Initial overview of project/Mechanical bird plan
The majority of the sounds required for the game are foley and ambient sounds, although important these sounds do not, for the most part, lend themselves to creative licence. As this is the case, we have created lists of sounds from the documents provided for us separating or highlighting the creative sounds from the ‘necessary’ sounds. This way we can each take on the responsibility of recording some necessary sound, whilst also having a creative sound to dive into more deeply.
As of today our team has conducted two foley sessions in which we recorded sounds for levels 1 and 2. These mostly included footsteps, interactive sounds such as picking up and opening books and folders, and ambient elements such as typing and chair creaks. With such a large collection of these sounds being required for the game, this foley process is turning out to be repetitive and tedious, therefore I don’t think I will be talking a lot about it, in short the process is record, edit file, send to MA students. Instead I would like to focus this project on the more creative sounds.
I have started with a sound in level 2, the mechanical bird sound. In this level the player is interacting with the space from the perspective of a mechanical bird, so far the size of the bird hasn’t been specified but I’m assuming it’s approximately the size fo a sparrow. The main elements I have to keep in mind whilst creating this sound is the proximity to the character (almost inside the character, as the character is the bird) and the size and weight of the bird (this determines the pitch of the sound and also the frequency of the flaps).
I would also like to make use of a lot of layering with this sound, I think the challenge is going to be seamlessly merging the mechanical with the biological. I believe that the sound of the bird should retain a strong biological essence, as the level is about a fond memory situated in nature, this to me suggests an organic quality to the sound.
This is an extract from my research on Dune in a previous post, I believe it’s relevant here and I plan to do more in depth research into exactly how the ornithopter sound was created.
‘Denis wanted the technology of this world to be grounded, as real as possible, so it didn’t become a distraction from the story. He wanted the audience to embrace the technology spontaneously. An example was the ‘Ornithopter’, it was based on insects, he wanted the vehicle to function like an insect and look like a military vehicle. The sound, Denis said, should be close to the spirit of a helicopter, in the same family but not the same. The sound team used recordings of beetles and other insects to create a helicopter sound with a natural quality.
Mark Mangini states that we can be more successful in our sound design when we start with natural recordings. He thinks that the reason for this could possibly be that we have a psychoacoustic response telling us that the sound is real, the time arrival to the ear and the acoustic environment in which a sound lives might be a subconscious identifier for reality. Whether this theory is correct or not, I think he is right. The brain responds to natural sounds differently to synthesised sounds, I’ve created synthesisers out of vocal recordings and they are very un-natural as an acoustic sound, but retain an organic natural quality. These natural sound ‘ingredients’ are all in service to quickly and effectively suspend the audiences disbelief. We can present sounds that are decontextualised from what it really is, present them in a new context and your brain doesn’t have to understand what the original sound was it just recognises that it’s real.’