dSonic Tells GameZone What it Takes to “Sound” Like a Winner

by Louis Bedigian

“We believe that when audio, visuals and gameplay are all tied into one another that all three become much stronger.”

When gamers get their hands on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, they’ll be treated to rich sounds that will immerse them in the experience. When they play Mage Knight Apocalypse they will not only want, but need to crank the speakers to take it all in. And when they witnessed animals coming to life in Zoo Tycoon 2, it wasn’t just the graphics and intricate gameplay that got the point across – the sound had an impact on that, too.

The studio responsible for making these games sound as good as they look and play is dSonic, one of the top companies creating audio for the game industry. Their client list includes Microsoft Game Studios, Namco, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Blue Fang, Floodgate Entertainment, Arkane Studios, and Mumbo Jumbo.

dSonic handles voice-overs, music, sound effects – the works. They worked on the creature sounds for Elder Scrolls IV, and by the sound of things, it’s clear they know what they’re doing.

What does it take to develop good sound? It’s more than the technology available, but anyone who loves video games knows that. What, more specifically, does it take and how do professionals like dSonic pull it off? Where do they come up with their ideas, and how are they able to implement them in the most effective way? (“Most effective” meaning “the player doesn’t think about it being a sound effect or a game score because he or she is just immersed in the experience.”)

dSonic’s Co-Founder and Creative Director, Kemal Amarasingham, sat down with GameZone to tell us what it takes, how they got started, how they do it, and what they plan to do next.

Give us a little history about yourself. Tell us how you got started in game audio and if you've worked in other entertainment industries (music, TV, movies, etc.).

Kemal Amarasingham: I started in 1994 with an internship at Looking Glass Studios as part of the graduation requirements for the school I was attending at the time. After interviewing at many video and radio production houses (and not really liking the atmosphere at those places), I decided to give Looking Glass a call as I happened to be playing Ultima Underworld at the time (one of the best games IMO) and noticed that they were located near me. I had an interview with them and just walking around their offices and seeing the people working on games, I knew this was for me. After 3 months as an intern, they hired me full time, and I've been in games ever since. While there I worked on the audio for System Shock 2 and Thief 1 and 2 and that taught me the importance of audio implementation. 

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 

How did dSonic begin? How long has it been around?

KA: dSonic was formed in the year 2000, right after Looking Glass had to unfortunately close its doors. Simon (my brother and dSonic co-founder) and I had always performed and created music with each other and had always had in the back of our minds to work together. We started by both working on a game called Arx Fatalis, and dSonic evolved from there.

I have always found the audio experience – music, sound effects, chimes, jingles, etc. – to be an extremely important aspect in video games. I've played through entire games, including the ultra-frustrating Parasite Eve, just to hear the music. I feel the same way about TV and film. I know I'm not the only one, but overall it seems that most people just don't get it. Most people, even game publishers perhaps, don't understand the importance of what the player is hearing. How do you plan to change that?

KA: We believe that when audio, visuals and gameplay are all tied into one another that all three become much stronger. As we move forward, we get involved in the development process earlier so that we can help prototype audio in an game audio engine. This allows the designers a chance to hear their ideas in the game and show how we will pull them off technically. This is possible now, more than ever with the latest audio engines.

We've sat down with some of our designer friends and shown them different ideas for adaptive music and sound using various sound engines. It's been great to see this trigger many different ideas they could achieve with the sound, to the point where creating gameplay would be based on the audio tools. The design of sound for a game – how an audio engine is used to play back sounds – can be as unique as the game itself. 

Mage Knight Apocalypse 

How does dSonic function within the industry? How do you promote the company to developers or publishers, and how are you promoting it to gamers?

KA: dSonic essentially functions as an audio department for hire within the games industry.  We can take care of the full development of the audio for a project from start to finish, or we can hand you a single sound effect (we actually had a gig where it was only one sound!)

We do a lot of demos of our work at industry events and educational forums to spread the word on the different approach to audio a game format takes. Most recently we worked with Creative Labs on an Adaptive Music and SFX demo using their audio engine ISACT within Unreal Tournament, and have given many talks using that as a demo. That is generally how we promote ourselves to publishers and developers.

For the gamers, we're trying to make people more aware of what audio can bring to a game, and a little of what we do to get people excited about the possibilities. The Unreal Tournament demo I mentioned is available as a patch to anyone who has bought a Creative Labs’ XFi card, for example. And just for fun, every Halloween, we write some music to give away to the fans and industry people to make that holiday have the mood it deserve. We love the horror genre.

In your experience, have there been any publishers that didn't think they needed polished audio in their games? I'm not asking for names, I just want to have a better understanding as to why so many games sound like (to be frank) crap.

