P3 Music Exercise. Planning and Creating Sound

Level 3 Extended Diploma in Games Development

Unit 73 Sound for Computer Games

Lecturer: Josh Rai

Aims:

P3 Be able to create sound assets for a computer game following industry practice.

Creating sound assets for a computer game following industry practice, working within appropriate conventions and with some assistance.

Exercise:

Using your exercises and assignment 1, plan a small piece of music for one of the following styles/genres.

Shoot em’up

Platform game (for a console/pc or smart phone).

Racing game

Sports game (you can choose the sport).

Remember: you must consider genre, sample rate, stereo/mono, audio storyboard, file storage, naming conventions, production planning, and quality assurance.

Extension:

Research and answer the following questions.

How will you monitor what you have recorded?

How will you monitor recording levels?

If you finish see me so I can check the above questions then you can begin recording/creating the music you have just planned.

-Genre: Ratchet and Clank style platformer. A 2D or 3D fun and cartoonish puzzle platformer. Music must be lively and enjoyable to fit the tone of the game.

-Instruments: Lively drum beats, cymbals, bass guitar. Construction noises (Foley): drilling, hammer hitting metal, etc.

-Mono & Stereo: The music would most likely be Stereo output, but we could use 3D audio effects to simulate the feeling of Surround sound without needing several speakers.

-File Formats: We would create this music using GarageBand so it could be exported as an MP3 file. This has a low file size and is extremely sharable. However, this is a Lossy compression format and would lose a large portion of the quality so we may decide to export as an AIFF. AIFF is uncompressed file format so would have a very large file size but would have better quality. It is the native uncompressed format for Apple computers.

-File Naming: The file would be organised into a folder named something like “background music”. The file itself would be named something like “level 1 music, Construction”.

-Sample rate: After some research we found at that 48KHz is an acceptable sample rate when recording audio. Most people do not perceive a difference in sound or noise above 20KHz so 48KHz is appropriate.

-Quality Assurance: Changing the volume of the track to check for distortion. Testing the game and the soundtrack side by side to assess whether it fits into the game’s tone.

-Production Planning: We have this afternoon, approximately 2 hours, to compose the soundtrack. There is two of us so we could potentially work on different tracks or different parts of the same track to maximise efficiency.

How will you monitor what you have recorded?

-This is the process of creating an audiolog. This is where the creator of sound notes down the specific parameters of sound such as, the duration, the volume, etc, and what the sound is and their personal opinion on the file recorded.

How will you monitor recording levels?

-Audiometer. A VU meter. A peak program meter. These programs monitor parameters such as decibel level etc.

Recording Sound

Dictaphone - We used a dictaphone to record various mechanical and metal sounds throughout college. We recorded hitting a locker, jangling keys, coffee machine whirring, shoes hitting on stairs. If we had been given more time we probably would have recording more conventional construction sounds such as power drills, cement mixers, hammers, saws, etc.

Editing Sound

GarageBand - We edited the sounds and used preset loops in a music editing program called GarageBand. GB is exclusive to Macintosh devices so we were unable to edit sounds outside of college.

This screenshot shows the creative process as we used preset loops to create a soundtrack.

Here you can see the track is taking shape and it was at this point that we decided to add Foley sounds. We used the jangling keys to make a kind of Tambourine sound and we used the locker bang to create a drum beat.