Group items tagged

"This year I took part in Audio Game Jam 2. A game jam with the goal to raise awareness of accessibility issues experienced by visually impaired people when playing video games. If you haven't heard of audio games, these are games which are played mostly or solely through audio. There's lots of audio games across many genres like narrative adventures, flight simulators, RPG's, RTS games or even GTA style games."

"Welcome to the Resources Section. These resources provide useful information for the creation of audio games, game accessibility and background information of the industry in general."

"INSIDE is a fantastic sounding game full of craft, polish and the sorts of perfect choices that only experience can bring. I have zero opinion on its overall loudness, and its weighted dynamics probably fall within the ranges we'd all aim to ship a game within. But its perceived dynamics are staggering"

"In order to design a computer game soundscape that allows a game player to feel immersed in theirvirtual world, we must understand how we navigate and understand the real world soundscape. In thischapter I will explore how sound, particularly in urban spaces, is increasingly categorised as noise,ignoring both the social signicance of any soundscape and how we use sound to interpret and negotiate space. I will explore innovative methodologies for identifying an individual's perception of soundscapes. Designing virtual soundscapes without prior investigation into their cultural and social meaning could prove problematic."

"For most fans attending a baseball game is a summer diversion, an addiction, an act of devotion. I'm a music critic, so for me it's something else too: an immersion in bustling, jumbled, enveloping sound. And if you think of the Yankees as an athletic orchestra, the team has a comfortable and acoustically lively new concert hall. What if I treated a game as a kind of outdoor musical piece? "

THE BOUNCY BEEPS of Pac-Man. The percussive build-up in Legend of Zelda. The effusive gibberish of The Sims. The sounds in videogames tell us to speed up, start over, and of course, to keep playing. But how does one set of beeps so effectively tell you you've gained power, while another indicates your character has died? And how, exactly, does someone create the sound of the Dark Knight punching the Joker in the face? The answer: Genius sound design.

"Two sonic branding experts explain the thinking behind some of the world's most recognizable sounds. Featuring: Andrew Stafford - Co-Founder & Director at Big Sync Music Steve Milton - Founding Partner at Listen"

"For those familiar with modern media, there are a number of short musical phrases that immediately trigger a particular emotional response. Think, for example, of the two-note theme that denotes the shark in Jaws, and see if you become just a little more tense or nervous. So too with the stabbing shriek of the violins from Psycho, or even the whirling four-note theme from The Twilight Zone. In each of these cases, the musical theme is short, memorable, and unalterably linked to one specific feeling: fear. The first few notes of the "Dies Irae" chant, perhaps as recognizable as any of the other themes I mentioned already, are often used to provoke that same emotion."

"As sound designers, we are usually focused on how sound can affect a player's immersion or enjoyment of a game - certainly important. However, for this blog post I wanted to try and focus on a slightly less common topic, how sound can affect a player's experience in relation to their 'performance'. How can we improve-or worsen-a player's ability to succeed with sound? "

"Cube with Magic Ribbons is a computer visual and synthesised sound composition for live performance. The piece takes its title from a drawing of M.C.Escher which is rich with contradictory perspectives but it is also inspired by the wrapped spaces found in the two dimensional graphics of early computer games such as Asteroids and Pac-Man. It was created using a custom visual sequencer SoundCircuit, which rather than employing a conventional DAW layout, allows multiple virtual tape-heads to travel through a two-dimensional wrapped space along tracks that can be freely inter-connected. As the tape-heads travel through the resultant network, the topological layout of the tracks comes to directly influence the macro form of the music. Furthermore, as the piece unfolds the nature of this already confusing space reveals itself to be increasingly elastic and complex, yet inexorably intertwined with the musical form."

"The 68,338 fans that packed into CenturyLink Field set the world record Sept. 15 for noise at an outdoor sports stadium at 136.6 decibels, propelling the Seahawks to a rousing 29-3 home-opening win over NFC West rival San Francisco. The previous record was 131.76, set at a Turkish soccer club game March 8, 2011, and the loudest CenturyLink had ever been before was 112 decibels."

"Such an elegant and delicate way of manifesting our issues demonstrates how we can do something without saturating ourselves, instead using art, simplicity and sound to be as direct as we can, not playing the dirty game of those to whom we are reacting. Actually, the project was finely installed in the Rauschenberg studio, where an old Nagra recorder, and a beautifully exposed tape, reproduce the hypnotizing call for action, which in this case could start just with an act of listening, constantly, to all of our words of concern."

"Stonehenge is a ruin. Whatever sound it originally had 3,000 years ago has been lost but now, using technology created for video games and architects, Dr Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield has - with the help of some ancient instruments - created a virtual sound tour of Stonehenge as it would have sounded with all the stones in place."

Trapped in darkness, you must use visualized sound to guide your way through threatening environments. The sounds you create will bounce off obstacles, revealing the shape of the surrounding world. It won't be long before your only way of sensing the world attracts a horrifying evil that devours both sound and souls.

"Jonas Hollerup Helle  did an in-depth feature interview of Martin Stig Andersen, Sound Designer & Composer behind Playdead's LIMBO & INSIDE."

"With Resonance Audio, bring dynamic spatial sound into your VR, AR, gaming, or video experiences at scale."

"Bose Frames are Bose AR compatible - the first commercial product embedded with the Bose audio augmented reality platform. Unlike other augmented reality glasses and platforms, Bose AR doesn't change what you see, or use a lens or phone camera to superimpose objects in your sightline. Instead, it knows where you are and what you're facing using a 9-axis head motion sensor and the GPS from your iOS or Android device - and automatically adds a layer of audio, connecting that place and time to endless possibilities for travel, learning, entertainment, gaming, and more. It's all accessible through the ease of listening - clear-eyed, heads-up, hands-free. And with Bose AR experiences in development, it's coming soon to Bose Frames."

With the advent of Digital Humanities methodologies the visualization of Humanities data has become more and more prominent. However, once the "wow-effect" of a "cool" visualization - such as a pie-chart, a word cloud, a diagram etc. - has worn off many Humanists begin to react with scepticism: is it worth the trouble? Doesn"t a "word say more than thousand pictures"? Their scepticism seems justified: Most of the current visualization paradigms are derived from engineering and mathematics oriented applications. Most of them are context blind, a-historical and driven by an epistemology that reduces complex phenomena to a series of "data points" - which is exactly the opposite of how Humanists tend to look at their field of interest. - In this lecture series international visualization experts will explore new, philosophically and cultural history informed approaches to Humanities data visualization that respond to the Humanities" needs.