KA: No. In general people very concerned with having every part of their game be great. The game community is very passionate when it comes to their games, and they don’t want any weak links in the chain.

The problem I think, is that the audio people are bought in too late in the development process, which is due to the fact that there haven't been a lot of tools for audio people in the past, and so getting sound into games was left until all the other work was complete. Now with the advent of game sound tools, the ability to get sound into a game earlier will be the norm, and will give us more time to tweak and develop great audio, and more importantly, show it to the developer in it's final state rather than just handing off individual sounds that might sound ok by themselves, but not work in the game environment.

Finally, I think there needs to be more audio content in games, more sounds per square inch.  Over the years I've seen content almost double from year to year, so we are definitely moving in the right direction.

Let's go into what dSonic does. If I were a developer looking to improve the sound in my game, why should I choose dSonic instead of hiring individual sound engineers, composer(s), etc.?

KA: There are a number of skills that are required for game audio – it starts with an understanding of the technology and process of game development and then you have to adapt sound design and composition skills accordingly. It is very different than doing sound and music for other mediums, such as film and TV.

So although there are a lot of audio people out there, there are only a few who have those combination of skills and it is very hard for a game company to find those people. We have a team of people that we have put great effort into training them as to how to make a game sound great.     

Looking to the very near future, the amount of audio that a full game will require will be staggering.  Just as the majority of movie scores require a team of people, game audio needs a team approach and I think it's better to have a collaboration of sound and music artists sharing their ideas – it ensures that the material in a game is kept fresh throughout.  A game with 70 different creatures, 60 minutes of music and a ton of environmental sound and dialogue is going to require a lot of sound ideas to make it work well. 

Zoo Tycoon 2 

dSonic chose to work exclusively in the game industry when it could be multi-tasking by scoring scores with Hollywood and providing vital voice-overs to anime. Why not look into other opportunities – why stay exclusive to the game industry?

KA: Firstly, we love games. Games are the best projects to work on, and we wouldn't want to do anything else! We believe focusing on one industry is essential to create the best results – we're not only producing audio, but researching the latest ideas and techniques for getting the audio implemented into our projects. That takes time, and we want to immerse ourselves in the industry. 

Do game developers/publishers tend to acquire dSonic's services for every aspect of their game, or are they more likely to have you work on one specific element?

KA: It does vary, but as time goes on we get hired more and more to do every aspect of the audio for a game. The exception to this is if there is an audio director at a company that is hiring us. They are generally the main person who will then implement the assets that we create, but we'll still use the same tools that they are using to make sure this is as seamless and easy for them as possible. That ensures that the game sounds great.

You guys do voice-over casting, recording and processing. How do you decide who to hire? What makes a good voice actor anyway? Is it based on what the publisher wants?

KA: Over the years we've gotten to know many great voice actors and have worked on them on a number of game projects, so we audition them from that pool of people, but we're always looking out for new talent. We have on occasion use the casting director route, especially when we have a game that requires many voices.

For me, what makes a great voice is the ability to bring something to the table – ideas to make a character sound interesting. I normally provide them with a general direction, and then see what they can come up with for the voice of that character. The actor knows their voice best, so if they create a voice based on the design description and their personal vocal strengths, it'll work out for a better performance. Secondly, how an actor can turn a phrase is very important. Just like music, vocals can have very interesting flow and meaning to them if read in a unique way, so we look for that ability.

Ultimately the publisher has the final say as to what they want and at the end of the day all our goals are the same: to get across to the player the character’s personality and keep the quality of the product high, so everyone works to make that happen.

A lot of interesting techniques are used to create sound effects in games. Could you tell us about a couple of those techniques dSonic has used, techniques the average gamer is likely to be unaware of?

KA: For Mage Knight we had a few creatures that needed to sound like they were speaking some kind of animalistic language. For this, we recorded some voice actors saying dialogue that spanned the various moods (mainly aggressive and inquisitive) that the creatures would be in.  We then took that and edited together parts of the speech that would sound like a language that had never been heard before, but was obviously communication. 

From there, we mixed in various animal sounds to give it a rough edge, and then applied a technique via our Kyma sound design system to give it a more unified sound. Kyma has a module called an REResonator in it, which splits a sound into 2 parts – an Exciter and a Resonator. You can then take the Exciter part of one sound and apply it to the Resonator of another….it doesn’t always generate usable results, but in this case we found that we could “Excite” Resonator sounds of a lawnmower with our edited vocals. It turns out that lawnmowers have a throaty kind of sound to them that is quite like that of a growly animal, so the result had the tone of the lawnmower with the modulation of the vocal – a nice sound for a creature!

Keep your browser pointed to GameZone Online for Part 2 of our interview with game dSonic.