Article Question

[Xan]

George, A while ago I browsed through the content on the site. In this article you mention;

There are many other techniques [for sound conception] that may be used that are not so "by the book", like random sound generation that will help to spark new and creative ideas for example.

Can you elaborate on "random sound generation". I thought at first it might refer to putting a random variation in a sound pool for playback but having re-read it today, that doesn't quite fit.

I've been a big fan of the magic and accident philosophy for a few years.

[george]

Hey Xan,

I read about an interesting technique where a sound designer, while doing non-critical listening tasks, would run a script he wrote to auto play random sounds from his library. So if he was importing lots of audio, or making backups, etc he would "hear" these random sounds. It may spark new ideas for specific sounds that you would not normally think of for a given situation.

There's also the case for random sound generators (pure data) and using them in game to generate random variations of sounds at run-time. This is something that I can definitely see coming to light very soon, as processor speeds increase. It's a very intriguing idea to use DSP generated sounds for things like bullet hits, and maybe even footsteps one day. The sound of these systems needs to catch up to the believable level first though... but intriguing nonetheless ...

G.

[Xan]

Interesting idea. So from experience have you found its simply hearing a sound not often heard that's most useful? Or the coincidence of two sounds (the one being rendered in the background and a random sound) playing together to create something new?

Some articles about procedural water sounds went around the department a few months ago - here and here (also linked from the first article). Not very viable right now considering:

Simulating nine seconds of babbling water takes 20 quad-core Xeon processors around four hours.

Our audio programmer linked us after he fixed a bug to get a fountain sound to work. It's funny, the first thing someone here suggested was also to use it for footsteps. Great minds and all that

[george]

I think it's purely hearing the random sound that is being played in the background... so when you're typing up that sound design pipeline document for production you could turn on the random sound generator and it might inspire you. I tend to just randomly click on sounds in my library if I'm stuck for a particular sound that is needed. Sometimes this will spark a new idea for how to manipulate an old sound or how to manipulate a sound that I wouldn't normally think of using... it can be a very useful technique, especially when you're frustrated. Hmmm, I think this subject matter could make for an interesting article for the site

Thanks for those links. Very interesting indeed. One day it will be possible and then the question becomes "how do we make this efficient"... maybe gaming systems will have separate "random processing" chips for random sound generation and real-time CGI effects... who knows?

G.

[Xan]

so when you're typing up that sound design pipeline document for production...

Funny you should say that... *yawn*

(I jest. I'm the one who decided to write it.)