Unit 73: Sound for Computer Games, Assignment 1

Assignment 1a +1b

The Last of Us

The music is very suspenseful and creepy to me. Its slow Flamenco guitar like sound creates a sense of tension because there are pauses between each pluck. The lack of any speech during the track helps to increase the sense of loneliness and isolation. After some research, I found out that the guitar used is actually a Ronroco. The Ronroco is a stringed mandolin like instrument of the Andean regions. It has a sound box traditionally fashioned from the shell of an armadillo or tortoise, now often made of wood. It typically has 10 strings in five courses of 2 strings each. It is similar to a Charango, but larger.

A Ronroco

The music has a wild west theme to it and I could easily imagine this score accompanying an old western film. This conjures lots of images of lone wanderers moving across a desert landscape. It also reminds me of the game Red Dead Redemption, which is a western game set in the U.S. and Mexico in 1911.This is the main theme for Red Dead Redemption and it gives off a similar feel.

The long slow plucks of the Ronroco create a very slow and sad feel to the music. Personally it gives me the feeling of a certain loss that the musician is lamenting over. In the game the main character Joel is exposed to a great loss, in the loss of his daughter. As the music picks up towards the end it gives a sense of an ever increasing danger. This parallels the gameplay as the two protagonists are constantly in danger of being killed. The music becomes slightly more vibrant and gives a sense of adventure without becoming joyful.

 

The composer is a famous Argentine musician called Gustavo Santaolalla. He has won two Academy Awards for Best Original Score in two consecutive years, for Brokeback Mountain in 2005, and Babel in 2006. This renown has helped The Last of Us to gain extra publicity and the main theme lists Gustavo Santaolalla as the composer of the track, which is a little unusual. This may well have been because of the terms of a contract drawn up between the two parties. This is a link to Gustavo Santaolalla's IMDB page that lists all of his work in the media industries:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0763395/ 

Gustavo Santaolalla

The Last of Us is a Playstation exclusive and features on both, the playstation 3 and playstation 4.

Playstation uses Dolby Digital that is an AC3 or AAC sound file. This is a lossy compression format. The Playstation 3 uses DD 5.1 and the Playstation 4 uses DD 7.1. The Playstation 3 uses Linar PCM 2 channel audio which means it produces Stereo sound. The Playstation 4 uses five channels of audio that have a Hertz range of (20Hz - 20,000Hz) The limitations of using a Lossy compression format would mean that the audio conveyed would not be as higher quality as the original audio.

In terms of audio, the PS3 supports a number of formats, including 7.1 digital audio, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio and others; audio output is possible over stereo RCA cables (analog), optical digital cables, or HDMI. The PS3 slim features an upgraded HDMI chip that allows bitstreaming of lossless audio codecs to an external receiver (earlier versions had to decode the signal internally before outputting it via LPCM).

This piece of music was most likely recorded as individual layers and then pieced together and edited in a studio. This video clip shows the developers recording sounds for the game including drums, guitar, flute e.t.c. It clearly shows them recording and then editing the sounds into a complete track. This would be recorded using Multi-track recording to allow the audio to be played through two or more speakers. Playstation 3 and 4 use can use surround sound and many of their customers have surround sound setups. This means that the developers would most likely remix the track to cater to surround sound systems.

Multitrack recording (MTR)—also known as multitracking, double tracking, or tracking—is a method of sound recording that allows for the separate recording of multiple sound sources to create a cohesive whole. Multitrack recording is a process where the tape is divided into multiple tracks parallel with each other. Because they are carried on the same medium, the tracks stay in perfect synchronisation. The first development in multitracking was stereo sound, which divided the recording head into two tracks. Stereo sound has become the standard format in most media and so Multi-track recording is often used.

http://day9.tv/d/Moomintroll/musical-instrument-in-last-of-us-soundtrack/

The piece of music was likely copyrighted to Gustavo Santaolalla and the developers of The Last of Us. Since this was an original work and was composed exclusively for The Last of Us it would have been a previously agreed contract that Gustavo Santaolalla would have fulfilled by completing this music.

Copyright

-Copyright is law that protects an original work from being used by anyone other than the original creator. It grants exclusive rights to the content, usually for a limited time. This applies to music as well.

Royalties

-Is money paid to a party for the ongoing use of a copyrighted product. The original creator usually agrees on a fixed price for use of certain assets. Unlike other forms of intellectual property, music royalties have a strong linkage to individuals – composers (score), songwriters (lyrics) and writers of musical plays – in that they can own the exclusive copyright to created music and can license it for performance independent of corporates.

