About Audio Milestones

Saw this piece on Gamasutra today, it is definitely worth a read, as it's a matter I've complained about many times in the past.

Gamasutra - Opinion: Team Audio VS The Milestone

In my personal experience, another method not mentioned here has been to simply bump the audio requirements for milestone to the next milestone (up until the last one, of course). There are issues with this, however - not least being developers often wanting to 'sell' their current milestone work to the publisher by adding sound. I even worked on a team once where it was common to receive requests to make sounds for assets that didn't exist yet, as a sort of placeholder to cover for them.  Like how cheap animations will sometimes use a still shot of a car careening around a corner and have sound do the work of movement with tyres screeching and engine roaring. This occasionally led to some really awesome developments, where the animator would hear the sound, like it, and then animate to the sound effect.  Much, much, much more often, however, it involved a whole lot of redesign. Which is okay early in the project when you have time to spare, but gets a bit stressful later when you simply don't have the time to redesign sounds.

In that respect, I think the separate 'Audio Milestone' is a pretty good idea... except setting it up like that has the potential to erode any collaboration you can get with the rest of the team as they create their assets.  It's really really easy to become the closeted sound fairy that adds audio to the build you put under the pillow, but the very best sound design comes from working closely with the team, where they can communicate what audio cues they'd like and can in turn meet you halfway in things like firing rates or features or flybys (how much cooler could you make that flyby sound if it were a little slower/faster/came from behind?)

Another way, which has happened more often than not, is that audio doesn't even get included in the milestone schedule. I've never quite figured this one out, but I'll take it as a mark of trust that they believe Team Audio will get it all done in time.

Concert Report: The Music of John Williams

I've been negligent in my posting for the past month or so.  I've been updating my resume and showreel for when my current contract ends, and showreels are one of those things that you can worry at endlessly, making a hundred little tweaks that eventually bring you in a circle.


And so, I am quite overdue on the latest concert report:  A little over a month ago, I headed down to Sydney again for the day for a concert that has long been on my bucket list of concerts.


The event in question?



Again, I can't shake that suspicion that somebody has been reading my diary and making all of my wildest dreams come true.  A John Williams concert in Australia is awesome in itself, but one hosted by Shaun Micallef?  That is right up there with that Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright crossover.


That said, it actually wasn't so many months ago that I would have quite happily never listened to the Star Wars soundtrack again - I have spent almost three of my six or so years as a sound designer working on various Star Wars and Clone Wars games.  Time can apparently heal all wounds, as the prospect was quite exciting and I bought the tickets before fully registering my actions.

It was held, much like the Distant Worlds concert, at the Sydney Opera House, which is always a treat.



There were cosplayers!  Who I unfortunately did not get pictures of, because we arrived with only ten minutes to spare.  But there was little girl dressed as Princess Leia which was the cutest thing ever (and an equally adorable little Darth Vadar), and a sand person!  A couple of generic Jedi wandering the floor too.

Had fantastic seats, only five rows back, dead centre.  And I'm pleased to say that Shaun Micallef is as amusing live as he is on TV.

THE SETLIST:

Olympic Fanfare - written for the 1984 Olympics, I was more familiar with the 1996 Atlanta Games version, so it was nice to hear the original!  You actually feel like the Olympics are starting when you listen to this piece of music.  While listening, it occurred to me how surprisingly rare it is to hear such boldly brassy original compositions these days.

Theme from Lost In Space - Shortest piece of the set, highly enjoyable, though I cannot remember the television show to save my life.

Theme from Jaws - You wouldn't expect this to be that exciting as a full piece, but there was more complexity to the Jaws Theme than I recalled.  

Highlights from Close Encounters of the Third Kind - a tediously boring movie, with a much more interesting soundtrack.

Adventures on Earth - Concert suite from E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial) - Very nostalgic, made me want to watch E.T. again.  Though the middle section had the effect of lulling me to sleep like a particularly pleasant lullaby.

Theme from Schindler's List - This piece of music is singularly moving and it is very important to never ever listen to it when feeling sad or depressed.  The solo violin was performed beautifully.

The Raiders March from Raiders of the Lost Ark - Everyone knows the Indiana Jones theme, right?  Sydney Symphony didn't put a single note wrong.

