Forum - Week 3 - Breadboarding...

...only with a considerable lack of bread.

For something a little different, Jake and I ran my MP3 player through the ring modulator circuit. The result was quite good, however the video and sound was just typical mobile phone quality. If only we had some water and a waterproof piezo, we could have had the whole shebang. During forum, Jake and I used the waterproof piezo as a speaker inside a plastic cup of water, and picked up the (Nine Inch Nails) vibrations with another piezo jammed underneath the cup. We then swapped piezo roles- the waterproof piezo was the microphone and the piezo underneath was the speaker. The latter worked better, as moving the underwater microphone around in the glass created a variety of timbrel effects on the music (particularly when blowing bubbles through a straw). It was only fair that Reznor got a rest and Tool got a try, so this time we played 'Jimmy' through a ring modulator.


Dual potentiometers



Light sensitive potentiometer



Ring Modulated Tool

AA2 - Week 3 - Process and Planning

I have analysed a section from the XBOX game Burnout Revenge by Criterion. The Burnout series is known for its extreme realisation of speed and spectacular crashes, and Burnout Revenge is one of the fastest and most explosive incarnations. The music is inconsequential to the game, as it is simply a culmination of unheard-of pop-rock bands ("EA TRAX"), and as such I will leave it out. The beginning of the recording is main menu orientation sounds, including up/down selection, choosing selection, changing car colour etc. The race itself begins with a running start, so actual player interaction is not occurring until a noticeable change in the severity of acceleration is heard (about 4 seconds in). The ensuing sound consists primarily of engine/boost noises (player, opponents and traffic), car damage/crashes (same again) and extraneous sound (environment whooshing past, slow-motion SFX, timer or score 'dings').



Special mention must be made regarding the sound when using the slow motion feature, which is used after crashing to steer your wreckage into opponent cars. The on-screen sound has a filter placed over it which makes it sound like it has been covered with a blanket, while an avant-guard style screeching metal sound effect is placed over the top. The sound is reminiscent of sharpening a kitchen knife, or perhaps a church bell tolling in reverse. This can be heard after the boost-then-crash that occurs at 1'30". I wish I could have recorded it in stereo, however I do not want to lug my XBOX all the way into uni on a bus for an assignment that isn't actually an assignment. I had to stop writing each different crash sound heard, as there is a ridiculously large variety. I recall that for Burnout 3: Takedown onwards (Revenge is #4) the developers had the backing of Electronic Arts as their publisher, so the in game sound effects are mostly real recordings. They used real cars and smashed them up with bricks and axes and (of course) other cars, building up a library of sounds that could be layered up at convenient points in the game. As most of us know, the perfect sound effect for an object does not necessarily require that object to make the sound (eg. coconuts for horse hoofs), however the use of real cars for the sounds of twisting metal and smashed windscreens etc. is very believable in Burnout Revenge.



The realisation of speed is helped by the 'whoosh'-ing that occurs fairly frequently during gameplay, triggered by passing traffic, opponents or significant landmarks such as bridges, trees or even road signs. In surround sound (or even stereo) the speed at which the whoosh moves past is analogous to the speed the player is moving past the object, which makes the extreme speed seem all the more treacherous.





~MP3 1.77MB~
~XLS 35KB~

I only did a couple file names, as you get the idea pretty quick. Of course if this was real it would have all of the file names.

Forum - Week 2 - Piezo Party

I have kowtowed to popular culture- here is my youtube videos. Ugh. I am having most fun with the soldering iron- I fixed a bass guitar and created a lead for it. Huzzah, I hear you say, well my reply to that is I don't appreciate sarcasm. Oh, you meant it? Well aren't you just the model citizen, you've got my vote in the next council election.

CC2 - Week 2 - Signal Switching and Routing

..........................*sigh*.

After 6 hours I decided to stop, as I was approaching the point of extreme frustration. To 'add mute functionality' to the patches, the mute~ object needs to be sent into the patch from outside. This would technically not be adding mute~ functionality to the patch, as the mute~ object would need to be placed outside of the patch itself. I ended up just encapsulating the interior of the patch into an embedded patcher object, and running the mute~ into that so all that was required from outside of the patch would be a toggle. I don't believe this was a very economical way of muting a patch, but it seems to be the only way to include mute functionality.

My other time consuming (and as yet unresolved) problem was the use of arguments to a Bpatcher. I am aware that you place #1 etc. on an object within the patch and that gets replaced with the corresponding argument. I just wanted to send a hslider an argument, so I connected a message box to it with #1 written in it. Upon testing, the argument replaced the #1, however the number was not sent to the hslider. I queried Dave on this, and when showing me his patch he had the same problem- the argument not being sent from a message box. I moved on to creating the gui, of which I spent (and will subsequently spend) minimal time on considering the detrimental waste of time it was last semester.

I know we did not have to read the tutorials this week, however I ended up having to read them anyway to even remotely complete the task. I did not complete the two new objects, although the phasor~ etc. tutorials seemed to make sense. Actual implementation of the information into two new objects would add another 2 hours, so yeah. No.

~MSP Files .ZIP 5KB~

AA2 - Week 2 - Game Audio Analysis

Surprise, surprise.

