#I originally used a clip of Ricochet as reference

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Seeing something with the camera again on Storyboard Pro

(feat. my wrestler OC - LYNX)

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Sound effects - Foley

26/03/2019

Next it was time to create sound effects for Ricochet and Aperol Spritz. Although one Ricochet sound effect needed to be gathered from the dBs sound effects archive (a crowd clapping and cheering) I decided to produce the other visual portfolio sound effects with Foley. The session took place in dBs Studio 4 - which has multiple connections running through to the Foley room. I wanted to layer some location sounds I had recorded for Ricochet with Foley to increase realism. Yu supports this concept, stating “manufacturing the sounds can bring us even closer to the truth than location sounds because the ability to create sounds allows a closer imitation of what we expect to hear” (Yu, 2003, p.96). Before the session, guided by spotting lists for both Aperol Spritz and Ricochet, all relevant materials needed were purchased and gathered plus extra objects for layering with these sounds, to make them more powerful. One example was recording metallic “ice” cubes as well as normal ones.

The Foley session was a two person job, so I enlisted the help of student Dan Kowalski to help by controlling the studio computer and making sure tracks volumes were not too loud to avoid recording clipping and distortion. Volume levels had to be adjusted for the type of sound recorded - levels up for quieter sounds like fizzing of drinks,  and down for louder sounds like the impact of a glass on a shelf (replicated with a wooden coaster).

When considering the appropriate microphone to use, I decided on the Neumann KM 184 Cardioid Compact Condenser. Using a condenser microphone was vital to this process because “in a controlled environment, they can offer a truer reproduction of the original sound. Condenser is the most widely used type of microphone for sound effects recording” (Viers, 2008, p.33). When reading about the Neumann KM 184 on their website I came across this quote: “The KM 184 has a very low self-noise of only 13 dB-A and can handle high sound pressure levels of up to 138 dB free from distortion” (Neumann, n.d). Using a microphone with a low self-noise would reduce noise in Foley recordings, and the high sound pressure level without distortion perfect for recording more impactful sounds.

I conducted research into Foley microphone placement techniques and found Viers insight “for the most part, Foley is recorded using close miking techniques, which help bring the sound into focus and reduce the effects of the room. You should always record sounds dry (no effects). Compression and reverb should always be added afterwards” (Viers, 2008, p.110). I placed the Neumann KM 184 on a stand and followed the close techniques described above, pointing directly at the object I wanted to record. Photos below show the microphone and placement technique applied:

Neumann KM 184 microphone

Microphone placement

Additionally, an AKG C 414 was positioned on a stand in the corner of the room and a pair of Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro headphones plugged into the Foley room audio interface, allowing me to communicate with Dan as he could hear me in the studio, and I could hear him in the headphones as he used the talkback microphone attached to the mixing desk. The pictures below illustrate this:

AKG C 414 microphone

AKG C 414 microphone & Beyerdynamic DT770 headphones

Talkback microphone

By showing the timecode on the monitor screen set-up in the Foley room, I could perform Foley sounds while watching the visual content. Dan cued up the video to a few seconds before the sound event for each take, asking if I was ready to record. The picture below shows the monitor screen in use, depicting the Ricochet Logic Pro X file, visual content, and timecode.

Monitor Screen

Before I began recording, I took precautions to reduce any sound I would create that would not be favourable in recordings. After reading the section on Foley in Viers’s book ‘The Sound Effects Bible’ I had learned useful methods to do this, including choice of clothes, as explained by Viers in this quote “Choose clothes that do not have noisy zippers or vinyl fabrics that make sound every time you move. Sweat pants are preferred, but blue jeans will do fine. The idea is to have loose clothing that will allow you to move freely without affecting the recording. Wear shoes that are comfortable but not big and bulky. You may need to tuck in long shoelaces that can bounce off your shoes when you move around” (Viers, 2008, p.117). Another precaution was to turn off my mobile phone to avoid interference, an important measure recommended by Viers, “turn your cell phone completely off. Cell phones create interference in recording equipment. This happens even when they are on vibrate. When you are ready to roll, turn off your phone. If you have to leave your phone on, place it away from the recording gear“ (Viers, 2008, p.118). This helped record clear Foley and greatly reduced unwanted background sounds.

