Blog #4 Sound introduction
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I’m the lead sound in our group, but I’ve never worked with sound before. Therefore, this week has introduced me to a couple of software programs for working with sound. It’s mainly been Audacity, Soundly and Sony Vegas. Although Sony Vegas is for both video and audio editing, that is the one I ended up using the most – as I’ve dealt with it before to some degree. I find it really good for easily dragging around and cutting sound clips, and having them in the same project to get a better chance to adjust their relative volumes. Audacity is really good for showing you the sound waves of audio files, and making it easy to find where to cut it so that it won’t sound too abrupt. And finally Soundly is a great place to find free sound effects for your game as well as storing all your downloaded sound effects in a neat looking library. Most of the music and sound effects of our games comes either from Soundly, freesound.org or the school library (which you can get access from if you kindly ask Finn Engström), but there are also some that are voice acted by yours truly. Since our game has characters that are (or was) humans, I have the privilege to skip searching and instead just recording my own noises where it’s needed. Both Audacity and Sony Vegas has functions where you just need one click to record from your mic. And there is also a Noise Gate filter, which removes any background noise picked up by your microphone. Other useful filters are the pitch filter, which you can use to create some variations in your sound, for example bullet shots that could otherwise come across as very repetitive if they always sound the same. The echo filter which could be used in our game, since it’s taking place in a large church, to create an effect that shows the player the surroundings through sounds. And many other ones that you can tamper and play around with to create spooky, alienlike sounds if you so wish. Thanks for reading!  |