lukebennett

[lukebennett]

Week 13 - Activate The Collection

As this is the final week of the blog, I want to revisit some of the questions i asked myself in week one and attempt to reflect upon those. What do I want to make?

What am I Making it from?

What are the reasons for making it? I don’t think I ever realised what I wanted to make, I think I just went with the flow and took things as they came and just did my job as a sound designer/ composer and did in most cases what was logical, For the collaboration with Oliver for example, to represent glitch and chaos required a certain sound approach which wasn’t necessarily what I wanted but just what the project needed, same thing with Neon Heist, however I was given some more freedom as a had to develop a sonic response to what the game was trying to do rather than just support visuals, however i think my thought process was mostly just ‘what could work’ and I just tried to make things that could work given my skillset and personal style.   What am I making it from? was initially about what collections did i want to work will, originally i liked the idea of the ACMI collections however i ended up working with just the Chunky Move collections with Oliver though we did use visuals from ACMI, Anthony Hamilton and Richard Grant inn some of the early drafts but we changed just to working with chunky move.  What are the reasons for making it? I don’t think there was any more of a reason other than to ‘Activate the Collection’ in the case of the collaboration with Oliver there was no ulterior motive it was just to recontextualize the chunky move works and for Neon Heist, the reasons were pretty self explanatory.  As of the time of this Blog the collaboration with Oliver is finished and the Neon Heist is due on Tuesday.  The Collaboration with Oliver in the last week became a lot more chaos focused and alot more unapologetic, we worked on rather than subtly using glitch and ugly elements, we used them boldly and realised with the help of feedback that this was the way forward and the way to finish the project. Our main changed were to make the video more aggressive and hence more engaging, to do this i used the same amen break part in previous versions but brought that back toward the end to use as the intensity ‘peak’ of the work, having this at the end then carrying this right though to the end of the clip, having a powerful ending, i used some down tuned metal guitars to make the ending feel more intense than the previous time the amen part came in and also make the ending feel a bit gross and noisy, I think these few changes had a positive impact.  Neon Heist this week was mostly just implementing audio, I re did one sound effect for the picking up gold, but otherwise all the rest was just playing the game game with the music put into it and reviewing. in some parts the audio is a bit glitchy and the music comes in at different volumes and when the track changes it overlaps, but these are things we will aim to fix before submission on Tuesday. 

Overall I think my projects went well, mostly the things to work on would be trying more ideas sooner then pursuing the ideas that work best and in the case of the game, outlining what material I actually need to hand over at the end, as I think this was a barrier to making good work initially.  WIPS: Oliver collaboration sound drafts this week (the ones that are dated for this week):  https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/Eubzc3iZDQJHmH27tJbX4PwBKn5tiTUcTNue9xXSPgDzlA?e=kaiSup Neon Heist gold pickup sound effect and footsteps loop:  https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/EoaDZnatKl5ImybrJ2uHdW8BNHHP9cmIcqPIV5FzY-6oIg?e=FEg3kt https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:u:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/EeEgnJbv6N1Lr8uWWQFKlrkBVkS8j9DnwrJ6Y-B6cBuklw?e=UKvoyB

[lukebennett]

Week 12 - Activate The Collection

This week was spent getting the game music done and finishing off a few sound effects so that they can be put in the game, the collaboration with Oliver is at a good stage, were just waiting to hear back from chunky move about what they think of our draft before we make any changes and finalise the project.  With the music, the games designers wanted just one track that could loop, which I have mentioned before is quite limiting given that programs like fmod exist to implement audio within unity to allow for more options for interactive music within the game. so i have made one track for before you open the bank vault (start of the game) and one track for after you open the bank vault (end of the game) these are both loopable and can transition with each other but I’m unsure how these are going to work in the game without using fmod, from now I going to wait and see how these sound in the game before I make any more changes.

With the sound effects, I made a sound for a toaster blowing up a server room (one of the tasks the player has to do). Some of the issues I’m having is with actually knowing what sounds I need to make, as the only versions of the game I have seen are just the bare bones with not all of the functions working yet, I cant really visualise what things would sound like and I have just been at the mercy of the game developers saying ‘we need a sound for this’ just when it comes up rather than me being able to see what everything that's interactive in the game (like a list of all the moving objects and functions) to which I have the creative freedom to see what different sounds I might need to create, this has been a barrier for the project. 