The game I will be aurally exploring is Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), developed by Bungie Studios. Halo was a release title on the original XBOX, and was also one of the first console games to use digital 5.1 surround sound in-game. The level I concentrated on was beginning of level 4, "The Silent Cartographer", as the first 3 minutes of this level has quite intense layering of music and SFX, especially when heard in full 5.1. ~This audio recording (3.1MB)~ is of me playing the PC counterpart, with the sound quality set to maximum so it almost sounds like surround sound (when through headphones). ~This youtube link~ is a very amateur run through the start of the level, probably on the PC version (note the lack of water VFX, and player invulnerability. n00bs). A free PC Demo of the level can be downloaded from Bill himself.

Aerial shot of the start point.

The level starts with a cut scene of dropships flying over an ocean, approaching an island. The music is a full orchestral score, with a female voice over, radio chatter and the sound of the dropship engines also heard. The camera changes to first person, revealing that you are on one of the dropships. As the dropships 'drop' you off on the beach, your allies open fire on the (alien) enemies, often shouting cheers of enthusiasm or shouts of panic and sometimes asking for assistance, depending on the ferocity of the enemy. The enemies are equally chatty, shouting alien obscenities ("Wort! Wort! Wort!") or screaming in fear as they see their squad depleted around them; Halo is noted for having 'over 3,000 unique vocal excerpts' (1).

First person view from the dropship

In this first section of the level there are 7 different weapons being used, all of which have distinctive sounds, such as the predictable combustion sound of the human pistol and assault rifle, or the electronic 'fizz' sound of the alien plasma weapons. The guns have mechanical and muzzle sound, and the bullets themselves also have airborne sounds and impact sounds which change depending on the type of bullet and what the bullet is hitting. Explosions are frequent, with human and alien grenades being used by each side respectively. At the end of this initial fight, the music track finishes conveniently close to when the last enemy is killed, normally with an actual musical 'outro' rather than a simple fade-out. This occurs numerous times throughout the game, where a soundtrack for a particular action sequence will play until the objective is completed, at which point the music moves into the outro of the piece. Composer Marty O’Donnell has said that the score “could be dissembled and remixed in such a way that would give [it] multiple, interchangeable loops that could be randomly recombined in order to keep the piece interesting as well as a variable length.” He also made “alternative middle sections that could be transitioned to if the game called for such a change (i.e. less or more intense)” (2).

In 5.1 all sound effects occur in real-time surround, so plasma bullets can be heard whizzing past, or team-mates shout from behind you and fire off rounds past your head. The use of 5.1 becomes a gameplay mechanism, as identifying enemy positions is much faster when you know not only that they are behind you, but their general direction in a 360º space.

A ground-breaking (at the time) aspect of the sound in Halo is the 'SFX context mapping' (for the lack of the real name), where a sound occurring in one environment will sound different to the same sound occurring in a different environment. The reverberation time and timbrel quality of the reverb changes depending on the size of the space, with small rooms having a very closed-in sound and gigantic rooms having huge reverb and echo qualities. The size and timbre of the reverb is processed in real-time, with actual room dimensions used in the calculations (1). In addition to this, the speed of sound is also coded, such that the further away a sound occurs the longer it takes to reach your ears. Such effects help to increase the spatial realism of the game's environments.

NERD.

1. Ben Probert's memory of Australian XBOX Magazine.
2. Aaron Marks and Martin O'Donnell "The Use and Effectiveness of Audio in Halo: Game Music Evolved" http://www.music4games.net
3. Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 2, Week 2. Game Audio Analysis." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 31st July, 2007.

Forum - Week 1 - Victorian Synth

This is late as I had trouble uploading the video.

This week's forum was quite stimulating to me, and not just the battery-licking incidences. I had never thought of such a thing as the Victorian Synth (if can even be denoted a synthesiser) so it was great fun experimenting with analogue sound creation. In fact, I wonder if it technically "digital" sound, as it is produced using on and off cycles. Semantics aside, I built an automated tapping machine (= FUN!), where the + of a battery is connected to the + of a speaker, and the - of the speaker is connected to a piece of aluminium covering the front of the speaker. When the - of the battery comes in contact with the aluminium (still with me?) the speaker pushes out, moving the aluminium. I set this up so when the speaker pushes the aluminium, the - of the battery is disconnected from the circuit, and thus the speaker and aluminium move back, allowing the - of the battery to reconnect. This creates a loop, the speed of which depends on the amount of pressure applied on the aluminium from the object carrying the - battery charge. While I was doing this, Will created 'Electric Popcorn' with a similar premise to mine, however the completion of the loop depended on the popcorn (little balls of aluminium) allowing a constant flow to the outer aluminium 'bowl'. On Wednesday Will and I got back together to create a symbiotic amalgamation of our ideas, and included a third which was a speaker on its side that would push pieces of 'popcorn' up a slope, which would then slide back down to be pushed back up again. Raucous fun! Dave was enthralled. Will's synth ran off of its own battery, however we set his up so the continued popping of his popcorn would rely on my tap-tap-tapping. I never thought I'd have to say a sentence like that. Experience. The difference.

Here's the amalgamation.
~VSynth.MP4 930KB~

Here's Will's popcorn in the dark, so you can see the sparks.
~ElecPop.MP4 123KB~