14 DAY TRIAL // It was already known that BioShock's orchestral score has been composed by none other than musical talent Garry Schyman. But what about the game's sound effects? You need pros for that as well, and so Irrational hired dSonic, that today revealed how they experimented with cutting edge technology when creating sound for Bioshock's story-telling tools.
According to an official press release, their use of new processing techniques brought life to the game's ghosts and added very realistic qualities to its audio logs and radio transmissions. They say these tools are vital to giving players clues as they navigate their way through the game. Here's Kemal Amarasingham, dSonic's creative director, saying a few:
"We decided to experiment with using convolution as an extreme processing tool," says Kemal Amarasingham, dSonic's creative director. "Convolution is a technology that is usually used for creating reverberation effects but we're excited to have found a new use for it."
Amarasingham and his sound design team have confirmed using processed sound effects files with various impulse responses to create an eerie ghostly atmosphere. Here's what they say, which is a good example. I for one believe that the whole game is a good example, given that players don't usually benefit from peaceful moments during gameplay.
This same processing technique is said to have been used to give very realistic qualities to the audio logs' ambiences and radio transmissions. Generally, video games can't always produce that realistic, fuzzy radio transmission style of sound, while also allowing gamers to fully understand more complex words and inflections in the tone of voice.
And to further add to their authenticity, dSonic strategically inserted static and feedback into each file by hand and then processed the entire file to get a degraded sound: "We imagined that the audio logs were recorded on a wire recorder which were popular in the 1940s, when Bioshock's world was first created," Amarasingham explains. "We made the log itself sound old by inserting static and snippets of period radio music, then we made the whole thing sound like it was being played out of an antique player."
For those who haven't heard of dSonic, they're a company that provides music, sound effects and voice-overs exclusively to the game industry. They've contributed to games such as Oblivion, Mage Knight: Apocalypse and Dark Messiah. Here's their official website.