A game I came across this week is Cloudpunk, its a unity game that’s set in a dystopian future and you’re a delivery driver, I was really impressed by the soundtrack and the use of synths to create this futuristic feeling and the pulsating bass that generates some momentum, this was a really good execution of what I am trying to achieve with the music for neon heist, having the synth pad and drone sounds materialise the futuristic neon world and have the drums and bass pulses to emote the ‘stealing’ feeling and set the pace for the game. in links I have timestamped some gameplay, at 3:00 there's a great example of a ‘stinger’ which I talked about last week which sounds really cool and breaks up the ambient music which falls into the background of the less intense passive part of the game, I have yet to find a way to use these short musical parts in the game in a way that wont be out of time with the music. I cant say exactly what about the game’s music I have incorporated into the music I made this week however I felt I drew inspiration from this in some way. I think from now on for the game my main focus will be making sure the sounds i have made actually work in the game and add something weather that be creating a desired mood or materialising actions in the game, if I feel like I need to add something, I will work on trying to make some ‘stingers’ which will be simple pad or drone stabs in the same key as the music which can be triggered when you hack a camera or something and I think I will re do the title screen music to better fit with the music themes of the in game music.   WIPS:  Game Music: https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/EgqaSZdZNpxMpLRBfL_NY2wB0uHPl9MW6zWKDdN9LSUvIg?e=kOnogh Server blow up sound effect: https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/EjrFl5aDWxZIsJoskwYZiHcB4e-mhS9Nbe9VH-cke9iYlA?e=L30kHT links: https://youtu.be/5y891t5q7K8?t=175

[lukebennett]

Week 11 - Activate The Collection

This week I re started work on the second version of the collaboration with Oliver and continued discussion with the game developers about how music and sound will be integrated into the game. 

This week started off by sending a short 15 second version of the collaboration with Oliver to the class for feedback (as this was all I had to show as I was struggling with executing my ideas for this version) overall everyone had the same issues that i did with my work, they didn't really know what to think or why to care, it wasn't bad just all very ‘meh’ and wasn’t engaging and just a very literal approach to making something with drones. so I decided to scrap that version and start again, this time focusing on making everything in Paul stretch as for this whole collaboration, all of the things people have liked and the things that personally I think work well, all came from Paul Stretch, so I bounced out all the synths I made in serum from the first version of the collaboration that I made a month ago and made about 20 odd sounds in Paul stretch which I then imported back into the session and made a new score just ripping those apart and arranging those parts. After this I felt just a few more things would tie it in such as a big sub bass and some drums and some hit and riser effects. After doing this for a few hours I came up with something that was 10 times better than the work I had done in the past week on this project, so in my eyes this was a success, Oliver and I sent this version to Darrin for some last minute feedback before we submit this for review from chunky move on Sunday, after the few points he made we revised the edit and the sound ready for Sunday, (in WIPS there is both sound versions done to the same video edit dated 08.10.2020 and 10.10.2020). After feedback from Oliver he thinks this sound approach works better with his visual style so i think this is now out number 1 version that we will put most of our effort into.  With the game, i asked this week if for implementation we could use FMOD and trigger those within unity, I basically wanted to try this is I wanted to get experience using FMOD after the high score conference last week (which was in my blog) and from that conference finding out that game FMOD project file for celeste (indie game) was released last year on the FMOD website, after looking at the project file i realised that it was actually a much more straight forward program than I initially thought and I was confident i could figure out how to put everything in there so that i could deliver an FMOD file instead of audio files for the game developers to deal with. However given that the game students hadn't implemented FMOD events before and given the time constraints they’re under and the workload it would take them to work out how to get the FMOD events to trigger in game we decided that what we were going to get out of that approach was not worth the time invested to where we would have to compromise on other things, so all the audio will be triggered in unity and either be one hits bound to an event or something that loops in the background. So this means that the music will be unable to react to player input which takes music away from the interactive aspects of the sound for the game, initially I actually thought this was a good thing, as this is a lot less work for me and it gives me an opportunity to make the music as good as it can be on its own with no restraints regarding looping or clashing (with the exception of the start and end of the track), Most of the identifiable and memorable music in games has been some of the least interactive, the two that spring to mind is the original Minecraft soundtrack, that was just a collection of tracks that would randomly play in the background which started and stopped at seemingly unpredictable times and would often start playing really loud when you didn’t want it to and at very inconvenient times, but this was part of the charm of the game in the early years. Another example is the Mario theme, just a great piece of music which its implementation was constrained by the game consoles of the time which meant the musical composition wasn’t able to react to the player but drive the emotional experience of the game just by being there. My solution to this is a to keep the music reasonably ambient yet interesting, using all the parts i have made to create an arrangement that changes and remains interesting, but doesn't vary in intensity or emotional content, Doing this would allow me to go harder with sound effects creating more tonal or musical effects for in game gestures that harmonise with the music, this blend of sound effects and music will be the main way i can create interactivity, i tried this briefly when i made the ‘key card’ sounds for the doors in the game opting for a synth in the background creating musical motifs that reflect either access granted or access denied sounds, (link in WIPS) i think in hindsight i could go a lot bolder with the musicality and play off the hyper material aesthetics of the game to make some more intense sound effects.  I think musically I would like to explore the addition of ‘stingers’ used to layer on top of the music which can be triggered by events in game that signal that the player is on the right track (getting closer to completing the game) this was used in the game manifold garden which is a puzzle game with ambient music which used ‘stingers’ to reward the player for completing a puzzle. I hadn’t heard of the term stinger until the composer of the game talked about it (Highscore conference form last week), given the Wikipedia definition gives examples of them in horror movies I don't think its far off what it was like in manifold garden just the context is very different. https://youtu.be/Mcn8God6MMY?t=1241 here is an example of the ‘stinger’ and 20:41 when the player jumps down a musical layer gets triggered as a reward.

