Sound is Not a Simulation - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 50

construct in the formation of identity and society.
There is a substratum of symbolic content associ-
ated with the visual space; Schafer's research has
created a set of hermeneutics from which sound-
scape studies may draw. It is necessary to create
dialectic on the soundscape, one which poses
questions of meaning, noise, control, structure
and interpretation. This becomes more significant
as urban and governmental policy move towards
controlling sound. If we operate on the basis that
sound is a set of objects which can be assessed
by their levels rather than their meaning, we will
construct passive digital soundscapes.
While the study of sound through the social
and physical sciences have advanced towards
exploring sound as a subject, we are gradually
moving towards an acoustic epistemology which
embraces the ephemerality of sound. It is both
sensorial and primary, a subject which needs
fundamental and theoretical frameworks which
can be realised through methodological research.
Unfortunately, in rushing towards categorising
sound and its effects, certain policies have been
created to simply categorize sound as noise, not
understanding the many social contexts which may
explain why, “despite successful implementation
of noise maps and action plans…there is little evi-
dence of preventing and reducing environmental
noise” (“Working Group Noise Eurocities” n.d.).
These policies fail to understand that sound has
many social contexts and that this means under-
standing that sound is not simply a signifier of
some otherness, an association with a producer;
a product or side affect of technology, car sounds,
factory sounds etc.
What this underlines is that there is a need to
explore the control issue which has arisen within
soundscape research, if sound is being seen as a
negative effect of industry and modernism one
which seems beyond the individuals control
then we have a concept to explore in virtual
soundscapes.
The positive act of listening in a virtual sound-
scape is that the sound can be controlled, be it

through volume or interactive means of changing
the sound environment. In the visual world of
games certain elements are static and the con-
troller cannot change or effect the environment.
This is based on the conceptual approximation
of reality, (a tree is a tree and must remain so in
order to simulate reality). If we introduce ambient
sound it too must approximate this idea a gamer
can close their eyes to shut out the world, but no
one can close their ears. But as in the real world
we can create or find spaces of acoustic interest
to us, we can in a virtual environment turn of an
engine, perhaps a gamer should be able to turn off
all engines and close down ( or destroy ) factories
and other sounds they perceive as unwanted in
their soundscape. Equally the soundscape should
simulate reality, the ambient soundscape whatever
that is must be all surrounding and there must be
limits to the control of this sound that is if the
intention to approximate the physicality of space.
I do not propose that we draw attention to
the soundscape within games, the more real a
soundscape seems, the less a gamer would notice
it. Instead we must consider that to increase the
perception of immersion the soundscape must
reflect or approximate a real world soundscape,
rather than being as a “bit part player to the visual
star” (Grimshaw & Schott, 2007, p. 2).
Ambient sound denotes a sound that surrounds
all physical space; it has been defined by some
as foreground, middle ground and background
sound (Adams, 2009; Schafer, 1977). This three
part description of a soundscape lays out sound,
within both the virtual and the real world, as an
assemblage, one which is created as a result of
reverberation, dynamics, levels and acoustics.
These three characteristics imply that sound can
be split apart to understand its workings, and then
reconstructed as a virtual soundscape, that is if we
ignore how sound is socially and psychologically
perceived. While technology can break sound apart
so that we can hear minute elements of the whole,
we physically hear sound in its entirety because
we cannot shut out sounds; we do not have what