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sounds provoke spontaneous sensations using
rendering effects of matter, and on the other, they
contribute to the elevation of suspense by creating
ambiguity between causes, uncertainty regard-
ing the origin of the sounds and by limiting the
information carried by the sound's affordances.
To achieve this, horror computer games rely on
a plurality of strategies.
In the preceding sections of this chapter, I in-
troduced a number of theoretical tools to help us
understand how gamers structure sounds within
and without the gameworld and how they produce
meaning with the different cues they listen to. I
now propose to revisit those concepts in light of a
horrific mise en scène to comprehend how horror
games develop those strategies.
the allure , grain , dynamic profile, and the mass
profile of a sound that determines its repercussion
on the gamer. During their gameplay activity, the
gamer hears ( entendre ) the morphological qualities
of the sounds which allow them to comprehend
( comprendre ) and experience them as frighten-
ing. Therefore, it is not only because the gamer
listens ( écouter ) to what they can identifiy as a
zombie that they are scared, but because they hear
( entendre ) a moan or a growl, which correspond
to the sound motifs contained in their knowledge
of horror symbols. Therefore, it is not so much
because the lamentation is generated by a zombie
and comprises low-frequencies that it is frighten-
ing but, because, in its essence, it contains an
energy reminiscent of a certain form of pain and
agony. Ambiences can have a similar effect as
they associate acoustic qualities with unpleasant
situations and frightening locales. Reciprocally,
the emotions produced by these choices of sound
force the gamer to focus on every little detail of
the sound design and are partly responsible for
the gamer's high level of “perceptual readiness”.
Of course, the selection of sounds must also
aim to create uncertainty as this feeling is essential
to the creation of suspense. To do so, designers
sometimes have to baffle the gamer's expectations
to a certain point. In his topic on the Silent Hill
series, Perron (2006) observed an evolution, from
one title to another, in the sound used to portray
the monstrous nurses. As the author explains:
“The nurses, which have a much low-pitched
'voice' in [ Silent Hill ], have a penetrating sped
up respiration in [ Silent Hill 3 ]” (Perron, 2006,
p. 93, translated by the author). According to
me, this purely aesthetic strategy has the effect
of reducing the gamer's “launch window” into
the game, preventing him from using his anterior
knowledge to identify (identifying functions) his
opponents. Consequently, Silent Hill 3 's sound
design created ambiguity regarding the cause of
the sound, and forced the gamer to reconstruct,
from game to game, the relation between the
sounds and their generators.
the choice of the sounds
While horror computer games (and mostly survival
horror games) utilize a wide range of sound strate-
gies, the staging of fear starts at a purely formal
level. The choice of sounds and the way they are
used are greatly responsible for the quality of
the mood of the games. Some empirical research
(quoted in Grimshaw, 2009) attempted to demon-
strate that there is a certain degree of correlation
between the physical signal of a sound and the
emotions felt by listeners. For instance, Cho, Yi,
and Cho's (2001) research on textile sounds shows
that loud and high-pitched sounds are unpleasant
to the ear, while Halpern, Blake, and Hillenbrand
(1986) point to loud, low-mid frequencies as being
disagreeable. Whereas these investigations seem
contradictory, they nevertheless tend to reveal
that the acoustic qualities of sounds can have,
amongst other factors, a physiological as well as
psychological impact on the gamer.
However, to arouse emotions, we need much
more than mere frequencies. Borrowing from
Pierre Schaeffer's theory (synthesised by Chion,
1983) on the morphological description of sounds
and Quatre écoutes ( écouter , ouir , entendre ,
comprendre ), it is mostly the work performed on
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