Horowitz, S. and Looney, S.(2014). The Essential Guide to Game Audio. London: Focal Press.

Marks, A. (2001). Game Audio For Composers, Musicians, Sound Designers, and Game Developers. CMP Media LLC.

Sanger, G. (2004). The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsles of Sonic Goodness. New Riders Publishing.

Stevens, R. and Raybould, D.(2011). The Game Audio Tutorial: A Practical Guide to Sound and Music for Interactive Games. Focal Press.

Milton, M. (2014) Sound Devices 633 – First Look Review. [online] Mary Milton – freelance sound recordist. Available from: http://marymilton.co.uk/sound-devices-633-first-look/ [Accessed October 21st 2015]. 

For the project we decided that we needed some epic and suspensive battle music, as well as magical story leading melodies. We looked in to copyright free music online as well ass the Library Music available to us at the University’s Media Stores.

The selected tracks are:

LIBRARY MUSIC:

ALBUM: EPIC ACTION & ADVENTURE Volume 4 – – Composer: Tobias Marberger (STIM)/ Gabriel Shadid (BMI) – Publisher: EPIC SCORE, LLC – 2009

Track:  Black Gates of Grebbestad (A)

Track:  Black Gates of Grebbestad (B)

Track:  Imperious Troops (B)

Track:  Stabbing Hate (A)

Track:  Twisted Fate (A)

Track:  Dangerous Rescue (A and B)

Tempting Secrets – Tempting Secrets Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

 

 

 

A special thank you post for the ARMY!  The Army and crowd sound effects were created by recording and layering the screams of our four friends on the picture below and our own contributions. Using a track layering and printing technique in combination with the Audio Suite option in Pro Tools, as suggested by Games Sound Designer Nick Dixon during a talk on sound effects design in the University of Lincoln in April 2016. This way I was able to create the great armies of Demacia and Noxus during the battle in Episode 1 – The Rune Wars.

The Post production and sound design process was primarily lead by the nature of Heuristic Mixing. During a talk on sound effects design, Video Game Sound Designer Nick Dixon explained that this type of mixing is lead by intuitive judgements, or in other words by creativity and personal sonic perception.  Another useful technique that Nick spoke about was frequency dips which are part of Frequency mixing. Freq. Mixing involves the removal of some frequencies so others can stand out, as opposed to just raising or lowering the volume. I adopted this technique during some stages of the mixing process of the tracks.

The structure the of the process in this case would be the capture of the sound -> editing of the audio elements -> mixing it the way you want it to sound ->analyzing what you did and why -> reviewing the effect and moving on to the next one.

Nick also spoke about perceptive volume where priority is given to perceptually louder sounds. In our project’s case the main sound is the Narration, everything else is lead by the voice, consequentially within the soundscape itself perceptive volume has been applied to several aspects that can be heard beneath the Vocal tracks.

 

For the various effects that we required for this project we decided to create our own original effects. Recording various sounds in foley such as metallic hits with different objects, clangs and crashes which were later used as sword sounds and layers for the army’s equipment during marching. We also recorded a lot of footsteps on different surfaces with different shoes which were later transformed in to various elements of the soundscapes.

 
We used the Sound Devices 633 Field recorder for our Foley sound using the Sennheizer MKH 416 and some times combining the MKH with a AKG414 for variations and different perspectives.

We also used a few sound effects from the BBC Sound Effect Library in the Sound Theater such as the Thunder sound in Episode 1 and The Shotgun Blast including the initial door breaking layer of sound and one wind atmosphere.

The thunderstorm I created by adding a lot of reverb to a recording of a packet of macarroni being crumbled in addition with orange squeezes for a “leeky” sound. The fire was created similarly with the crunching of the packet and with a slight blowing in front of the diaphragm of the microphone, which is layered some cracking sticks.

The Swooshing sounds for example we recorded by Using Jake’s Squash Rackets. We swung them in front of the microphone during foley.

The magical sounds were created with the combination of Sound theater library effects and MIDI synth manipulation in pro tools.

HOW DID WE CREATE THE ARMY AND THE SHOUTS AND SCREAMS?