The Art of Audio

Lost among the hype of screenshots and gameplay is the hidden art of audio and its role in next-gen gaming (and movies). In part, being hidden is no bad thing—usually if audio is the focal point of a review or comment, it's in a negative light. Conversely, audio that remains hidden is a mark of seamless integration that immerses you wholly into war zones, eerie hallways, roaring race tracks, and the like.

Community guru for Xbox® and Xbox 360™, Major Nelson, sat down with Scott Selfon, the Senior Audio Specialist in the Microsoft Game Technology Group, to talk about all things audio as it relates to games.

For the full scoop you can listen to the interview here, or feel free to read on for a rundown of what was highlighted.

A Next-Gen Helping Hand
To put it simply, Scott's job is to help the audio engineers for game developers implement the audio as easily and effectively as possible on Xbox 360. As Scott puts it, "One of the things I try to help out with … making it as easy for people who are the artists, who can create sound effects and create music to plug those into a game without having to become programmers and have to get into all the technical nitty-gritty."

Though not often talked about, the audio
in-game can make or break the experience.

The Challenge of Unique Audio
Scott also points out the challenge of creating audio for a game as opposed to a movie when he mentions, "Creating sound effects in a game is really kind of challenging, because in a film, when the bad guy shoots his gun, you can go to a sound effects library, or you go out to the field and find someone who has that gun, and you can record it, and get it exactly right. And it sounds great … in a movie. You do that in a video game, you do that once, and the player fires that gun and says, 'Yeah, that sounded good,' but then you fire it ten more times—you can't just play that exact same gunshot time every time. You have to find ways to vary it. As a sound designer, you have to deliver every possible experience, and it's a lot more than a linear experience in a movie."

Built in Real-Time Audio
The challenge listed above is still very real, but there is something next-gen hardware, and in particular, Xbox 360, can bring to the table. In the preceding case, the audio hardware and software built into Xbox 360 allows for real-time reverberation. This means that a single sound effect can be altered innumerably based on what you tell the system is surrounding the sound.

For example, as Scott puts it, "I can have the same gunshot, and if I shoot in a cave it will echo around, and if I should it in the bathroom, well, it will still echo around but in a different way. Being able to do that in real-time is a huge advantage over previous generations where you actually had to just ignore reverb, or they would actually bake the reverb into the sound."

The technology offered by Xbox 360 allows
for a much richer, varied, and more detailed
audio experience in every next-gen game.

Now, with reverb built into the system the audio engineer can worry about creating a unique tapestry of sounds and less about creating a single sound thirty different ways to account for every different environment.

User Soundtracks
There's no question that being able to stream music from your PC or directly from Xbox 360 while playing a game is a popular feature, but it also presented a unique challenge for developers.

Developers spend significant money crafting and implementing the score and sound effects for their game. The "happy medium," as Scott puts it, was to tag the background music separately from all the other sound effects in the game. That way, every last sound effect, every last bit of dialogue was still heard as intended while allowing the background music to be replaced by your own tunes.

Though not often talked about, the audio in-game can make or break the experience. Furthermore, the technology offered by Xbox 360 and the help offered by folks like Scott Selfon allow for a much richer, varied, and more detailed audio experience in every next-gen game.

Article by Ryan Treit