This week I was also contacted by Zoe a MAGI student asking to do sound design for her animation, after a bit of back and fourth we came to the conclusion i couldn’t fit the project in before the end of the semester to meet her deadline however we did agree on collaborating after the semester and having me so sound design for the animation after my projects are finished, so I have another project to continue my work after the semester is over.

WIPS: Oliver Colab: https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/Eubzc3iZDQJHmH27tJbX4PwBKn5tiTUcTNue9xXSPgDzlA?e=F2GJTZ Game Sound Gffects: https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/EoQKn5duHRxGmWHM22TjpecBMeMXtI3TbdQYWjSRlU8JWg?e=lTK4H1

[lukebennett]

Week 10 - Activate The Collection

This week my aim was to get sound effects and music sent off to be implemented within the Game and to make a draft second version of the collaboration with Oliver.  

This week in class a lot of really helpful things were discussed about the state of the industry and what to expect with regards to best setting myself up to work in the industry in the future, one of which was attending conventions, given the pandemic a lot of these have moved online, it just so happens there was one in Melbourne happening this weekend. 

On Saturday i ‘attended’ the highscore 2020 game audio conference, it was great to hear how the sound design and score was implemented in lots of indie games and even having a look at some of the project files was very eye opening and further clarifies a lot of the previous research i have done in past weeks and hence i found this to be super valuable information and i have begun to realise how many easily avoidable mistakes i have made to which if i was to start my game project again i would take a very different approach. There was a lot of content on sound implementation in programs like FMOD and Wwise which is a skill i will need to learn if i want to do more of this kind of work as i think this was my main failing initially with the game project as i didn’t understand how implementing sound worked so all the music i made was very conservative and made sure it could loop as a background but in hindsight that is a very primitive approach and if i understood implementation tools such as the programs i mentioned above I could have come up with something a lot better very quickly and to where I could make decisions about what i want the music to be doing rather than flying blind into the project.

On another note I have handed over the music and sound effects for the game i have now, the music is sectioned off into parts 1 and 2 which are like and intro and a build up and each of these have multiple ‘loopable’ variations which make up a track which is controlled by the game. The sound effects were a lot more linear, i just made sounds for things in the game that had been put in at this stage. The music and sound effects i will work at getting them working within the game in the next week. links to these are in the wips.

The second version of the collaboration with Oliver is something I’m a bit behind on, I aimed to have this done by Friday to give to Oliver however it wasn't at a decent stage to receive feedback on so i have pushed it back to be ready for feedback next week, in the meantime Oliver has a new edit with the few revised changes from feedback in class 2 weeks ago. My plan for the second version has become more defined, i want to have a de materialised drone element for each dancer similar to a lot of the existing chunky move works, however either some sound design and automation to reflect the dancers movements in the edit, i’m also thinking of using some bit reduction or subtle sound design to reflect on the distorted qualities Oliver has brought to the visuals. I think this gives me a clear direction to get something down into a draft for feedback next week.

