picking up large wave movements
Perspective 2: Stood in the sea facing the shore picking up the wave breaking

WAVES stone beach brighton by Andrew Quinn

I also wanted to try and record some waves on the breakwater in the marina so I walked down there from the hotel to find it closed because of the rough sea. However some nice fishermen with a huge dog let me in. I ended up getting very wet but also getting some very nice angry sea sounds.

WAVES breakwater angry by Andrew Quinn

As I was walking back one of these appeared round the corner. Perfect case and point of always being ready to record or I wouldn't have got this.

TRAIN minature railway passby by Andrew Quinn

Bows and Arrows

2010-07-26T19:34:00.006+01:00

Today I managed to get an hour of time with an ex-national archery champ Dave Carter to record a few bow and arrow sounds. I managed to get some good material of him loading arrows, arrow impacts and firing, but not of arrow pass by's. The arrows we were using were cutting too cleaner path through the air and were making almost no sound at all. Experimentation with broken arrows and arrows with things attached is needed in the future, when I can possibly have a bit more of his time.

In the meantime here is an example of some of the sounds I managed to get;
Recorded @ 24bit/96k Rode NTG-3 into Fostex FR-2

BOW composite fire x2 by Andrew Quinn

Thanks to Dave for helping out.

Automatic Sound Synthesis from Fluid Simulation

2010-07-23T12:23:00.002+01:00

Generative sound design music and dialogue was one of the topics discussed at this years Develop Conference here is an interesting article and video on generating bubble sfx.

I would like to point out I am not involved with either of these institutions however I did find it very interesting.

I dont think i'm out of a job quite yet but the duck in the bath simulation is pretty close. One thing mabe to think about is if this very clinical way of generating "real" sound will replace over the top and unrealistic "designed" sound.

Refs; New Scientist 24th July 2010

Sounding Liquids: Automatic Sound Synthesis from Fluid Simulation

http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/SoundingLiquids/

Primal Carnage Podcast

2010-07-22T23:41:00.005+01:00

Primal Carnage has generated its first podcast listen to it now !

via OVERCLOCKED 2

Primal Carnage

July 22nd, 2010 — overclocked

Have you ever thought what would a game be like if instead of player vs. player it was player vs. dinosaur? If so, then indie developer Lukewarm Media has just the game for you, Primal Carnage. Primal Carnage puts you right in the middle of an all out war of man vs. dinosaur. Instead of bringing you 200 million years to the past and arming you with sticks and stone, the dinosaurs are brought to you via an experiment gone wrong. Now this is not your daddy’s FPS game either. While you duke it out against the dinosaurs be sure to remember there is a guy controlling that dino who wants to crush you just as badly. Wait. What did I just say? Yes, you can control the dinosaurs.

Primal Carnage is also sporting some of the best graphics around thanks to Uniengine and the sound is awesome as well. DX9, DX10, DX11? Whatever you can support Primal Carnage is for you. It will punish those of you who think you have great systems, but still be easy enough to run for those who haven’t upgraded in a while.

Think you’ve got what it takes to be top dinosaur or top dino-killer? Listen to the cast to find out and head on over to www.primalcarnage.com to sign up for their beta and find out.

Oh and did I mention there will be mods?

Even a little mention of the sound team, I would like to add that there is another talented (yet unsung in the podcast) sound designer working on Primal Carnage called David Yingling

Skip to 28:00 for the sound section of the interview

Updated Demo Reel

2010-07-20T16:05:00.003+01:00

Updated my demo reel check it out & let me know what you think:

Kontakt Veg Patch

2010-06-11T15:51:00.007+01:00

This patch contains 306 veggie abuse sounds from both my own library and Tim Prebble's excellent Hiss and Roar library. The sounds are grouped by vegetable and arranged on the keyboard by performance hits to the left, rips crunches centre and gloopy wet sounds to the right. All the groups of vegetables are velocity sensitive and have the pitch and ADSR mapped to external controls.
This enables me to "perform" different sounds direct to picture and very quickly build up different hits or textures.

The sounds below were created very quickly, I just hit a few keys and exported the output, no editing of midi was done.

