We received an interesting press release today from San Francisco-based dSonic, which contributed significantly to the awe-inspiring sound design in this year’s breakthrough hit, BioShock.
Said Kemal Amarasingham, dSonic’s creative director:
“We decided to experiment with using convolution as an extreme processing tool. Convolution is a technology that is usually used for creating reverberation effects but we’re excited to have found a new use for it. We processed sound effects files with various impulse responses to create an eerie ghostly atmosphere.”
Amarasingham provided a video clip from the game as an example, and continued:
“This same processing technique was used to give very realistic qualities to the audio logs’ ambiences and radio transmissions. 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. 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.” dSonic also applied custom made sound design to the voice-over files used for the TVs and PA systems in the game.
Although not a household name (unless you live with videogame sound engineers), dSonic has contributed to over sixty titles including many recent AAA hits like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.
Related Stories
Comments
Leave a Reply
-
Top News
Latest Articles
Listen to Primocasts
Newest Previews
Recent Reviews
Fresh Media
-
Sponsor
Links