WIPS: https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/EqYnGwq0FAVHnBqsZm3NakcB_QXL6Wv9etkelWffbkKkqw?e=yTKesQ

[lukebennett]

Week 9 - Activate the Collection

This week I wanted to re visit my idea for the Big Band influences in the game project, as getting a soundtrack for the in game is now a priority as I would like to get some of the music working within the game before I choose to change too much about it however i think just changing a few small things to address give the music structure and feel less dark would be enough to get the music to a stage to where we can implement the music into the game as this seems like it could be a difficult task and quite crucial to the player experience. I think what drew me most to the big band elements was the harmonies and the way each instrument contributes to making a complex chord pattern, which I think is the only element of this style of music that I would be able to implement into this composition given the stylistic choices made by the game’s developers. I think my next step will be to incorporate some 7th and 9th chord’s split across multiple synth sounds to lift the mood of the music for the game as I think a lot of the darkness of the initial music came from a lack of harmonic elements as I stuck to mostly low drone notes that were just a root note and a 5th, This was in attempt to make sure everything can loop properly as it was much easier to make a piece that could loop seamlessly with ambient music where the melodies weren't going to clash. With the Collaboration with Oliver I have started to work on an alternate version of our collaboration which is more inspired by the chunky move collection with the intent to fit within the brand identity of chunky move. As I have begun working on this second version some questions have arisen such as, What do I want to keep from our original version? and Should the Tempo still be the same? and Could they feel completely different or should they be 2 versions of the same project? Initially the parts I wanted to keep was the driving 4/4 rhythm as I think this pushed the visuals and contributed to making the work engaging, But I was going to go for a more analogue clean drum kit sound rather than the heavily processed drums used in the original however when I changed the drum sounds to something less processed the energy of the music was completely sucked out and the piece felt slow and less driving which is not what I initially wanted, but this is where all my questions above came from, should this version rely on the drums to drive the work, if so, could I speed up the tempo to get back some of that energy or should I try something else and go a different direction as this is a different iteration of our work. I Think given that changing the songs tempo would require the video edit to be changed dramatically I will proceed with the same tempo and after completing a draft version of this second edit Oliver and I can re visit the idea and evaluate weather it would improve the audio-visual experience to speed the work up and chase the driving feel we think is a strong element in our original work. 

This week I tried to do a bit more research as I feel like I’m getting stuck and am lacking inspiration with my projects, so I have tried to jump start my practical thinking rather than the theoretical which I have been focusing on more in the past few weeks. Given the game visuals look a lot like vaporwave to me i have been exploring the vaporwave game genre and have found some visually similar games to what neon heist looks like at its current stage (example link in refs) I think i’ll aim to incorporate a lot of the same synth sounds that these games use in their soundtracks as they reflect the smooth textures of the visuals whilst feel rich and could be used to sound futuristic. I have also been looking at sound design workflow from other people who have done this in games, I found some good video of people designing sound effects for games specifically from scratch (Link in Refs). Another link I found particularly thought provoking is Andy Farnell talking about sound design in video games. Something that he said that resonated with me was that we often treat video games the same as film or any other visual medium but we really shouldn’t, as when you’re working on a film you have a timeline and can collect sounds and plan out what you want to go where but in games you don’t have that visual reference of what the viewer is going to see, so you almost have to imagine ahead in time to what sounds you might need which is a massive challenge and often a lot of sound work becomes unusable. He talks about having sound that can change within the game to adapt to what environment is triggering the sound, i think this is an interesting concept but unlikely that i will be implementing and of these techniques into my work as this seems really complex and well outside of my skillset at the moment.

Refs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7CJtMCnycE&ab_channel=gabehype https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKBaPIva2vE&ab_channel=KrotosAudio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc04hDcy3lo&ab_channel=MatthewCheshire

[lukebennett]

Week 8 - Activate the Collection

This week was about preparing my Assignment 2 progress presentation, just making sure both my projects are at a stage to where i could talk about what progress i have made and what i still need to do.

After showing the latest version of the collaboration with Oliver in class, we got some feedback which was quite useful and pointed us in a direction to where we can better realise our ideas. Some things I took away from this was the use of musical elements used to materialise the dancers movements, rather the just the edit, doing something like this would make the dancers movements more a focus of the work and would better appeal to chunky move I think, Another option is to make two versions so I can take a more aggressive approach at making something that chunky move might approve of, compared to what our collaboration is now which is vastly different in style form the chunky move original works. From now I think I will work on a second audio version more stripped back and inspired by the chunky move originals whilst still incorporating elements of glitch, so we are not straying away from the core concept of our idea, but still being wiling to explore new ideas.