Veg Patch by Andrew Quinn

Primal Carnage Featured In PC Gamer

2010-06-10T11:13:00.004+01:00

Primal Carnage has been previewed in the June edition of PC Gamer

Get In !

www.primalcarnage.com

www.lukewarmmedia.com

Editing Birds for Non-Repeating Ambiences

2010-05-05T18:45:00.007+01:00

This week I went out to record some bird calls for a non-repeating game ambience. This proved to be slightly problematic for two reasons.

1. Birds rarely stay still and are generally found in tall trees.
2. Birds are fairly quiet compared to ambient noise.

Here is an example of what I managed to record at the woods.

Recorded at 96k/24bit with a Rode NTG-3 and a Fostex FR-2

Birds Source Recording by Andrew Quinn

As you can hear the bird call is masked by a lot of background noise and is quite quiet. To be used in a non-repeating ambience the call needs to be as clean as possible so that it can be randomly triggered without affecting the looping background.

So the next step was to EQ out the background road noise, I did this using auditions parametric EQ, using a high pass filter with a cut-off frequency of 333hz.

Birds Eq 333hz by Andrew Quinn

The call is allot clearer now but is really quiet so I normalized this sound to -0.1db

Birds Normalized by Andrew Quinn

The process of normalizing the sound has brought up the noise floor considerably. So this needs to be removed from the call. I did this using the hiss removal process in audition. In some cases I had put the calls through the hiss removal process twice to completely remove the noise, although one pass did the trick 99% of the time.

Birds Noize Reduction by Andrew Quinn

Nice clear noise-free single bird calls ready to be put into a non-repeating ambience.

Hemotite Hard Drive

2010-05-03T18:57:00.010+01:00

There have been a lot of interesting sound design / recording posts recently from a variety of different reording blogs. There were two I really wanted to try for myself Hematite Magnets a la Erik Aadal (the shares and stock in these must have risen considerably since Erik's post) and a Hard Drive. I won't explain much about these as these two sources will do a much better job;

Noise Jockey: Hard Drive Guts

Erik Aadal: Hematite Magnets

(Thanks for the inspiration!)

Having acquired some hematite magnets and a hard drive I set about recording both of them .... separately. I won't post the results here as if you have read the links above you will know what it will sound like.

Then I came up with an idea. Now like most people I have been told that putting strong magnets near electronics was bad, so with great abandon I started putting the magnets near and on the spinning hard drive.

What happened next was quite interesting.

Instead of exploding or electrocuting me the magnets created resistance on the spinning metal plate and slowed it down giving me control over the sound/pitch of the spinning hard drive.

Hemotite Hard Drive by Andrew Quinn

Sound recorded at 96k/24bit on a Digidesign 003 using a Rode NTG-3 and a custom contact mic.

Splinter Cell: Conviction Full Sound Documentary

2010-05-02T17:00:00.002+01:00

I have been playing the new Splinter Cell game recently, included with the game on the disk was this making of documentary. Enjoy.

One interesting audio decision made in the game is that any story dialogue regardless of the position of the camera, main character and source is routed straight through the centre speaker at full volume.

New Website = Consolidated Online Presence

2010-04-19T20:47:00.003+01:00

I have re-done my website to try and integrate all my online ramblings into one area.
So here it is; www.aquinn.co.uk
This layout is easier to update and finally works on the iphone/ipad.

Bye bye Flash hello CSS

Demo Reel

2010-04-07T16:33:00.002+01:00

My New Demo Reel is now up!

http://www.aquinn.co.uk/Videos/AndrewQuinnDemoReel.mov

Brink Sound Design

2010-04-07T14:26:00.008+01:00

I have created a new bit of sound design for the newish brink trailer check it out;

www.aquinn.co.uk/Videos/BRINK_Temp_02.mov

Primal Carnage GDC Demo

2010-04-02T18:28:00.005+01:00

I'm a bit late posting this but ive been away. Without further ado The Primal Carnage GDC demo.

The audio team were given only a few hours to implement/compose the audio for the demo. Given the time frame i think we did ok.