Once all equipment was set up and working and I was ready to record my first takes, I adjusted the microphone position to point at exactly where the sound was coming from - a technique learned from this Viers quote “when recording an object, find the source of the sound that is being produced. This is called the sound source and should be the center of the microphone’s focus” (Viers, 2008, p.92). I also took into account the angle of the visuals and where the listener would be in relation to them. This was testing a theory from Westerkamp outlined in this following quote “I have found it interesting to create situations in which the ear is imagined as a microphone and the microphone as a human ear. It causes a shift in perception both while listening without a microphone and while recording” (Westerkamp, 2002, p.4). Viers reinforces this sequence of recording techniques, advising to “find the sound source of the object and start there. Then be creative and try miking the object from different perspectives and directions” (Viers, 2008, p.92). The following pictures document this process and show behind the scenes shots of the Foley recording session underway. These pictures were taken after the recording was completed to demonstrate the process, when mobile phones would not interfere with the recording session.

When convinced I had captured multiple high-quality recordings for each sound needed, I went back into Studio 4 to organise and export the recordings into a folder. I thoroughly enjoyed the process and the collaborative workflow applied when working with Dan in this Foley session. The Foley recordings folder is displayed in the screenshot below:

References

En-de.neumann.com (n.d.) KM 184 [Online]. Available at: https://en-de.neumann.com/km-184 (Accessed 22 March 2019).

Viers, R. (2008) The sound effects bible, 1st ed, Studio City, CA: Published by Michael Wiese Productions, pp.33-118.

Westerkamp, H. (2002) Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology, Organised Sound, vol. 7 (01), p.4 [Online]. Available at: https://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/writings%20page/articles%20pages/linking.html (Accessed 15 February 2019).

Yu, E. (2003) Perspectives: Sounds of Cinema: What Do We Really Hear?, Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 31(2), pp.93-96 [Online]. Available at: https://eds-a-ebscohost-com.bathspa.idm.oclc.org/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=a619ddbc-9c39-4ac8-b92c-a2f4873cdf17%40sdc-v-sessmgr06 (Accessed 15 March 2019).

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World of Tanks – Musically Mature

Music and sound effects in games are so much more than a nice-to-have feature. Not only do they help players get into the right mood for battle, they can even become an important tactical element.

When World of Tanks launched, its audio team consisted of just one person. Wargaming couldn’t afford to record real tanks, so the vanilla sound effects were mostly improvised. The game was constrained by the limitations of its first audio engine, FMOD. It didn’t allow for spatial positioning of sounds: tankers could not gauge the distance of an explosion or what side the enemy shells were coming from, and had to rely on visuals only. The sound effects were static: your favorite tank’s cannon always banged exactly the same way. The musical themes were static, too. Alexey Tomanov, World of Tanks Audio Team Lead, tells us how the game’s sounds were made more realistic, varied and informative – and what the new musical soundtrack will be like.

Building up the Sound Library

I’ve been playing World of Tanks since launch. When I was hired by Wargaming in 2013, I had been in tens of thousands of battles. As a player, I wanted the tank engines to growl like they do in movies and explosions to sound different every time. As an audio engineer, I knew that high-quality sounds could be obtained by recording real vehicles, and their fluidity and depth could only be achieved with a new audio engine. The most effective way of improving the game’s sound effects was to gather the source material while implementing some new effects in the old engine and then switching to the new one.

Integrating all the recorded sound material into the new sound engine Wwise was a ton of work, but totally worth the efforts.

The work on the library of live tank sounds had started before I came aboard but I participated in the bulk of it. The company was sending us on long trips abroad with hi-fi recording equipment. We captured the engine sounds of the StuG III, the T-26, the KV-1 and the Valentine in th »Kubinka Tank Museum« near Moscow. The Patton, the Hetzer, the Chaffee, various Shermans and other vehicles were recorded in the Virginia Museum of Military Vehicles and the Museum of the American G.I. in Texas.

We recorded the cannons’ sounds in a desert tank firing range in Jordan. Having access to that place proved indispensable, as there were guns of different calibers. It did not matter that most of the vehicles – for example, the Chieftain main battle tank – were of a later period than the one we cover in World of Tanks.

