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Feature: Dynamic Game Audio Ambience: Bringing Prototype's New York City to Life
by Staff
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June 4, 2009
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In a fascinating, in-depth audio article, Radical Entertainment's sound director Scott Morgan explains the detail that went into creating the complex ambient sound for the troubled cityscape in action game Prototype.
To create Prototype's ambient sound, Radical's Vancouver-based audio team traveled New York City and explored Manhattans streets, shorelines, parks, subways, and rooftops, bringing back over 20 hours of raw recordings. The game's ambiences are complete reconstructions combining multiple layers of Radical's original recordings with extra sounds from their libraries, approximating the borough's drone:
"Although our recording set-ups were stereo, some of the ambiences in the game are actually quadraphonic. We decided that light-weight, low-profile stereo equipment was actually more desirable than any kind of elaborate four-channel mic/recorder setup.
The quad ambiences in the game ended up being amalgamations of two or more separate sets of stereo recordings from the same environments. Although you lose any realistic positioning with this style of recording/playback, it has the advantage of sounding denser, which was often desirable for our game.
Although many of Manhattan's neighborhoods and boroughs have distinct and unique ambiences, what we discovered after several days of recording is Manhattan has a constant drone that underscores everything in the city. You can hear it in the parks, the subways and the busy streets -- it is like a resonant note that plays continuously in the background, 24/7.
Some of our quieter recordings reveal this keynote drone so we primarily used those recordings to form the basic, four-channel building block of Prototype's New York City ambience."
Prototype's ambiences were divided into three tiers, or perspectives -- the quadrophonic bed track, taken from more distant perspective recordings of Manhattan; "midground" ambience composed of ambient sounds made from groups of objects in the real world like pedestrians or vehicles; and foreground audience composed of sounds from a single object in the game world such as lines of ambient dialogue or individual vehicle honks:
"The main advantage of this tiered approach is the blending you can achieve from foreground to background which acts to provide a kind of aural depth of field. Because you get individual reactions and ambient sounds form objects in the immediate foreground, the midground and background layers blend in to provide a sense of depth to the audio. This way, the individual sounds don't stand out as awkwardly loud or prominent in the mix because of the blended grouped content underneath.
Another advantage to this approach is you can be frugal with the use of voices for ambient foreground sounds thanks to the support of the midground, grouped sounds. This allowed us to set maximums on individual pedestrian voices, vehicle engines and other foreground objects. In a game which features hundreds of these objects on the screen at any given time, this proved very important to reserve voices for other more important sounds like the main characters powers, combat sounds, prop damage states, etc."
You can now read the full feature at Gamasutra, which includes more in-depth details on how Radical Entertainment crafted Prototype's complex ambient sound (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).
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