Playing the Game
In an era of technological possibility in the field of sound design, the only limit is imagination.
When audio designer Ashton Mills (Guildhall alumnus, Leadership 2012) wanted sound effects inspiration for the BAFTA winning video game, Among the Stones, he simply went or a walk in his garden. “I was smashing up rocks and recording that, or rubbing a car tyre on the ground,” he says. “You just have to be creative. I’ve since been to a farm — and to an armoury to record the sounds of coal and fire and hot metal for a bit of a game where you can mine and smelt metals. We’ve brought children into the studio to record laughs and squeals.”
This is sound design — the artistic engineering of sound — and it’s everywhere, from films and adverts to interactive exhibitions and video games. The discipline started, so the story goes, in the 1920s, when Jack Foley recorded sound effects live over a silent movie in California. Now, in an era of technological possibility, the only limit for students going into the field is their imagination.
“In our department, sound design underlies everything we do,” says Professor Mike Roberts, Head of Electronic Music and Music Technology at Guildhall School. “All the boundaries are crumbling. It used to be when you worked on a film that the sound effects department and the music department didn’t really talk to each other. They were very separate. But now they’re morphing. Composers get involved in musical effects, sound effect artists venture into music. From the moment you’re dealing with sound sources being ambiguous — special effects like bowing cymbals, for example — then that’s sound design.”
Whether it’s for a game, film, advert or trailer, the “act of creating sonic manipulations” is very similar, continues Roberts, and there is more and more crossover between media and genre. “Memorably, Ford commissioned an artist to make musical instruments out of car parts for an advert, for example, and a Honda advert featured a choir to replicate the sounds their cars make. The technique of sound design is artistic and exploratory and that doesn’t change. What changes are the commercial realities.”
Roberts has recently worked with students on an exhibition for the Museum of London, called Beasts of London. “I had about 12 composers and eight sound designers. The sound designers were doing the diegetic, narrative work — recreating what you would expect to hear if you were in that situation. The music enhances the emotional experience of the visitor. The two work in parallel and collaboration is about balance, not conflict. In the real world it’s more complicated — it depends on the director, and the musical underscore can get cut. The relationship between sound design and music is being redefined, project by project.”
Mills, who works for game company Jagex, started out in composing, but soon “fell in love” with sound design. “There’s something very immediate about it,” he explains. “It’s granular, you work on lots of different elements that build up. And sound effects are part science. You know what they should sound like.” Mills usually finds himself working with developers and designers, working on the ‘dark art’ of implementation. “If your character is going to walk on grass or on a wooden bridge, it needs to trigger a different sound. As a sound designer for a game you work a few steps behind the developer, not quite alongside. You attach sounds to the animation. To implement audio, you need to write code in game scripts so that the sound effects you’ve made play in the right place. You need to think creatively about the technical side.”
In fact, the way a sound designer works on any given project will depend on a wide range of factors, from the medium you’re working on to the size of the company. “On a small, indie game you might record the ambient sounds, the game play effects, the music and the voiceover yourself,” says composer and sound designer Marios Aristopoulos, who lectures in Game Audio at Guildhall. “On a game like Blizzard, however, there were 45 sound designers! 3,000 people worked on Red Dead Redemption. You might work in a studio, often in a basement with no windows, or you might work from home. I once did a game in China where I didn’t meet anyone, not even on Skype. I did the whole thing via email.”
Despite the technology, sound design often begins organically, says Roberts. “A lot of the richest pickings start with an acoustic sound, then use technology to manipulate it. It’s hard work to create any natural resonance from something purely electronic. It sounds very alien, artificial. We are not so far from the days of radio studios using coconut shells for horses’ hooves.”
When Aristopoulos was composing music for the hit PlayStation game, Apotheon, he used traditional instruments such as the Armenian duduk, or the ney, which was popular in ancient Greece, finding musicians in Greece who could play the instruments. “This was probably my favourite project to work on because the music is so loved,” he says. “I’m proud to say my music was used in Athens at the torch-lighting ceremony of the Special Olympics World Games Abu Dhabi 2019.”
Game soundtracks are becoming increasingly valued in their own right, and James Allen, a Film Music student, is so convinced of their value, he has started an orchestra at Guildhall to perform game music in a traditional concert hall setting. His first concert will be music from the game, Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture, composed by Jessica Curry. “I’d love composers to see that game music is as viable, respectable and exciting as any music,” says Allen.
In this story-based game, you move slowly through a town in Somerset that has become a quarantine zone. “To me, it’s the most amazing experience of any art form,” says Allen. “If the definition of art is creating a story or a vision for someone via some kind of medium, then a game, with its visuals, actors, poetic words and incredible music, is the best kind of art. And when you listen to the music, you’re back in the game.”
The word ‘experience’ here is key. “When you play a game you can control a very detailed story for 20 or 30 hours,” says Allen, “and the way you play it is completely unique.” Aristopoulos agrees: “That aspect puts the creator in a different position. You don’t know what the player is going to do. You might create the sound of footsteps, but if the player is going to run for half an hour, you need to vary that sound.”
Teaching students the breadth of skills required in sound design is a challenge. “The evolving nature of technology means no-one knows where we will be 10 years from now,” says Aristopoulos. “You could be fully trained in one thing that is outdated in a few years. In virtual reality right now, for example, there are no experts yet, people are figuring it out as they go along. The role of education is to expose students to a wide range of stimulating influences, widen their horizons, and help them develop their own voice.”
“To be a great sound designer, yes, you have to have the technical skills, but you can learn skills on YouTube,” says Mills. “What I got from studying was discipline, ways of thinking, developing my ears. In the real world you need to communicate and collaborate. You need to be nice! You need to be able to build an idea. To do something, reflect on it and change. And I learned how to do all that at Guildhall.”
This article first featured in the Spring/Summer 2019 edition of the Guildhall magazine, PLAY, and was written by YBM for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
