Sackboy's Voice - Full Of Eastern Promise

I'm back from a two week trip to Japan. It's the longest and most far, far away holiday I've had for many years. There were lots of temples, photos, temples, walking, temples, eating, temples, a proposal of marriage and more temples. I even managed to make a few sound recordings; the massive ravens which are everywhere, lots of other birdsong, Buddhist chanting, trains, pedestrian and level crossings. I'm looking forward to giving them a listen and a bit of an edit. Oh, and did I mention the temples?

So, I'm feeling refreshed and ready for the year ahead. Mr. Credit Card isn't looking so healthy. He could just about handle the holiday; I seem to recall he was actually quite looking forward to it as he doesn't get out the wallet much, never mind the country. But he started to turn a strange colour when I asked him to take on the engagement ring. "That's what you're for" I told him. He said I had to "give him lots of money" if we were to remain friends. The bastard!

In other news, LittleBigPlanet has been nominated for 8 GANG awards. There's some symmetry there with the 8 AIAS awards the game won at DICE last week, ignoring the fact that none of those were for audio BUT you don't win Game of the Year and Console Game of the Year without good audio so I'm a winner too. Or so I keep telling myself.

Interestingly, Sackboy won an AIAS award for Outstanding Character Performance, so I am now officially an Academy Award winning voice actor. Yes, thank you, thank you ladies and gentlemen. No autographs please, put those pens away. If you'd like me to cough or hold my breath in the Sack-stylee as some after-dinner entertainment then contact my mum. Be warned though, she drives a hard bargain, and you'd be best advised not refuse her offer of a wee cup of tea.

Seriously though, I think the sound design decision not to litter the Sackfolk with inane voice samples contributed significantly towards that award. This is something which some sound designers find hard to resist - there are a couple of 3rd party trailers and adverts out there where some arse has added chipmunk voices to the Sackfolk to make them sound comic and cute. This is a great example of something which is easy to do in the linear medium (so deceptively easy it doesn't actually require any thought) turning out to be almost impossibly hard to do [properly] in the interactive medium. Which would be purely academic were it not for the fact that an inability to speak is a strong component of the Sackboy/Sackgirl IP.

Ignoring implementation issues such as contextual blindness and technical limitations such as memory constraints, not having a voice allows players to feel that their Sackboy, which they lovingly dress, customise and emote with, is theirs. This sense of ownership would be hard to achieve if the character you were controlling had a mind of their own, voice and language being the most personal way of communication and expression. Which is why when Sackboy does speak it is with the voice of his player, his lips moving to match those of his puppet master.

Anyways, in addition to the 8 nominations from GANG, there are also nominations for the two audio categories at the BAFTA video games awards and the audio award at GDC, so there's still the chance for some award winning audio love coming towards LittleBigPlanet over the next couple of months.

If you want to read more about the audio in LittleBigPlanet then check out my recently published article at Music4Games, and keep an eye out for the March edition of Game Developer Magazine.

Game Developers as Toilets

I haven't been thinking about sound much this last week - been doing mainly music t'ings. In its place then, some silliness...

At lunch yesterday the coders were discussing "what kind of programmer are you": are you the kind of programmer that comes along and torpedoes the toilet lovingly constructed by the other programmers? Or are you the kind of programmer that enjoys licking the toilet clean?

Others were "confused as to why we have to keep re-imagining the toilet what with it having been invented already", "sick and tired of the toilet being engaged all the time" and "convinced there is more money to be made in the construction of urinals".

Programmers, eh?

Feeling left out I decided that I was the bleach; a nice smelling addition, absolutely necessary for an enjoyable toilet experience.

Hypersensitivity to Repetition

I've been aware of it for a few years, but I'm becoming increasingly sensitive to sound repetition. Or, at least, my reaction to repetition has become more intense, usually resulting in me shouting at the TV and digging my nails into Mrs. Kenny's leg with much gnashing of teeth and cries of "WHY?! WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT?!".

I'm not talking about subtle variations of the same sound, I'm talking about playing the exact same sound over and over again without any attempt at variation and with no stylistic or contextual justification for doing so.

Cheap-ass TV adverts are a likely bet to set me off on one of my angry, spitty fits. Likewise for cheap-ass TV documentaries with their obsession of (badly) adding foley to old, silent stock film footage. But when you watch a Hollywood blockbuster you expect a superior experience to no-budget broadcast productions, because someone who cares has been paid a lot of money to put the soundtrack together.

There are exceptions of course. In the pressure cooker of post-production it's understandable that re-using a sound might be the quickest solution, or perhaps even unavoidable when there are an army of audio personnel beavering away. So, last night when I watched Terminator 2 for the first time in many years and heard the same sound being used for gas igniting, a bullet ricochet and a tyre exploding, it intrigued me more than annoyed me; the events were half an hour apart and only a freak (or a specialist) (or a specialist freak) would notice such a thing. I recall that there is a squawk that is used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy for both a passing crow and an orc being shot in the neck by an arrow. The reason these events jump out at me from the soundtrack is that the sound in question is so distinctive that the first time it is heard it lodges itself in my mind as "a nice sound that was fitting and I liked and will no doubt steal that idea one day, muhahahaha", and from that point on it is a marked man and any re-appearance is quite likely to be picked up on by my hyper-annalytical auditory system.