I was mostly working on getting the Game sound effects started this week, i have bounced out a few test sound effects that I will send over to the developers, they initially liked some of my sound design works that I did last semester with the really glitchy and textured effects, these are not super natural sounding but they are hyper materialistic and this is one of the aesthetics they were going for, however I’m not sure this will work given the direction the game design is going, a lot of my choices in music and sound design were made off the initial pitch I was given about the game and the few reference images I was sent, I thought the game was going to be a lot darker than what it is now, given the latest pictures of what the in game colour scheme looks like, it is a lot brighter than what I was expecting, I think some of the sound choices and textures might have to be toned back to something smoother and warmer to better reflect the environment that they are going to be heard in. The last thing I want to do is to make the space confusing to the player to where they cant figure out where they are supposed to be.

(^ the game environment colour scheme).  as you can see I think a lot of the music I made in the past texturally wont work so I think I will need to change the some of the sounds to something cleaner than I initially thought. However this environment reminded me of the Tron movie except colourful, this gave me ideas about what this environment would sound like as a diegetic space, I noticed in that film they used a reverb space to place elements, but the reverb was a gym sound rather than a natural orchestral room, very spring sounding where you could hear the echoes off of the flat walls, I think using a reverb like this would go a long way in materialising the world in the game. 

This weeks WIPS: https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/EpnEbdwzWjxAkBnJMGd1PB4BVu2gaZOkyrPQFTW41vs1qg?e=tbKI0x

[lukebennett]

Week 7 - Activate the Collection

This week was slightly disappointing, given that i feel like i did a lot of work that got me no where and made a lot of demos that i feel like were failures, but that’s just the nature of creative work right.

With the game sound I started trying to change the original background loops i had created, after being given feedback that they might be too dark, but to keep the intensity. This proved to be difficult as the synth sound that were used to create intensity, had this effect due to them being dissonant and droney and the darkness was more of a bi product of this, These sounds were initially used as they created intensity but weren’t present and could be pushed way into the background of the game play whilst still providing a great feeling of intensity. I found it really difficult to just change the existing music to better suit the game, as I couldn't find a replacement for the synth sounds that worked, i instead decided to start from the beginning and take a completely different approach, just focusing on getting the feeling that i wanted regardless of weather it would fit the game or the aesthetics, just so can get an idea of what works and go from there. i ended up using a variation of some soft snare rolls and hi hats from an acoustic drum kit and some bells in a sort of arp pattern at a faster tempo, this had a mysterious feeling whilst still generating some intensity and still being sparse enough to work in a game environment however this doesn’t sound futuristic at all and i will need to work to find some futuristic sounding instruments to use as substitutes, these examples can be heard in this weeks wip’s folder in links this i would consider a failure as it took me a while to get to this point but i feel like it was a necessary step. I also created some less aggressive versions of a title screen track form the game, this was using the same synths as before but a different drum pattern that was a bit less abrasive for the game. i wanted to keep all the synths in there to play to the futuristic and neon styling, overall i’m unhappy with these, i think the melodic components aren’t very cohesive and don’t really work or sound like a piece of music yet.

my collaboration with Oliver is going well, we have sorted out a length for our piece and now can being refining our ideas and the material we have chosen to ‘activate’. Oliver has sent over his latest video version and i am still working on some of the sound for that in preparation for next weeks classes to hopeful get some class feedback. I have been playing around with some of the synth sounds which work with the video and pulling some of the existing sound out in segments to better reflect the content of the video, such as having a distorted choir sound playing when 2 people are dancing and having their actions sync to the sound in a way, this might make the sound as a piece of music less engaging but the overall audio-visual experience more cohesive. I have started to experiment with a more sound design approach to one of the scenes in the video, as one of the edits Oliver did was didn’t have a dancing element and was quite experimental. I wanted to try to make something that enhanced that and made it feel material, still very rough at this stage but that is in the wip’s for this week as well. I also spent time this week researching some mix techniques from some EDM artists, my reasoning behind this is that the work with Oliver would benefit from a really aggressive sound and alot of the cheesy aggressive EDM music like dubstep is actually mixed really well and these artist know how to make a really busy mix with lost of heavily processed and distorted sound where everything has to be loud, sound good. I watched a lecture from pegboard nerds where they went into a bit of detail about phase aligning sine waves to the frequency of the kick drum to make a sub base that follows the base note of you track as well as mixing the sides of your mix separately to the mid’s and making sure that each independently sounds good on their own, techniques that previously i wouldn’t have thought about. I aim to incorporate these kind of techniques to the collaboration probably at a more finalised stage to hopefully get a massive sounding mix, I think this will reflect the aesthetics we are going for.