The gun of a Scimitar light tank booms just like those on classic French tanks with oscillating turrets. We had time to record the gun and engine sounds from various distances, moving our mics all over the desert. Later, when we switched to the »Wwise« audio engine, these recordings proved very useful. We even captured the sound of tank armor being hit. A rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the broken hull of a SU-100 tank destroyer and a pretty expensive microphone was set five meters behind it. Had something gone wrong, we could have lost an insane amount of money. But the SU-100 armor didn’t cave in and we got our reference sound.

New Sound

We completed collecting the tank sound library by autumn 2014, and started to integrate the new audio engine – Wwise – into the game. It took us a year and a half: we had to fine-tune and optimize, making sure the new engine wouldn’t impede the performance on PC’s with single-core processors. Most of the time was spent bringing the new audio content into Wwise.

Real sounds from real cannons: On a tank shooting range in Jordan the team recorded real cannon fire from different positions and distances, even ricochetting rocket-propelled grenades.

We spent days and nights in the studio honing the sounds. The engine switch came in 2016 with the 9.14 update. It substituted more than 80% of sound effects in the game with realistic ones based on our sound library material. The Wwise engine helped us bring variation to hits, shots and tank explosions. Every such sound now consists of 10 microsounds, chosen randomly from separate containers, each holding 5 different files. The sound layers are randomly shifted by microseconds relative to each other. All this makes every sound effect unique.

Wwise has spatial positioning of effects, and you can assess the distance to a shooting or exploding tank and also perceive the direction. The engine allows for a 360° sound panorama, and you will instantly know which side of your tank has been hit. You can also hear how hard the blow has been: the sound depends on the share of your total hit points lost and has three degrees. The subtraction of 300 HP produces a scratching sound for the Maus heavy tank and a loud boom for a Tier X arty, because in the first case you lose 10% of your HP and in the second, it’s about 50%. Unlike hits, ricochets have their sounds tied to the attacker’s cannon caliber: how hard you may be struck the next time is the most valuable and relevant info in this case.

New Music

At the time the 9.14 update came out, the audio part of the game was like a stock tank: it had great potential to be unlocked. And that’s what we’re currently doing – rebuilding the music along the same lines of the sound effects. »New music«, as we call it, is a completely new soundtrack with map themes that play differently every time and depend on what’s happening to your team on the battlefield.

Everchanging just like flames: The main battle theme will evolve in real time, made up by randomly chosen fragments from a map’s sound asset pack.

What we want is to take both the soundtrack and its scope to the global level. Musicians from all around the world created the source material for the new soundtrack. They composed short, original pieces representing their countries’ musical heritage. New music fits the nature of the game: the play sessions are brief but overall the players spend lots of time in it, so they should never get tired of the melodies.

In the process of working on the new soundtrack we discovered that music is one of the many talents that our passionate community has. There are several globally known talented musicians representing our community of tankers, such as the Swedish heavy metal group Sabaton or Akira Yamaoka, the composer of »Silent Hill«’s legendary soundtrack. Working closely with these famous and incredibly talented musicians was a great experience for us all. Yamaoka-san has been working on a track, which will be added to the OST – as a gift to the World of Tanks community which we will present to our audience very soon.

Sabaton are a band of passionate and dedicated World of Tanks players. In cooperation with them we created a stylish World of Tanks video clip which was released on August 16th. The clip was directed by the famous German music video and commercial director Zoran Bihac who is greatly known for his work on many videos such as »Mein Herz brennt« by Rammstein or »Praise Abort« by Till Lindemann. The music video itself features Sabaton’s most famous song »Primo Victoria« and focuses on tank battle emotions and tank rock content. We like to call it the birth of a new music genre: #TankMetal!

About the Author:

Aleksey Tomanov

is World of Tanks Audio Team Lead at Wargaming.

Aleksey has been in game development since 2006. He worked as a game and sound designer at Floodlight Games. Alexey came to Wargaming in 2013 and delivered audio concepts and sound design for World of Tanks Blitz. In 2015, he became World of Tanks Audio Team Lead and is now in charge of World of Tanks’ sound on PC.

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