Sound Design; Andrew Quinn & David Yingling
Composer; Gareth Coker
Mix; Andrew Quinn

Lukewarm Media Website Intro

2010-04-01T19:51:00.004+01:00

The Lukewarm Media website has recently gone live, the intro includes some sound design i put together. Its a pity that broadband isn't quite up to 96k/24bit audio yet because mono 128kbps mp3 doesnt quite do it justice.

www.lukewarmmedia.com

www.primalcarnage.com

and for all you audiophiles out there the stereo .mp4 version;
http://www.aquinn.co.uk/Videos/LWM_WebIntro.mp4

DIY Vocal Screen

2010-03-15T20:49:00.003Z

Rather than dishing out between £100-£200 on a vocal screen i decided to build one myself. Using some wood that came with my house some packing foam, various length screws and nails and my (as you can see) excellent joinery skills i bodged together this.
It may not be pretty and it may not be as adjustable as some of the off-the-shelf models but it is cheap and it works.

Estimated cost; £0.20 (for some tape and glue)

Smash Smash Bang Bang - The Day I Destroyed A Car

2010-02-28T13:20:00.008Z

Photos By Heather Donaldson Car Provided By Charlotte Fotheringham

Recently a friend decided she was scrapping her car, i managed to persuade her that letting me record the sound of it being smashed into several pieces would be a good send off for the old girl. I got in contact with the local scrapyard who were happy for us to destroy the car on their premises if they got the remains.

For this excursion i brought a long my old friend and fellow sound designer Matthew Denman who assited on both the recording and the smashing.
I took my usual set up of a Fostex FR2 and a Rode Ntg-3 with the addition of a borrowed Ntg-2 and a bag of various tools and bits of wood.

One thing i hadn't counted on was how hard it is to smash a car window if you don't know what you're doing. It took a while to work out that the weak spot is right where the glass meets the frame.

We recorded everything from various bodywork impacts/scrapes to the breaking of all the windows/lights.

One saftey tip to remember for the future is that when the windshield is cracked any other impacts or movement of it causes tiny glass fragments to fly everywhere so goggles are a must. I would also advise a face mask as well as the fragments are so small it would be easy to breathe them in.

Everything was recorded at 96k/24bit and we came out with some nice results, a particular favorite was the sound of a wheel being thrown through the allready broken/cracked window.

A layered hit made from some of the recordings we made;
Smashed Car Various by Andrew Quinn

Rocks and Shells

2010-01-19T18:59:00.002Z

Today i spent some time recording various shells and bullet casings impacting a rock for the casing physics impacts found in the game i am currently working on.

Casings and bits right to left ;
12 Guage Shotgun Shell, Big Fat Brass Slide, Really Thin Brass Slide, WW2 German Mauser Replica Casing, WW1 German Mauser Casing (Actually fired in anger and picked up from a feild in Verdun, Belgium), WW1 German Mauser Bullet (agian from Verdun), Bullet from replica casing and a WW1 allied bullet collected from the Somme

The impacts on the rock from the various casings was recorded using a RODE NTG-3 and a sE Electronics 2200a.

Casings by Andrew Quinn

Recording Cars

2010-01-18T18:10:00.006Z

As described in a previous post im currently working on an independant game, the game features a jeep and motorcross bike as two playable vehicles. As a bit of a test to see the results i could get i went out and recorded my 13 year old Audi A4. Il be using some more suitable vehicles for the game.

After reading some tips on recording cars from Tim Prebble's exelent blog (Shamless Plug--> The Music Of Sound) I decided to use two dynamic microphones, a Shure SM57 and a Shure SM58 Beta. I covered both of these in a condom and then wrapped them in two old tea towels to reduce vibration.

Word of warning! don't use lubricated condoms, (as i did initially) as you end up with slightly lubed microphones. I can't yet see the advantage of having a lubricated microphone, unless you're trying to insert it into someone.....

I placed the SM57 in the engine bay pointing diagonally at the engine, initially i had the cable routed through the passenger side window but this left the mic cable running right past the battery which introduced some interesting interference. So instead i routed the cable through the driver side window and taped it over the dashboard.

The SM58 was put over the exhaust and the cable was routed over the boot and in through the rear passenger window.

Audi A4 Example 01 by Andrew Quinn

Meet Norbert - Crash Test Torso

2010-01-03T12:24:00.003Z

I have been working on an as of yet unnamed game project that has recently required some bodd falls/impacts. Step in Norbert. Norbert is several phonebooks an argos catalogue and some rolled up newspapers wrapped in a faux leather jacket. The arms, neck and bottom of the jacket have been taped up as well as the zips. This was done to try to deaden the sound and stop any unwanted paper/zip rattles.