Links:

Pegboard Nerds ‘lecture’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvsYQdgQjBQ&ab_channel=JBLProfessional this weeks demos: https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/Es0_-x0VJ5dJlQrSNZo_G4sBoFNt-P8OqQuHViTpwoVpFA?e=xt1Wba

[lukebennett]

Week 6 - Activate The Collection

This week i sent over some draft versions of the background music for the game (link below). I created 9 versions of the background demo i sent over around a week ago, each slightly different but all loop-able and where each could interact with each other smoothly. I also started a version of a title screen track per the game students request, to be implemented as they are working on the title screen for their game-play test.

The feedback was that the background music was maybe a touch too dark, and personally I thought the title track was too aggressive. The music being too dark I understood, however given the aesthetic choices the game students are taking, my approach has been more inspired by a cyberpunk aesthetic, which i thought would fit the game well and is what they seemed to be after, however i am now reconsidering this approach directly as a starting point, as it might be too serious for the game experience, compared to what i initially thought, given that the game is simplistic in design compared to most AAA games that I have used a references and inspiration. The question has arisen that maybe i don’t have the covering fire for this darker approach and it might be better to dial the aggressiveness back a notch but still keep the feel of the music and incorporate some lighter elements to play off the more ‘fun’ aspects of the game design, however my only concern is that there is a fine line between making something less abrasive and making something cheesy like a lot of mini games out there, given that i am the sound designer, falling into the trap of just incorporating music that is easy and just something to fill the background is the main thing i want to avoid. 

My thoughts on how to remedy this was to incorporate some big band elements, which may sound ridiculous and extreme. I initially associated the word ‘Heist’ with kind of a big band soundtrack, as it reminded me of the old James bond movies and most spy movies in general and also the more satire Archer tv show which the art style of the game and some of the themes i found similar, except in the case of this game, we would be playing the game from the other side, the villain rather than the hero. The game incorporates sneaking around and has the same themes as these spy movies which is why i think i associate these two together. I think some elements of this could work as big band music is very grand but its also light and groovy, the complete opposite of the dark and intense palette of sounds i have so far. Obviously these two styles will not work together so my intent it to incorporate some of the jazzy chords and grooves with some more synthetic instruments to better mix with the existing synth based composition. I have found some youtube videos where people have done big band covers of different soundtracks and even video games (i had no idea this was a thing) i am thinking of playing with incorporating some of the chords and the way the instruments harmonise with each other within my existing musical compositions to achieve a slightly lighter mood. 

The collaboration with Oliver on the Chunky Move Asset's hasn't made a lot of progress this week beyond our initial foundation, however we are starting to think about how we can best make use of the opportunity to use the chunky move works and how we can respect the assets in a way that Chunky Move will ‘approve’ our work. The benefits of conducting our work in this way from now on, constraining us to thinking about how they might think about our work, will put our work in a better position to be used and promoted by Chunky Move, as it has the potential to give them content to use for social media and engagement with their audience and it will give our work a platform other than existing within our own folios. It seems smart to make the best of this situation and do the assets justice as one of our main focus’s of our work.

Demo’s this week:

https://rmiteduau-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/r/personal/s3710584_student_rmit_edu_au/Documents/SEM%202/Game%20Audio/Drafts?csf=1&web=1&e=pRTzXO

Refs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FSU3yx0pcw

[lukebennett]

Week 5 - Activate the Collection

This week was the project proposal week, i had to collect and present my ideas and approaches for my two projects for the semester, outlining how my 100 hours would be spent for the rest of the semester.

This week i delivered my first drafts and demos to the game design students, to get their input on some sample music for the background in the game and just some sample ‘mood’ music to see if i am in the ball park with incorporating all the aesthetic elements to the groups expectations.

In class this week, Grounding theory stood out to me as a good way to combine the written aspects of creative work, with the practical on a more theoretical level, helping me think about incorporating the theoretical with the practical better in the future. Also being away what cultural movement my work falls under and how that could actually be useful to think about rather than detrimental, as it can help me work out if i’m achieving my goals of what i want my work to be.