But when I was watching the unusually PR audio-hyped Wall-E last weekend and, on at least three separate occasions, a sound was used over and over again to score the same event without any justification other than pure laziness, I was a bit miffed. There's using a sound again with good reason, as when Eve introduces herself and says her name twice exactly the same way to reinforce the fact that she is artificial, a robot/machine/computer; we're used to hearing the UI sounds on computers being identical which gives us a grounded sense of familiarity that a task is performing as we would expect. Then there's using the same metal impact sound half a dozen times in the space of 2 seconds to score a robot knocking repeatedly on a door because you are enormously crap at your job and are clearly open to the idea of me biting you in the arm and gouging away at your face. Repeatedly.

But why would a beautiful sounding film, albeit one with too much music for my tastes, let its standards slip? The same people who cut the sounds on cheap-ass adverts and TV documentaries are the same people who add multiple instances of library sounds at Pixar without even thinking; non-sound people who need to bring their mute creations to life during production but don't want to pay for it or understand why it's important to use someone who has a clue or gives a rats ass even when it's "just temporary". It's the same people who add temp music as a quick fix and then moan at the composer when their shiny new music isn't identical to the temp track:

"Dammit man, can't you make this music sound more like Thomas Newman? The temp track we're using is perfect!"

"I am Thomas Newman".

Poor old Ben Burtt, it's not his fault.

All of which makes me glad I work in games. Which is ironic considering how dreadfully repetitive sounding games are, especially if you are unfortunate enough to overhear someone else playing one in the same room [shudders]. But at least I have the convenient excuse of games being outrageously repetitive experiences. It's a different kind of repetition though. Honestly.

I'm pretty sure my hypersensitivity is in part due to me actively trying to avoid repetition in my work. If an individual sound event has six variations and is set to have a certain amount of random pitch variation and I don't hear that reflected in-game, then something is broken. As previously mentioned, UI sounds are the exception; not hearing the same sound would be confusing to the user ("why did I get a different result for performing an identical task?") and, personally, I like to take that to the extreme. But if you work in linear media you have no excuse. Except perhaps for pecking-order politics. For that you have my sympathy.

Eraserhead and Library SFX

I finally got around to framing my Eraserhead poster; after 3 years of neglect it now has pride of place in our spare bedroom (which I have secret plans for as "Kenny's Studio", but don't tell the Mrs). It's questionable whether a bedroom is the best place for a disturbing movie poster, but I reckon the only reason it'll give anyone nightmares is if they've actually seen the film. Because it is quite the experience.

The use of sound in Eraserhead (1977), David Lynch's first feature, is oft pointed to by sound designers as a great example of their craft. The intense feeling of being trapped in a relentless, hideous nightmare owes much to the powerful soundtrack constructed by Lynch and Alan Splet. You could never accuse it of being an easy film to watch; a friend of mine would put on Eraserhead when she wanted people to leave her flat after the party had gone on quite long enough. But no matter what you think of the film itself there's no denying that it has its own special sound, albeit not quite as unique as it would have sounded 30 years ago.

I had a proud moment a couple of years back whilst I was working on the pre-production for a project where a senior member of the team had described the work I was showing him as "a bit David Lynch". As flattered as I was this was meant as a put-down, him thinking that this approach wasn't appropriate for the dark, suspenseful thriller we were working on. But I think it nicely illustrates how unique Lynch's body of work is that he can be name-dropped, especially by a non-sound designer, to describe "that sound".

As part of Ann Kroeber's talk at 2007's School of Sound, Frank Behnke played some wonderful interviews he had recorded with Alan Splet on the set of Blue Velvet (Behnke was a student intern at the time). Splet rather matter of factly revealed that all the sounds in Eraserhead were based on library material. This puts the sound design community's obsessive emphasis on recording and using original sounds in to perspective.

High quality original sounds are superior to library sounds, of that there is no doubt, but it's what you do with the material that counts. The "design" in sound design does not come from "designing sounds" but from "designing for sound".

True 'dat.

Part of the reason I say this is of course because I don't have as much time or budget for original SFX as I would like and knowing this little factoid about Eraserhead's soundtrack makes me feel better about that, which probably takes away from the point I'm trying to make. So just pretend you didn't read this last paragraph, and think on...

First Post

One of my colleagues has said to me, on at least three occasions now I might add, "Do you have a blog? I think you'd be good at it - you don't censor yourself". Which isn't really much of a compliment, more of an observation. In fact, "observation" is a bit kind. Let's be honest, it's blatant criticism; they might as well have said "You talk shit, Kenny. It pops in to your head, and it comes straight out of your mouth". Well, be that as it may, I fail to see how that equates to good blogging, or good reading. But I suppose that's your problem now.

I'd never really understood the blog phenomenon. Just... wha? But I've found myself following more and more links of late which end up at someones blog, and the reading is often pretty good (which is why it was linked to in the first place, of course). It is telling that if I then investigate the rest of that person's blog it is of no interest to me whatsoever - it was just that one post which struck a chord, so there's no point in subscribing. But despite the overwhelming utter pointlessness of the vast majority of content of a blog, as long as it produces one interesting post at some point in its life then it has value.

And this is how I have convinced myself it is OK to have a blog. I haven't quite nailed down what I'm going to write about, but it'll be audio or games, or audio in games, no doubt.

If it doesn't work out I'll just blame my colleague for talking shit.