Theme from Jurassic Park - They did however, get some of the timing slightly off with this piece, though honestly, you would only notice if you'd listened to the theme a hundred times before.  In that respect, the Sydney Symphony had quite the task before them.

Theme from Superman - Shaun Micallef has ruined this forever, as I will now be hearing 'Is it a bird, is it a plane, it's Su-per-man!' with every stab of the motif.  This performance I could not fault at all.

INTERMISSION.

The second half started with the March from 1941 - I hadn't even heard of this movie, it was a military piece with a sort of Hogan's Heroes feel to it.  Turned out Steven Spielberg directed the movie, will have to check it out somtime.

Then Hedwig's Theme from Harry Potter - I could have listened to this for the whole two hours.  They did a stunning job with this.  I'd heard it performed by the local Pops orchestra before, but it didn't come close to this performance.

Sayuri's Theme from Memoir's of a Geisha - this was a beautiful rendition of Sayuri's theme, and such a departure from John William's usual style, a wonderful meld of asian and western instruments.  Proof that even after sixty years of writing music, he still has something completely new to offer.

Then, for the final run... Highlights from Star Wars.  This section in particular was executed flawlessly, and fulfilled a lifelong dream to hear live.  The very first soundtrack I saved up to buy with my own money was the two-disc special edition of Star Wars: A New Hope - which was fiendishly expensive for the time.  I still have that CD today.

They started off with the Main Title, and dropped the concert hall into darkness... and then the conductor lit up a lightsaber, and conducted the first few notes with it!

The Imperial March was of course next, and the bar staff came out dressed as a very convincing Darth Vadar accompanied by a retinue of Stormtroopers.

Then Princess Leia's Theme.

Then the Catina Band Theme!  True fact - I can listen to this music loop for hours at a time for months on end and not get sick of it.  I know this because I have in fact done this, as I used it as placeholder music for one of the levels on The Force Unleashed.

They finished off with the Throne Room and End Titles.  And so concluded an absolutely mind-blowing concert.

My only complaint is that there wasn't more.  The encore was only a quick reprise of the Superman theme.

Maybe for the best, because then we had to race back to the airport to catch our flight home!


....One of these days, hopefully I won't have to travel 1000km to attend such concerts.  I am trying not to be too cut by the revelation that Distant Worlds is going to play again in Adelaide late 2011, while Brisbane continues to languish in the film and game concert wilderness.

A Reminder To Always Carry A Microphone

On Friday, having changed bags for evening classes, I completely forgot to bring my portable recorder with me.

Normally, not a big deal.  But on this particular Friday...

On the way to lunch, I passed a demolition site.  Where they'd broken out the wrecking ball.

During lunch, a trio of military helicopters flew overhead at speed, to practice for the air show for the River Festival launch the next day.

On the way back from lunch, the demolition crew had moved to some of the side buildings, and were taking out the windows with sledgehammers.

Needless to say, lesson learnt.

For Want of a Plugin

Working in video games, you often get to cover the whole range of tasks in the audio spectrum - mixing, recording, sound design, implementation.  Ambience, foley, voice over, music.  It's good, it keeps things diverse!

Sometimes, though, you feel as though you've turned into Dr Frankenstein as you wield scalpels to painfully perform cosmetic surgery on a face that was already beautiful.

Today was one of those days.  I'm still not entirely sure what happened further up the line, but it turned out the pickups that were recorded for one of the languages used a different voice actor for the main character to the voice they recorded the rest of the lines with.  They went to some effort to use a soundalike, but the result unfortunately remained jarringly obvious, especially as many of the lines are played back-to-back with lines performed by the original actor.

With little prospect of a re-record so close to submission, the best bet was to try and mould the new voice over to better match the original - at least enough to fool an ear on casual listening.

In other words, my goal for the day became to make 25 lines of this:

Sound as much like this as possible:

I can't use the sound files themselves, unfortunately (they would make my point much quicker and more effectively), as I'm pretty sure putting any game assets up, however non-incriminatory, would land me in hot water.  I use the spectral views of the waveforms as examples as my primary tool in this instance was graphic and parametric equalisers and the effects brush tool in Audition - there was some formant and pitch changes, but they were comparatively subtle.  The differences lay primarily in the texture and performance.  I couldn't do much about the performance, but I could at least smooth the new voice out to make a better soundalike.