With my collaboration with Oliver we got some great feedback regarding the direction to take our collaboration, regarding using the music as the driving force and the video editing providing the visual decoration. i think from now on we will stick to just working with the chunky move assets rather than the Anthony Hamilton due to copyright concerns. overall this feedback has generated ideas about how i might want to refine my work and incorporate some more added value through use of symbolism and diegetic effects to better infuse the sound with the visual content.

a Big change for me this week was considering using Fmod for the game audio rather than integrating into unity’s audio engine. This would give us greater possibilities for integration which i read about in Game Audio with FMOD and Unity by Ciarán Robinson, and how the use of these would impact the gamplay experience in a positive way in  The Game Audio Tutorial by Richard Stevens and Dave Raybould. though using Fmod’s audio integration with players inputs and movements we could achieve better results of smoothness and less repetitive audio triggering to something that might feel more realistic and immersive.

Book refs:

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=5721517

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/reader.action?docID=4689086

[lukebennett]

Week 4- Activate the Collection

This week was quite productive in terms of confirming my projects and helping define the directions of these projects and the formation of some ideas which could lead to more finished work. 

My first achievement was securing a project working on a game. I was sent an email from Phoebe, Janifer and Emily, telling me about their game project and their aesthetics and game mechanics and asking if id like to get on board. The game is first person bank heist game with a futuristic feel and hyper stylised/neon colours and art style, in terms of sound design this describes an aesthetic which fits with a lot the work i already do. I have had a discussion with the group about how to implement sounds within the game and also what they are after from a sound perspective. For this project it will be a combination of sound design and music. The game is in early stages and they are still designing the map layout and a lot of the character features and equipment that will be making sounds in the environment are yet to be designed, so given that i have made a start on some music which fits with the theme. 

The only issue that has arisen is that the team at this stage hasn't given much thought to what music and where it’s going to be used (understandably). So it’s hard at this stage to write according to what role the music plays. so i have made a start compiling all the themes and aspects of what the game identity is and tried to represent that though music as best i can in the form of a ‘theme’ as at this stage i want to make a start but haven't got a lot of direction. I think for music for the game i will end up writing as much music as possible for all different intensities of what scenarios i could imagine the character to be in and just pick which ones work in the end (almost like writing an album), once I have a clear direction of what i want the music to sound like. 

I have been researching Mick Gordon for a presentation In Adam Hunts sound class and in a YouTube live stream (link in refs) he talked about some  approaches to music in games and how he had done it personally, this has given me some good insight into whats required to make something great. 

From a sound design perspective i will need some art design to go off but my plan for each sound, is to design multiple variations for every given space something could be in, such as different reverb tails for different rooms for example. from a sound design perspective, making the sounds will be easy, making them work will be the hard part. 

as the music has proven to be a challenge I have conducted some research into generic musical approaches in games, i have been looking at books such as

-   Music in Video Games : Studying Play by K. J. Donnelly, , William Gibbons, , and Neil Lerner -   Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games by Karen Collins

I have also looked into other ‘heist’ themed games and games that use similar art styles and how sound has worked for them. I have made a list of soundtracks I need to listen to and make notes on what does and doesn't work. games such as Payday 2 (heist game) and Watch dogs (hacking game??) are two which are more realistic bad have the same game dynamics, so looking at the sound in these games is a good place to start i think, but i am also looking at games like cyberpunk which has a futuristic aesthetic and very synth driven musical elements and has some blade runner vibes going on as well. I’m also breaking it down further into what is a ‘heist’ and what colours ‘neon’ mean and how they’re used to generate an aesthetic visually. i think the questions i need to answer is

is the character the villain? (could impact emotional response) how intense is the setting? (is it creepy or high energy)

As for my other project with Oliver, we submitted a short draft to the class which has helped us refine our approach and work flow, I am working on a 1:30 ish length version of the work in progress track that he can work on creating something with the visual assets from chunky move. We have secured permission to use the chunky move material but i have some concerns with the outcome of the project now as chunky move have been very protective of their assets, which is fine, however i need to take in to consideration that if i want this project to be used in my portfolio and potentially distributed to other people, we will need to make something that they approve of.

Refs 2 books 1 video:

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/reader.action?docID=1659217

https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/book/6451326

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lQUuXKW4FQ&t=8s

[lukebennett]

Week 3 - Activate the Collection

This week I have made progress outlining my first projects for the semester.

First project is a Collaboration with Oliver, working with the inspiration of glitch, initially seen in aspects of Richard Grant’s work, His idea was to  play with opacity and blending mode to blend two clips to re contextualise the video’s. My job with this project, will be to use sound to fulfil the vision and adhere to the ‘brief’ of glitch and chaos.

