New Wine in New Skins - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 414

Sonification: Sonification is the use of non-
speech sound to convey information or perceptual-
ize data. For more information about this research
field visit http://www.icad.org.

although often this broad scope results in
musical games winning the award, which
are not necessarily the most innovative titles
in terms of sound design.
13. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/
view/467236
14. http://tale-of-tales.com
15. Colloquial term for the first sound movies.
16. Another example of the early adoption of
new technologies by innovative filmmakers.
17. Note that the use of sonic codes originally
reserved for cartoons (described as iconic
and non-indexical by Curtis, 1992) in such
movies gives the notion of any objective
“realism” as a point of reference the final
blow.
18. A minor methodical issue has to be mentioned
at this point. Firstly, most of the movies
discussed by the authors cited are at least
15 years old. Furthermore, there is no sub-
stantial account available on sound design
within television series where many aesthetic
innovations have been developed in the last
few years. Future work shall incorporate a
discussion of these relatively new formats.
19. Many of the aesthetic innovations, like mix-
ing many different sounds from all possible
sources, time-stretching and pitch-shifting,
are “standard” methods for sound design in
film and computer games (see, for example,
Sonnenschein, 2001, Marks, 2001). They
have entered our collective memory built on
mass media consumption and, in some cases,
have become stereotypes themselves often
serving the limited, functional aesthetics of
most of today's games.
20. Note the recent publication dates: It is clear
that the discussion of this topic is far from
concluded and that the related theory is still
very much in a state of flux.
21. Drama Princess is a “reusable autonomous
character for realtime 3D focused on dra-
matic impact rather than simulation of natural
behavior”, developed by Harvey and Samin

ENDNOtEs

1. At this point I want to clarify my use of the
multi-faceted term “sound design”. I will
use the term here to describe the activity of
creating and composing what is commonly
called “sound effects” (SFX) and does not
involve music or speech, except for the cases
where the borders between these traditional
classifications are blurred. The nature of
computer games also includes aspects of
implementation and programming.
2. http://www.iasig.org
3. http://www.audiogang.org
4. http://www.gamasutra.com
5. Interactive XMF is mainly used for music,
and will be integrated in Sony's “Awesome”
scripting engine for the Playstation 3.
6. http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_55418.
html
7. http://www.audiogang.com
8. I do not discuss musical computer games as
they form a specific, highly stereotypical,
genre, and are therefore not relevant for the
aim of this article.
9. Actually, it is a major challenge to create
procedural systems that do not sound random
and characterless.
10. http://www.audiokinetic.com/4105/sound-
seed-introduction.asp
11. http://unity3d.com
12. The various nominees and winners of the
Independent Games Festival competition
which is being held at GDC in San Fran-
cisco provides a useful basis for studying
interesting approaches to sound design in
independent games. Of particular interest is,
of course, the “Excellence In Audio” award,