Norbert has so far survived being thrown down the stairs and into a wall with some interesting sound results.

He has yet to be thrown out of a third storey window.... but he will be.

Ben Burt Talks Star Wars

2009-12-09T18:15:00.002Z

All round sound legend Ben Burt has been talking to the Motion Picture Guild about his role in Star Trek

Read Here

Sound Design Articles and Videos

2009-12-08T00:23:00.000Z

Just found something quite amasing ive been looking for something like this for some time...

http://soundworkscollection.com/

I really wish i had this 12 months ago..

Operation Flashpoint Audio

2009-08-30T21:04:00.001+01:00

Heres an interesting little video on the audio in operation flashpoint;

Interactive Music

2008-12-02T15:07:00.002Z

Writing interactive music is a complex operation because the player isn’t forced into hitting beats and bars. There has to be a system in place that makes sure that the music either cross fades in certain positions or the music has been written in such a way that means it can cross fade at any point.

The music is able to adapt to the player movements by using two techniques. Horizontal re-sequencing is the method where pre composed segments of music can be re-shuffled according to the player’s position in the environment. Vertical re-orchestration is the technique of changing the mix of separate instruments in an on-going loop as the player moves round the game environment. Games such as Crysis, Far Cry, FarCry2 and Halo 2 use a combination of these techniques.

Parrot War

2008-11-11T19:27:00.003Z

End war is a new voice activated RTS. Speech recognition is so good it can understand parrots, next test Glaswegians.

Kinetic Sound Example - Grid Race Driver

2008-11-10T11:53:00.004Z

Grid is a racing game for the PS3 Xbox360 and PC, the throttle is velocity sensitive and can be "feathered" and "stabbed" producing different sounds. In the video there are examples of both these.

When the throttle is applied smoothly the sound is smooth and progressive. when the throttle is applied in stabs the sound seems more throaty and harsh. weather this is just an imagined effect or this is true is unknown.

Here is a possible sub system that could be used to implement this sound;

The resulting engine sounds in grid make the game experience very realistic

Freeman Evidence Spotted

2008-11-07T16:12:00.003Z

Real Time Vst Plug-ins In Singstar 3

2008-11-02T22:55:00.005Z

Singstar 3 is a 1-8 player competitive singing game for the PS3. Essentially its a karaoke game. The developers wanted to create a proper studio sound for the vocals, in previous versions of the game they wrote their own real-time processing algorithms these worked but were not to professional standard. For the new version of the game the developers decided to use Professional VSTs from sound forge, these VSTs are run nativeley on the PS3 in real time, all the developers had to do was optimize them for the PS3.
Your singing can also be recorded and post processing added later in another part of the game. This is the first time that real studio quality plug ins have been used in realtime in a a game.

oh and does it make a difference ? well a large one so much so that people thought that sony had changed the microphones for singstar 3, in reality they were the same mics they had always used.

Sound Propagation in Dead Space

2008-10-28T09:56:00.003Z

Firstly Dead Space is terrifying and its all down to the audio it's superb.
However whilst playing the game i noticed a small problem with the sound propagation, watch the video and take note of the way the sound changes as the character moves away from the fire and into the other room. If you watch the video further the character moves back into the main room, again take note of the sound. The two changes occur at completely different places. This leads me to think that the sound changes are triggered by the door moving rather than using occlusion. this leads to some weird effects during the game.

COD 4 non Repetative Game Sound

2008-10-10T13:21:00.002+01:00

This is an example of some non-repetitive game sound in COD4. It appears to be made up of several different elements that play out at random intervals. As the sounds are sounds of an ongoing battle the pitch isn't varied but because there are enough different sounds and volume is varied, the ambience doesn't become repetitive.

Types and Roles Of Sound In Games

2008-10-06T12:07:00.014+01:00

As game audio has become more popular and widespread several professionals and commentators involved in the gaming industry have tried to define the different elements which make up sound in games.

Karen Collins in her new book Glossary of Game Audio Splits Game Audio into four groups within which are several sub groups;

Dynamic Audio is sound that reacts to changes in the gameplay, environment and input from the user. Within Dynamic Audio there is Adaptive Audio and Interactive Audio. Adaptive Audio is sound that occurs in the game environment reacting to the gameplay rather than input from the user. Interactive Audio is sound that is reacting to gameplay but is responding to the users input.