Little Big Planet

These are some of the thoughts I had while listening to Dead Heat:
-Suspenseful

-Intimidating

-Electronic

-Gives of a feeling of sneaking or moving through an area of danger.

Instruments:

-Drums and symbols

-War of the worlds like brass instrument
-Bass Guitar

-Second half of the music sounds very much like the theme to a spy film e.t.c.

It is also very similar to the Untouchables main theme by Ennio Morricone.



 The second half of the track reminds me of this track from the game Ratchet and Clank. The use of various drums gives a funky, lively feel to the track.

After some research I found out that the composer of Dead Heat is Barry Adamson. It was originally composed in 1993 as part of his EP called "The Negro Inside Me". Therefore this piece is an original work and was not originally intended for use inside a video game. It is very interesting how Little Big Planet used this music to fit a child friendly platformer game given the more mature EP title.

Barry Adamson

This music is part of the official soundtrack of Little Big Planet 3 which is a platform game focused around creativity and co-operative play. Little Big Planet 3 is available for the PlayStation3 and PlayStation4. This music to me gives the impression of going through a largely mechanical or industrial area of the game. The mixed up and varied symbols and drums create images of old mechanical parts or even robots. I imagine a scene where there are objects such as gears, conveyer belts, elevator lifts, etc. It would mostly play as background music to create ambience and to excite the player. It may also be used when the player is facing a difficult enemy or a boss as it has quite an intimidating feel, especially in the first few seconds. I noticed that Dead Heat is very similar to the soundtrack to the film "Enter the Dragon". Enter the Dragon is a famous, cult, martial arts film starring Bruce Lee. This has most likely been used as inspiration for the track and has taken the iconic images of Enter the Dragon and capitalized on this. When this was originally composed it most likely drew up images of martial arts film action and the enigmatic Bruce Lee.

In comparison to "The Last of Us" soundtrack this piece would probably be of lesser quality and the developers may have tidied up the music in editing software such Adobe Audition to try and achieve better sound quality. This is because the original work was composed in 1993 and there have been improvements in various audio recording and editing software since then.

The original music would most likely have been an uncompressed format when originally recorded such as a WAV or AIFF. It would then have been converted into a Lossy compressed format for use in the PlayStation such as Mp3 or RA. This process would lessen the quality of the music when compared with the original score. It may have been recorded live with a band in a studio, which would use a Digital Signal Processor to convert the analogue sounds of the instruments to a digital format. However because of it's synthetic feel it may well have been made using a synthesizer or recorded as separate sounds and meshed together in the studio.  Midi – Multi Instrument Interface - is information that computers use to play back certain instrument sounds. It works on any computer hardware that utilises a synthesiser. For example: when you record music onto a computer using MIDI, the software saves this list of messages and instructions as a .MID file. If you play the .MID file back on an electronic keyboard, the keyboard's internal synthesizer software follows the instructions to play back the song. The keyboard will play a certain key with a certain velocity and hold it for a specified amount of time before moving on to the next note. Therefore MIDI is used in a variety of areas to create or recreate music without the use of the original instruments.

RAM can limit the recording and editing of sound, as complex software requires a lot of RAM to run smoothly. Video encoding and Sound encoding are very RAM and processor intensive. If the computer being used does not have enough RAM it may take much longer to encode the media.

RAM (pronounced ramm) is an acronym for random access memory, a type of computer memory that can be accessed randomly; that is, any byte of memory can be accessed without touching the preceding bytes. RAM is the most common type of memory found in computers and other devices, such as printers.

The developers would also have to gain permission from the composer Barry Adamson to use the piece of music. This is because the original piece would have been copyrighted to Barry Adamson. They would most likely agree on a contract to pay royalties to Barry Adamson according to the contract. This would most likely be a fixed fee and might include clauses that stop Barry Adamson from selling this piece of music to another corporation, such as for another video game/

The music and various instruments within that music would have varying degrees of these parameters:

Amplitude is the size of the vibration, and this determines how loud the sound is.  We have already seen that larger vibrations make a louder sound.

Frequency is the speed of the vibration, and this determines the pitch of the sound.  It is only useful or meaningful for musical sounds, where there is a strongly regular waveform.

Wavelength In physics, wavelength is the distance between two successive identical parts of a wave It is commonly designated by the Greek letter lambda (λ).
Hertz is the unit of frequency, symbol Hz

Pitch is the subjective allocation of a sounds frequency on a scale. It relates to how high or low we perceive the sound to be. It is closely related to frequency but is not the exact same.

Decibel level is a measurement of a sounds pressure level. It is measured in relation to the typical threshold of a human ear. Decibels themselves are a measurement of a ratio between two variables.