Questions for game sound engineers?

Hi all,

We have the opportunity to ask a few interview style questions in a blog post to a company who has made sounds for EA games, Nintendo, Sega and more! They welcomed our invitation to answer any questions we might have about sounds in games in general, so I thought I would ask you guys if you have any questions in particular you think might be interesting to ask?

Don't be shy to ask anything you want or are curious about!

Anyway post them here, I can't promise they will all be asked/answered, but I will do my best!

Tom

Are there any tools for sound "sculpting/morphing" that they could recommend for people getting started in sound design, hopefully that are easy to use and relatively inexpensive for those of us with small budgets? Or tools that are good for coming up with a unique sounding instrument for a synthesizer?

Basically - where do they recommend someone new to sound design to start?

Nice. Games are a multimedia experience, so branching out is always a good idea.

I would be curious to know their methodology. We have tools that give us simple old school sounds, sine, square etc, and then there's always the mic, but that leaves a bit to be desired when you want to start to expand.

Also, stuff like how do they "look" for sounds. Do they just say hmm a doing, or a boink would work here?

is there a way we can find out which company they are, or which games they may have worked on, because that would really affect the types of questions I'd ask

Hi Lucid,

Don't see why I can't mention it

The company is Soundrangers, (http://www.soundrangers.com/)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundrangers

Tom

k, not familiar with the sound of any of those games, but thanks tom!

Like Newt, I would like to know how do they communicate to each other: is everyone making tchhhh, pschhh, zoink in project meetings or do they have fast prototyping stuff?

Reading the wiki is a bit confusing. Are those guys sound engineers ? It looks more like they are coders who made an audio library. I'm not sure if they are actually making sounds or providing a way to have this sounds played in games.

Anyway, let's ask a few questions.

Like lucid I'm not really familiar with their list of games.

Nevertheless I see a lot of "web" tags, so I would like to know the format of sound they used.

How do they deal with the problem quality/size of the file in the end (I guess they have a certain amount of space given in the final product, how do they handle putting all the ressources in a limited amount of storage).

I'd like also their take about the opinion on the future of audio handling in html5 (related to Ashley's last blog entry, even if I'm sure you guys are already up to ask it ;) )

I would also like to know if they ever have to deal with "dynamic" music. In the past (understand the 90's) I remember of some games popping up on the market and putting the "dynamical music" as a feature. The music was to follow the action. If you were in a quiet room with no ennemies, music was cool and calm and as soon as ennemies, or something would happen, the music would became more aggressive/rythmed to follow with the action.

So what's the status on this technology in 2011, how is it handled, is it still actual or was the concept abandonned ?

As sound engineer, how do they handle such technology, do they only deal with the musical part (as in writing variations of the same theme that would fit any action given) or do they have a take on the coding part ? the scenario writting part ?

soundrangers.com/index.cfm

Says "The members of the Soundrangers Sound Design Team have been creating sound effects and music for decades".

Good questions so far! Thanks! Should get interesting answers back hopefully :)

I see now that I mixed "library of sound" with "audio library".

Yet I think most of my questions still stands, and also I'd like to add :

Working with/for big publishers (EA, mricrosoft, etc...)

Nowadays, publishers tends to assign dev studios on a project. How did it work for the project they worked on ? Did they had a close relation with the dev studios ? publishers ?

What were the workflow like ? (Did they have to work at the devs location or was it remote work from their studios, sending the ressources once they were done)

love soundrangers,

i used them for my first game on the app store.

I remember when you would jump on Yoshi and all the sudden the drums would come in.

That was like... NASA technology.

Do they just get a list of sounds to be implemented or do they get a silent version of the game they have to act on?

Is voice recording very different than sound recording?

Do they keep exotic animals in the office, just in case?

What are the most unusual objects/materials they got sound out from?

Whoa weird coincidence. This is the site my team decided on for sound in our game. We bought a build-your-own 50 pack from them. They're not bad. They seem a bit on the expensive side in my personal opinion, and a lot of the sounds we bought have to be remixed into something more suitable for our needs, but I wasn't the one putting up the money so hey :P

Any update on this ?

Or in the end did you just asked questions about HTML5 audio support (as reported in the blog) ?