Sound for Fantasy and Freedom - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 38

Ambience and background
to bridge the reality Gap

players and, for example, “whisper” that speed
is increasing or that time is running out and you
must hurry.

Physical environments are (almost) never silent.
Air, water, objects, creatures and machines around
us all more or less make sounds. The absence of
sound is unnatural and scary; it is an auditory
counterpart to pitch black. Sounds are the signs of
presence, life and function. By adding just a very
soft sound of moving air, an otherwise dead and
detached game environment can come alive. If
the sound is well designed, it is possible to create
an experience where the game-generated sounds
blend with the sounds from the gamer's physical
environment, creating an inseparable whole. The
gap between the realities closes.
Ambient sounds can be strong carriers of
emotion and mood. They share this ability with
music and the fact is that the border between the
two is more and more often blurred by film and
game sound designers (Dane Davis, cited in Son-
nenschein, 2001, p. 44). Carefully “composing”
an ambient or background sound can serve several
purposes at the same time. It can create a sense of
physical presence, it can set the basic mood and
it can communicate emotion and arousal.
In the Beowulf game, the ambient sounds were
the sound of air softly flowing through the game-
world's system of caves and tunnels. The sounds
had a slight amount of reverb added to create a
sense of volume in the caves and the reverb was
removed for tunnels. The ambient sounds were
also deliberately freed as much as possible from
musical components such as pitch and rhythm:
We wanted to give the players as much freedom
as possible to use their own imagination, not
influencing them in any direction defined by us
more than necessary.
Most of the DigiWall games use music tracks
as ambient and background sounds. In this case
the purpose is the opposite. Music is used to set
the basic mood of the games and to encourage
physical activity in the players. The music is de-
signed to communicate subconsciously with the

sound Effects and Music
for cues and clues

Often game designers want to encourage the play-
ers to go in certain directions or to take certain
actions. By carefully planting sound effects and/
or music, the player can be guided, inspired or
even intentionally misled. Beowulf uses a large
number of natural sounds to warn the player of
potential dangers such as predators, bottomless
holes or boiling lava. The DigiWall games use
music and sound effects with musical properties
to guide attention in certain directions on the
wall. One example is the game Catch The Grip ,
in which the direction from the last grip caught
to the next to catch is represented by a series of
notes. The length of the series tells the physical
distance on the wall. The panning of the notes in
the loudspeaker system signals the direction left/
right. In the game Scrambled Eggs , sound effects
with a falling pitch denote the movement of “eggs”
falling from the top of the wall towards the floor.

speech, Music and sound Effects
for Information and Feedback

Many sounds are emotional and meant to create and
communicate mood and presence. Other sounds
are meant to convey cognitive information about
rules, scores, results and so forth. Speech is, of
course, very versatile and useful in this case. It
is very effective to have a voice read the initial
instructions for a game, especially if it is a game
with relatively simple gameplay and few rules.
The same is true for scores and results. Who won,
the left or right team? How many points did you
score? To have a voice read these results creates
a strong feeling of presence and makes the game
come alive. One drawback with speech is, of
course, language. For example, Swedish voice-