This is one area I've found Audition has always been pretty good for - this kind of awful corrective surgery.  It's always been a bit weak in multitrack and surround editing (although reports so far indicate that the latest edition of the program have gone some ways into correcting this), but as a stereo editor, once outfitted with some external plugins, it's one of my favourites.

I do wish there were more EQ-matching plugins around, though.  This would have been the perfect moment to have a reliable one on hand.  The few I've tried in the past have hovered between not very good and nightmarishly user-unfriendly.  To the point where I get better results attacking the spectral view with an effects brush and painstakingly fiddling with graphic and parametric EQs, flicking back and forth between examples.

The ideal such plugin would be to load an example waveform in for analysis, then to save that analysis out as a preset that can then be applied to the sound you wish to modify (with adjustable parameters, naturally).  There have been a lot of instances where this would save me so much time - instead of fiddling with EQ, I could focus on other areas like pitch and volume correction.

I've heard there's a fairly expensive ProAudio VST bundle going around with something a bit like this.  But in retrospect, maybe this is actually a bit lazy.  I have, essentially, just made a wish for a plugin that will do half of the mastering process for me.  Next request:  Press button, make soundtrack.

My recorder is the cutest recorder

The standard windshield that came with my Zoom H4n just wasn't cutting the mustard anymore, so I picked up one of Rode's dead kittens for it.

I've found the Zoom to be particularly sensitive to wind noise, since the condensers have very little in the way of protection and somehow manage to be perfectly angled to catch the maximum blast of air whichever way it's moving.  The foam shield that came with it would cut down on most handling noise, but the slightest breeze would defeat it.  I haven't tested this muff in particularly strenuous conditions yet, but so far the prognosis is good - it handles an average day's breeze effortlessly, and I'm convinced it lets more sound through than the foam shield did.

And makes it adorable, besides:

Hans Zimmer's studio

Some incredible photographs of Hans Zimmer's studio:

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2010/04/18/hans-zimmers-studio/

This is how the current king of movie soundtracks works.  It's almost impossible to be jealous, because it feels somewhat like being jealous of the Queen for living in Buckingham Palace.

Memories of Fantasia Concert Report

Last weekend, I had the privilege of heading down to Sydney to attend Eminence's Memories of Fantasia concert held at the Sydney Convention Centre on Darling Harbour.  I've been a long time fan of games and anime live music performances, and Eminence's in particular, but this particular concert was extra special for me, as the guest composers were none other than Hiroki Kikuta (Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3) and Kenji Ito (Dawn of Mana, Romancing SaGa, Okami Kakushi, just to name a few).  

The reason this was such a big deal for me is not only because the Mana series is one of my absolute favourite game franchises, but Kenji Ito (along with Yasunori Mitsuda) was probably the first sound designer whose name I went to the trouble of learning.  Ben Burtt is probably the sound designer most soundies mention when asked who their inspiration is (and that's certainly true for me too), but way back as an ickle ten year old I spent even more effort hunting down Secret of Mana's sound effects than I did its music.  It's had a curiously subliminal effect of me throughout my sound design career, and to this day I can recognise a sound from Secret of Mana just as clearly as any from Mario.

I digress.  This is supposed to be about the concert!

 

 

Held at the Sydney Convention Centre's auditorium, the venue was very nice with reasonably good acoustics, though the lack of assigned seating was something of a shame.  Eminence are fairly lax about people recording their performances, but this is the only picture I took as I was more interested in listening to the music than snapping pictures of the musicians.  Actually, the constant camera clicks were a little annoying, similar to someone constantly coughing through a show.

Here's the set list breakdown:  

First set was all Hiroki Kikuta.

Fear of the Heavens (Secret of Mana) - this is the iconic opening theme of Secret of Mana.  They did a beautiful rendition of it, marred briefly by distortion coming through the cello's mike.  Fortunately the stage technician was quick to fix it.

The Little Sprite (Secret of Mana) - Sprite's theme!  Very cute, surprising choice!

Powell (Seiken Densetsu3) - Another really odd choice, considering this was the only SD3 piece, but heaps of fun and very nostalgic.  Flute got rather overpowered by percussion in this one, the dynamics were frequently off actually (unusual, since this is where Eminence normally shines), but I suspect it was more how they'd been miked than anything else.