Diegetic Sounds are real sounds that occur within hearing distance of the user, this includes sound effects and dialogue. Non-Dynamic Diegetic audio is sound that occurs within hearing distance of the user but the user has no direct involvement in the sound. Adaptive Diegetic Audio is sound that reacts to changes in the environment but not the player directly. Interactive Diegetic sounds are sounds that occur in the players space that the player can directly interact with, these include footsteps and weapon impacts.

Non-Diegetic Sound refers to background music and sound effects. Adaptive Non-Diegetic sounds are sounds that occur in reaction to gameplay but aren't affected by the player and aren't part of the environment and cannot be heard by the game characters. Interactive Non-Diegetic Sounds are sounds that can be affected by gameplay or the player but cannot be heard by the game characters. This describes interactive music or sound effects reacting to gameplay. Non-Dynamic Linear sounds are sounds that are unaffected by the players input or gameplay, these sounds are usually found in uninteruptable cut scenes.

Kinetic Gestural interaction refers to Diegetic or Non-Diegetic sound which the player and typically character participate physically with the sound on screen. this can be as simple as using a controller to play an instrument on screen or using a Wii controller to control the velocity of weapons or perform actions that produce sounds.

Sander Huiberts and Richard Van Tol from GamaSutra.com take a simpler view splitting game sound into four parts Zone, Effect, Affect and Interface

Zone Refers to environmental sound, these sounds are diegetic and set the game ambience.

Effect refers to diegetic sounds during gameplay that are produced: ie footsteps, gunshots, explosions. these sounds can be on or off screen.

Affect refers to non-diegetic sounds that set the mood of the game, these range from orchestral music to moody low tones

Interface refers to non-deigetic sounds these can be menu sounds or sounds related to the HUD, the main use of these sounds is to convey information that isn't setting the mood.

These two examples both describe all the main types of game audio however i think that Karren Collins description is over complicated. There are too many sub sections and the descriptions of the sub sections are too diffuse. By having this many catagories i find that i cannot get some audio to sit in any one catagory, weather this is due to the language used in the description or just my mistake. GamaSutra's IEZA framework is a much better breakdown of game audio types because it is simple, complex audio can easily be divded into the different catogories. I have found some examples of the four major groups from GamaSutra's IEZA framework.

Zone
This clip shows some ambient passes of Unreal Tournament 3 each level has a different feel because of the change in the background sounds used.

Effect
This clip shows a short clip of Call of Duty 4 it features allot of diegetic sound effects from weapons, enemies and the plane this makes it to be a very immersive realistic experience.

Affect
This F.E.A.R clip is a good example of how Non-Diegetic sounds can affect the feel and mood this game in particular relies on discordant sounds and stabs throughout to make the game allot scarier.

Interface
This Metal Gear Solid 4 Clip has some good examples of information sounds via the HUD and the radio menu. for example when Snake enters the radio and also when he is flicking through the inventory.

Ugly Sound

2008-10-02T13:41:00.004+01:00

I am using this short video of the original Carmageddon as an example of some ugly sound design.

The first thing that is noticeably bad sound design is that some of the time major sounds are missing, for example at 0:53 the player crashes hard into a lamp post and no sound is triggered. This problem occurs constantly throughout the game, it doesn't seem to matter what the player is hitting. See (0:53), (0:55), (1:00) and (1:08).

The second major problem is the repetitive nature of all the sounds. There is only one splat sound for hitting pedestrians and only 2-3 screams, as hitting pedestrians is a major objective in the game i would expect more sound to be attached to the pedestrians as it makes hitting them very repetitive.

The third major problem is the complete lack of ambient sound, this makes the envronments unrealistic.

Also at random intervals during the game for no discernible reason the phrase "i've hit the wall" is played. (1:17)

I am aware that this is a relatively old game (1997) and processing power and memory was probably diverted to the game's at the time ground breaking physics, however because the sound is quite bad and repetitive it ruins parts of the gameplay. This doesn't have to happen, other games released at the time such as MDK and Dungeon Keeper managed to sound great as well as pushing the envelope as what graphics could do on the hardware available.

User Beware

2008-10-02T00:54:00.000+01:00

Its probably best if you don't read this.