Article Two - Sound Design and Production.

          Sound Article.

It is hard to believe where videogames have come from, a bottomless pit of monophonic beeps, 1 bit sound and the most simple graphics if you can even call them graphics. Sound in videogames has come on leaps and bounds from its humble beginnings in the 1972 classic “pong”. This game highlights the strict limitations that videogames had to abide by, no thanks to microprocessors. On the other hand now videogames can have huge orchestral pieces and nobody bats an eyelid, bigger processing and more memory come together for a much more rich gaming experience. Games like Halo including huge orchestral symphonies, which match the epic scenes and story, confirm these technological advances.

When it comes to sound in videogames they are a whole host of ways to obtain music and sounds, this can be going into archives and libraries of already made sounds or even hiring people to make the sound for you.

Archived sounds and music, most of the time loyalties are free, meaning they wont have to pay to use it. This can be a simple thing like door openings, beeps and ambience. This can be for indie games on a budget as it lowers budget.

Also videogames with big budgets can get composers to write huge pieces of music for an orchestra to perform, they can make everything from the ambience to the soundtrack to the game.

Console Processors and limitations.

1976 saw the introduction of 8bit consoles with removable cartidges.1977 saw the debut of the Atari’s 2600, their CPU based and it was designed with 9 initial games. This would later become one of the most popular first videogame consoles.

The next major consoles in 1980 included 10bit processors and had 3 sound channels.

1982 saw consoles such as the Atari 5200, arcadia 2001 and Vectrex. The Vectrex used vector graphics and its own self managed display.

Over a few years we see the progression in processors and the consoles themselves, this made more than one music channel available and 8 bit music scores. I think it is important to understand that it was fundamentally impossible to have huge scores in early videogames, not because of lack of imagination but rather the consoles lack of technology.

Audio Recording systems.

Sound recording and reproduction is the re-creation of sound waves such as; spoken voice, sound effects and instrumental music to name a few.

Recording audio can be done in many ways but through the advancement of the videogame industry it can only be implemented in attachment to video games in certain ways, for music to e implemented in a game it must be saved or exported as a VGM (video game music) this was used in systems such as MSX and PC.

There are many different digital audio recording and processing programs for recording and editing audio, from casual to professional.

In the 1970’s saw stereo come into play. 24-32 tracks. Not much but this showed development, just as videogames were picking up pace. With the Atari 2600 coming out in mid 1977, the first real console in my opinion.

The 1980’s, saw the rise of digital mixing consoles, digital editing and Atari sequencers, 16bit/44.1khz Cd standard. Music and technology in the 80’s progressed, larger processor memory which mad recording sounds and layering easier and more true to the game. Yamaha DX7 synthesizers would of also been used in the 0’s on video games as early games majorly relied on synth, you can see this in games such as; Pac Man, Galaga and dig dug.

A chip tune, also known as chip music or 8 bit music, was a chip that was used in the late 70’s and early 80’s for VGM (video game music).

1980’s saw the first game to use DAC (digital to analog converter) meaning it produced sampled tones instead of a tone generator.

Things like the advancements in the sound recording side of the games, was down to personal computers like the commodore 64, this would have been using 64k of RAM and 16k of switchable rom, and 6510 processors, often known as “the epitome of 8 bit, this sold up to 22million units.

1985 came around quickly and bringing a new commodore with it, this just two years after the first, but the advancements in chipsets allowing them to be custom, the commodore amiga, based on a 7.16 MHz Motorola 68000 was the first home computer to have pre-emptive multitasking operating system. The PC used a single 880kb 3.5 in disk drive and 256kb of RAM.

Advances like these, random access memory and processing speed and memory see the development in music in games, adding the amount of layers that could be recorded for videogames and they did this faster and at a better quality, over the short span of maybe 15 years the advancements and possibilities have grown endlessly.

I think these developments helped the gaming community and industry a lot as the designers of the games had these intercut ideas but physically could achieve them because of the hardware but once they were able to we have seen a constant flow in gaming advancements.

File Formats.

An audio file format is a file format in which digital audio is saved on a computer. 

There are a number of different types of audio files, the most common being wave files (wav) and MPEG Layer-3 files (mp3).

The way audio is compressed and saved is called a codec this will regulate the size of the file size.

Some file types can contain jus music where as some can contain additional information, i.e. notes and other data.

The most popular type is MP3 and AAC. 

Audio Sampling.

Sampling is the process of taking a portion of sound(s) and using it and reusing at as an instrument or recording in a different piece of music.

Monotone, mono or non-stereo, this early sound system uses a signal channel for sound output. This is the most basic format of sound output.

Stereo or stereophonic is sound that is directed through two or more speakers, this is used for a more natural distribution of music.

Bit Depth, uses pulse-code modulation (PCM), bit depth is the number of bits of information in a sample and this directly coincides with the resolution of each sample.

Sample rate is basically the conversion of an analog signal into a stream of digital numbers, each number characterizing the analog signals amplitude (the loudness). Each number is called a sample, the numbers in the sample per second is called its sampling rate, and this is measured in samples per second.

Audio sampling has many constraints, this can be a legal obligation, which your music abides by, and it can be a costly affair. Music samples are not cheap, using a song or using parts from it could lead to a big pay out, this could be a percentage of profits or even a cash lump sum.

If you decide to add samples to your product without clearance, you could end up with a costly lawsuit.

A lot of people who work in the music industry see sampling as a double edged sword, it’s a hand tool to have and use but it can also bottleneck a genre of music, with an over used sample making all music sounding similar.