We're privileged to live in an age where a sound isn't limited to its initial output, we can alter them with ease through the use of computer software which allows us to take a simple noise and turn it into what ever we within reason want.
The screenshots below should hopefully go some ways to making a point of how quickly and easily you can alter a sound recording.
This screenshot shows how the original sound file can be quickly cut to remove any unnecessary gaps in audio. This makes for a much more concise audio segment which then requires no queueing and can be played
Here you can see how the all the processes you've used to alter the audio are listed in a table which allows you to easily rearrange and toggle them on or off.
This image showcases the interface for one of the reverb functions, PlatinumVerb. This interface allows you to play your audio sequence whilst altering all the settings, thus letting you hear every individual alteration without having to replay the clip a hundred billion times to try and pin down what the difference between one play-through and the other is.
The above 2 images show how equalising a segment of audio changes the waveform. The first wave is how the audio looked before equalising and the second one is post equalisation, as you can see there is a much smaller difference between the peaks and troughs. This means that the loudest and quietest parts of the clip have less of a range between them, reducing the chance of eardrums being burst by unexpectedly loud noises.
Sound in Interactive Media
The world of interactive media is constantly evolving and changing in pretty much every aspect. To use video games as an example, graphics are improving as polygon counts go up, the quality of the average game is going up as the computers that produce games are ever upgrading and evolving. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the sound aspect of games and interactive media on the whole is remaining the same or stagnating, though it definitely isn’t.
As we surge forward with advances to our computers the sound industry also benefits as the tools they use to produce audio also evolve and progress. Sounds needn’t at your finger tips in order for you to be able to record them anymore, today’s technology allows us to synthesize any noise through the use of audio-altering software such as Audacity or Logic Pro. These programs allow us to take a tone from a built in sample library or use a recording and apply a seemingly endless amount of downloadable or preinstalled filters, distortions, reverbs etc to it. Simply put, if you have the required proficiency with such software you can take one sound and manufacture it into what ever sound you require.
With all this talk of digital sound advancing and evolving you could mistakingly think that the world of authentic, organic sound is dead on the water and doomed to be left behind, though that’s far from true. If the specific sound an interactive media developer requires exists in the realms of our normal word and he/she has access to a decent Foley artist then there’s a good chance that sound will be produced au naturel. A Foley artist, if you didn’t know, is a person responsible for recording sounds to be used in media when that sound would be difficult to obtain at the clarity and volume required by the director. For example, if there’s a scene where a man on horseback rides onscreen then odds are you’re not hearing the actual sound made by that horse as it moves, it’ll be a man or woman in a soundproof room messing about with two halves of a coconut and some chains respectively, these sounds will then be placed over one another. Once you start thinking about how often Foley is used it’s difficult to ever see films or TV series the same way again, you’ll begin to notice that the sound of that man sipping his coffee or the sound of that raven squawking overhead are all made post filming. Unfortunately for me it’s seeming quite hard to disregard this knowledge and some magic has definitely been lost.
Stepping away from the doom and gloom of ignorance lost, interactive medias such as games often make very good use of voiceovers. These voiceovers help to set a narrative and without them the game could well be much less immersive in that the characters around you would be without a voice and as a result will almost always be less relatable. Just like a good Foley artist will be able to recreate the sound of a horse riding through down a cobble road or a good sound engineer will be able to fabricate sounds of explosions, a good voice actor can give life to a character and instantly and quite literally set the tone for how that character will be received. If you were to go back and rerecord the iconic voices of certain characters it would instantly change the feel of the game, think Duke Nukem with a high-pitched child’s voice. The tone of the game would instantly be set very differently.
In conclusion I feel like I’ve gone some way to explaining just how vital sound is in interactive media by explaining just some of the ways it’s produced and used. It’s hard to imagine what things would be like if we still were constricted by the limitations of sound production in the past, change from one year to the next is subtle and so it’s hard to notice them but when you look back at films such as the original Star Wars and imagine that the sound of the blasters was the pinnacle of audio production today as it was all those years ago then it’s plain to see how far we’ve come and how far we’ll likely go in another 37 years. If nothing else, it all sounds pretty decent to me.