Oliver and I are beginning discussion’s to further develop our ideas beyond just a few sentences describing the aesthetics which we aim to achieve. This started by me sending though some sample songs, which in my opinion, represented a glitch aesthetic ranging from more listenable music, (such as Jon Hopkins) to something that more resembles noisy sound design, (Autechre). Oliver helped clarify the approach by saying that Jon Hopkins - Emerald rush, was aesthetically what he had in mind for the project. This gave me enough to go off for an initial brief and something to strive towards. I have started to create some draft music to fit to a proposed 10 second video clip that Oliver is working on to test these ideas. This is where we are up to on this project.

My second project has yet to be confirmed, However i am planning to get onboard with the one of the games projects that are available. This project is still yet to get underway as the games students and I are yet to make contact. however in the time between this happening i have begun to familiarise myself with the software that would be used for this project and the skills i might need to develop. I have been looking into both Unity and F mod just to understand the general workflow and familiarising myself with how these programs work just to knowledge under my belt as I haven't done anything like this before.

In regards to the Lectures, I engaged most with the different ways to approach audiovisual relationships, more specifically audiovisual juxtaposition. I think elements of this when thought out, can be highly effective at creating an engaging experience. This is something i would like to explore further down the track with my first project. The idea of the existing collections being ‘un-engaging’ and its our job to make them engaging triggers the thoughts of who do we want to engage with this and how can we create added value to the collections. Some questions i want to answer whilst working on my projects are.

How am i going to implement creative questioning of fundamental rules?

Why am i doing it this way?

Am I right or am I wrong in doing it this way?

How could this work in a collection?

[lukebennett]

Week 2 - Activate the Collection

A way I started to engage with the material for this week is asking myself a series of questions that showed up in the lectures.

What do I want to make?

What am I Making it from?

How will it be made?

What are the reasons for making it?

Answering these questions will aim to define my practice and what ideas and approaches will inform my work and why.

My initial thoughts about conducting creative work in the audio field is to take a more art thinking approach, rather than solving a problem, i’d focus on forming idea’s from existing ideas and creating a chain of ideas that isn’t dependent upon solving a problem.

Design thinking however could be a viable approach, as the main difference between the approaches in my eyes is that design thinking aims to solve a problem, in this case, it is how the art collections interact with the audience, this applies as our goals within the subject are to enhance and re imagine these art collections within an online environment.

However if I am to make use of the creative freedom we have been given to engage with all of these art collections, it would be a wasted opportunity I think, to take a design thinking approach, where as an Art thinking approach I would be able to bounce off whatever Ideas I have without being bound to the thinking of ‘will this work’. In short, the ability to try things with no proposed outcome is an approach I want to explore, this is inspired partly by David Lynch when he said that ‘great ideas are caught’ and not intended to be great from the initial formation of the idea (Lynch on creativity).

Something else that I engaged with was the ‘what comes after a remix’ question posed by Manovich. This particularly interested me given my electronic music background and electronic music being discussed as an aspect of ‘remix culture’ in Manovich’s article. The thought of, ‘when will we get bored of the same cultural objects being re-used again and again’ this makes me think that logic in creation might not be the best way of creating something new and unique, given my skillset in audio is heavily weighted in this remix culture, not necessarily directly, but defiantly ideologically, I find myself constantly borrowing ideas and techniques that I learned from other people. The main question from this document which I would like to engage with is “will it be still psychologically possible to create a new aesthetics that does not rely on excessive sampling?” (Manovich 2007)

Collections I would like to engage with:

My thoughts at this stage are still very broad, however I was most attracted to the Richard Grant works as this felt very familiar to music I have listened to in the past and visuals which accommodate the music well. My thoughts on addressing this would be to use the existing audio and visuals and create something using these as my starting point. My thinking is using the idea of remixing as a starting point then not drawing on any other ideas from outside this context, thus limiting the approach of remixing to simply the initial idea where I can hope to address creating something by letting the ideas flow from there and implementing an art thinking approach.

I am also interested in pursuing some of the ACMI home video collections however I haven’t found any good ideas for how to approach any particular video’s yet but I am really interested in taking up the opportunity to work with that collection.

Refs:

Lynch on creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNufijIDD-Q

Manovich 2007, What comes after a remix: http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/057-what-comes-after-remix/54_article_2007.pdf