Our Super Audio Designer, Arto Koivisto, has over 20 years experience in making music and sounds. Before joining the ranks of Grand Cru, Arto has worked on music production & sound design for theatrical plays, promotional videos, animated short films, and commercial DVD releases. He’s also actively making demoscene and other music releases under a variety of aliases, best known by the moniker Little Bitchard.
We asked Antti Ikonen, Head of Sound in New Media MA programme at Aalto University, to gather questions from his students for Arto on his skills, job and views on Game Audio Design. Let’s take a closer look and hear what he has to say.
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How does one become a game audio designer? Which competences do you think are the most important?
You need a very wide skill set, thus I’m not sure if any certain route exists. But to…
..improve technical & theoretical: Study to understand sound as a phenomena; acoustics, synthesis, digital audio etc. Study music theory and history. Learn what different instruments look like, how are they played and what are their limitations. Study music production equipment. Get a good mic and record audio with it. Play games focusing on audio; how are sounds used, what and where? How do they work with the visuals? Mix and master songs.
..improve creative: Learn to write songs in a variety of styles. Start building your own sound library. Record a short video clip off a game or get a game that has a folder for audio assets, and create your own sound effects, replacing the originals. Get involved in a hobbyist game project (one forum here). Get inspired by what other people do. Have comfortable, silent idle moments, just letting your thoughts run.
..improve (& maintain) hearing: Listen to a lot of sound; outdoor noises, music (including genres you consider utter bollocks), and in general everything around you. Remember to wear earplugs at loud gigs. Learn to build a constant awareness to sounds around you, as if you were blind and had to rely on your ears. Learn to dissect what you hear into basic elements; you’ll need this for building sounds. Frequently give your ears a well-deserved break.
..land a job: Build up a “base” resume of quality works (eg. a variety of styles of songs you’ve written), make a compact demo reel (~5min tops) and a good-looking CV, network with people and be persistent with contacting startups and companies with your CV & demo reel for job opportunities. If you have any friends working in the industry, ask them to tip you off about up-coming projects and people you should contact.
Besides the obvious creative and technical things, I’d also emphasize solid people skills. A motivated, functional team is the foundation of good games, and you should contribute to that by being a positive-minded, easy-to-work-with kind of person.
How did you get there personally?
I simply have a fixation for all things audio, and that has propelled me to work on a variety of projects. Working with music and sounds is something that’s in my blood, and combining that with my interest in gaming (eg. I built myself this), I feel it was perhaps just a matter of time before I’d end up doing game audio too… Ultimately I got started by freelancing music to games.
Who is / are your favourite game audio designer(s) worldwide?
Don’t have any… I do very much like the huge impact sound design has eg. in the Dead Space -series, so I’ll nominate the team behind it. Just compare playing the game with the sound turned on & off!
Does a game audio designer need to know actual programming languages like C++?
No. There are people for handling the “code inside”.
That being said, it does help a lot if you’re (at least roughly) on the map with how things work from a coding point-of-view. You’ll need this all the time, when discussing things with people implementing audio code. Door swings both ways too, so it’s always better if the coder(s) you work with have some understanding of digital audio theory, technologies etc.
Of course, if you’re a multi-talent I doubt anybody will stop you from handling both asset creation and audio coding. It’s easy to imagine that especially small companies would regard such a person highly, like someone who could be delegated with realizing the audio side of things of a ready-to-ship product.
How much do you record sounds for games yourself?
As much as I can, but there’s always the need to keep the combination of project budget, game style and schedule in check and recording everything by yourself is not often that feasible. I especially like coming up with builds & setups for creating and recording sounds.
What is the most difficult bottleneck in the game production pipeline from the point-of-view of a sound designer?
Not quite sure if you could call this a bottleneck, but I’ll choose it anyway: not being connected with the rest of the team. This could happen due to a few things.
Especially with smaller companies & startups, audio production is often out-sourced to a person who might not be physically part of the team. Or even worse, is only connected through an intermediary person (= broken telephone effect). This leaves a gap in the creative process which is, besides the audio designer grinding assets in his/hers dungeon of audio gadgets, also about physically interacting with the rest of the team: Getting inspired by ideas thrown around at meetings, giving input of your own, seeing people react to your work, iterating designs etc.
The same could happen despite being physically there, but then it has to do with how and where you work. The traditional view of audio production is that special environment requirements, like sound-proofed spaces, have to be met. In an open-office, creative environment game companies often have, it’s very challenging to arrange such spaces, and thus audio production gets isolated away from other teams.
So to better comply with this open environment, the work spaces and methods of game audio development surely could use some re-thinking… Approached from a more flexible and collaborative perspective, so that sound design isn’t tied down to a single location.
The responsibility is with the sound designer too; you need to frequently leave the comfort of your dungeon and interact with the team. As a sound designer you’re part of the production pipeline, so also make sure it’s not YOU being difficult.
What is the most popular audio middleware in the game industry at the moment, FMod Designer or Wwise?
Unfortunately I have very superficial experience with these tools and little factual knowledge about their popularity within the industry. My background is with mobile game development, where the traditional ‘event = sound’ approach still very much applies.
Using our game Supernauts as an example, we do have some of the same functionality both of these tools offer, like asset triggering randomization and 3D spatial sound. However these are implemented directly within Unity to have a more optimized package. For asset creation and editing, I use Cockos Reaper, where I develop individual sounds over clips of in-game video captures.
Not exactly the cutting edge approach, but it works!