The sounds of the rolling sand waves have short and tall versions, and were made by putting a headset mic in a Ziploc bag, burying it in sand, and sweeping the sand over it with my hand. There are also pitched-down spinner fireworks that play as sweeteners.
The sandbox wasn't big enough for getting the big sand sprays, so I recorded them at 1 am in the playground of nearby Clover Park -- and ducked from cops!
The player's scarf is made from a microfiber apron that was sweet-talked out of a salon by Phil Kovats, my former manager and the audio lead of The Last Of Us. There is a loop that plays from the middle of the scarf, and a loop that plays from the end of it.
The robe and scarf loops are always reading a few variables from code in order to play at the appropriate speed and intensity. They take into account player velocity, wind speed, and for the scarf, scarf length. So each scarf loop is always playing one of 64 specific arrangements of scarf sounds.
The sand surf sounds were actually repitched, EQed, grass loops from Flower (plus separate loops for turning/carving the sand)... until the day before everything wrapped. I was the only one who knew or cared, but it always bugged me, so I recorded and replaced it with what's there now, what I always thought it should be, my finger drawing circles in the sand. Took about five minutes to do!
Most of the shining magical stuff was made by mutating and convolving various bells and chimes against each other using a free program called Soundhack.
The sound of the large cloth banners getting colored in was made from the shining bell and chime stuff along with soft liquid lapping, to contrast the dry desert. They pitch up according to how colored in they are, like the flight meter of the scarf. (This is done in code, and not heard in the example below.)
The lantern hums in the game were made from meditation crystal singing bowls. Their lighting up sound includes a bell that sits in my parents' living room.
The splash sound of diving in and out of the spirit water in the vertical 6th level came from a hall in Naughty Dog, when Damian Kastbauer, who was there helping with sound implementation on Uncharted 3, walked up behind me and swirled real life sparkles around my head -- a tiny plastic box with a thumb wheel on it that played "Pop Goes the Weasel" at any speed. The little guts of a music box or baby crib mobile, maybe? Timestretched, EQed, effected bursts of it became the magical splashes I needed.
Austin also provided musical flourishes that were combined with chimes for collecting the flying cloth strand bits. Collect one at a time and it plays individual small parts; sing to five or more at once and it instead plays a moderately sized flourish; sing to 10 or more at once for a large one. So that way it wasn't just a large stack of individual sounds, but something that sounds like a section of the orchestra springing out of the score.
What I like about the game, Austin's excellent talk at GDC and your article here is how music and sound interacted much more closely than they do in most games. Depending on the genre / style / mechanics, a lot more games should do the same.
I find inspiring how creative you were with what you recorded. Great ingenuity in the sounds recorded!
One point you make that I think is very important for games trying to breath life into their worlds; if ambient creatures are added to the world, they are perceived as dumb if they don't react to the world in any way. These reactions can be simple audio elements that are triggered at logical times to denote emotional responses from these creatures, and immediately give the game-world more believability. I think this is a trick that could be used to great affect in many games.
Thanks for this great article. I am experiencing problems in looping sounds like surface slides, because there is a certain amount of phasing going on, and whenever the the sample loops to the start, you can notice the discontinuity. I try to cope with that by duplicating the audio and reversing the duplicate in the time domain. Any suggestions would be deeply appreciated.
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One point you make that I think is very important for games trying to breath life into their worlds; if ambient creatures are added to the world, they are perceived as dumb if they don't react to the world in any way. These reactions can be simple audio elements that are triggered at logical times to denote emotional responses from these creatures, and immediately give the game-world more believability. I think this is a trick that could be used to great affect in many games.