The Nature of the Beast - Computers as Theatre - page 15

Sounds Good to Me
The music in some of the early arcade and box games was truly horrible. Tim Vasikalis, an
extremely successful composer and producer of sound for games, explains that “early video
game music was exclusively developed by the engineers themselves. . . . Back in the day,
the only way to embed sound into a game was by directly programming it into the com-
puter chips” (Vasikalis 2012). Oh, that explains it.
Despite Pac Man , it became clear to me in the early 1980s that audio had tremendous
potential in computer games. This belief began with the simple observation that when the
radio is on, my brain visualizes the action and characters, but if the TV is on without sound,
my brain does not create a soundtrack. Audio-only videogames generally met with curios-
ity, but not great success in the general marketplace (e.g., Real Sound by Kenji Eno, 1997)
until spatialized audio showed up. Binaural recording has enabled spatialized sound for VR
as well as for absorbing audio games (e.g., the mobile game The Nightjar ).
I fi rst used binaural fi eld recording to create spatialized sound in the production of
Placeholder , a virtual reality project at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1993. One of the
soundscapes we needed was the sound of a waterfall, including walking through it. I asked
my partner Rob to do the recording, which involved wearing special microphones on ei-
ther side of his head. As it was a waterfall, we had to do something to protect the micro-
phones. A search party was sent to town to get some condoms, which were then placed
over the mics. So here was this guy, struggling through a rushing creek with strange af-
fordances on his head, then standing (briefl y) under falling water that was hitting his head
at about 300 psi. At that moment I wondered what a random hiker would have thought.
Two big things came out of the Placeholder recordings. One was that, although the
piece represented three scenes using very different videographic methods, the audio held
the world together. The other was that Rob and I have continued to make environmental
binaural recordings since then, and it's been a blast.
Sound and music design in interactive media—especially games—has
become increasingly important and sophisticated. The introduction of spa-
tialized sound into computer games in the late 1990s accelerated the devel-
opment of sound-design tools, technology, expertise, and curricula. Simpler
sounds give us cues as well as a sense that something “real” is going on,
from the minimalist “whoosh” when you send a message to the “crackle”
of “paper” when you drag something to the “trash” on the Mac.