Meridian Dance (Secret of Mana) - I'd heard this one at Eminence's ensemble performance in Perth last year, and was very pleased to get an encore.  It has fantastic energy, and the violins (where Eminence is strongest) really shone.

TENRYO 2nd Movement (Original) - one of Kikuta's original pieces, it was a two-instrument deal, one synth pad plus Hiroaki Yura (Eminence's founder) soloing on violin.  Very nice, melancholic and mellow.  I am tempted to search out more of Kikuta's original works.

The Magic Bakery (Shining Hearts) - Very cute, all plucked strings.  I'd never heard the Shining Hearts soundtrack before.  By this point, I'd begun to suspect that Kikuta's personal favourites leaned heavily towards the light, cheerful pieces.

The Windy Road (Shining Hearts) - Somewhat embarrassingly, don't recall this one very clearly.

 

They broke here to have an interview with Kikuta, it was quite interesting as he has such an unusual and varied history.  After all, he started out as a manga artist assistant for Shonen Sunday (participating in a doujinshi circle before that).  He also writes, and started out doing sound effects for Square before moving onto music!  He has no classical training, but oodles of talent, clearly.  You can really be jealous of such people.

 

The second set was miscellaneous!

Aerith's Theme (FF7) - Very famous theme.  It's always very beautiful, though it's another one of those I've heard at all of these concerts and am about ready to hear something else.  However, Eminence's pianist really is to be commended for such a brilliant performance.

Memories from days far away (5 centimetres per second) - All of the music associated with Makoto Shinkai's work is beautiful, and the piano in this was particularly lovely.

My Neighbour Totoro Medley - Another one that is always great but is also done to death.  How to solve, though?  Because veteran attendees might have heard it heaps of times, but for the people attending their first anime/games concert, these old staples are so loved!  In any case, it was called Memories of Fantasia, so no great surprise.

Canta Per Me (Noir) - They played this one in Perth as well, it's an awesome piece even without vocals.  Noir had such a fantastic soundtrack, perhaps one day we can beg Salvos Nos from Eminence too.

The Song (Gundam SeeD) - The best thing to come out of Gundam SeeD.  No joke.  Another repeat from Perth that was very welcome.

 

Here they broke the set program to play the amazing Mario medley too!  We were robbed of an encore, I suppose they moved it into the middle of the concert to save time (since they started late.)  By their own admission, they did not have much time to rehearse, perhaps that was why.  (You could hear that they were a little less polished than normal.)
 

Third set was mostly Kenji Ito.  His work often has a very lounge music sort of feel, which is nice but maybe not the sort of thing you expect to hear at a concert.  One nice thing, though, he performed the piano for all of his own pieces!  It's always very awesome when a composer does that.

 

Started out with Gusha no Mai (Dawn of Mana) - enjoyed this one mostly because of my familiarity with Dawn of Mana.  Makes use of a good range of instruments and has a great bounce to it.

Prologue (Culdcept II) - Never played this, and was unfamiliar with the soundtrack.  Nice piano.

Memeto Mori (Wizardry Renaissance) - Also unfamiliar with this, but enjoyed it a lot because it was both evil and melancholic and that's always a plus with me.

Overture-Opening Title - Dawn of the Romance (Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song) - Never been a huge fan of the SaGa music, it's technically very good but a little generic for my tastes.

Afternoon Rain (Okami Kakushi) - Very pretty, they brought out their vocalist at this point.  Someone has uploaded a video of it on youtube if you want to sample it.

Netsujo No Ritsudo (Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song) - A bit more upbeat, everybody clapped along to this one, had some good energy.

 

That concluded Ito's set!  His interview was amusing mostly because it got off-track so often as Hiroaki kept correcting the MC on absolutely irrelevant topics.  Some interesting anecdotes in there, and Hiroaki can name drop composers like nobody's business.  By Ito's answers, it's very obvious he's a longtime workhorse of the industry, and very classically trained.  

 

Then there were two secret-secret original secret vocal pieces that Eminence was being all super-secret about and nobody is allowed to talk about, so I won't, beyond saying that they were pretty cool and I am really looking forward to December.

 

No encore, sadly.  Eminence does always have a signing afterwards, which I unashamedly took advantage of.  All in all, a successful concert!  Looking forward to the next one already.