Joanna Orland

Sound Designer, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Joanna Orland is a sound designer at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s London studio. She began her career in the games industry at EA Criterion where she worked on the Black and Burnout franchises. Joanna’s game sound career has focused strongly on ambient sound design with a keen emphasis on emotional drive. Before the games industry, Joanna had studied audio and media for a number of years, retaining an MA in Audio Production (University of Westminster), Post Graduate Certificate in Interactive Multimedia (SheridanCollege) and BAA in Radio & Television Arts (RyersonUniversity). After obtaining her MA, Joanna spent three years in the role of University Lecturer in the MA Audio Production course at the University of Westminster, leading a module on Interactive Design. This was done simultaneously to her work at EA Criterion. Other work of interest includes an internship at American soap opera The Young & The Restless, organizer of a benefit concert for The Canadian Cancer Society, Front of House staff at the Toronto International Film Festival, Engineer and Co-Producer for acclaimed singer-songwriter Matthew Jay, and a role as producer and journalist for a gossip web site.

Bringing Ambience To The Foreground: Enhancing Emotion Through Ambient Sound Design
Speaker: Joanna Orland (Sound Designer, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe)
Date/Time: TBD
Track: Audio
Secondary Track: Production
Format: 20-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All

Session Description
This session brings ambience sound design from the background to the foreground as it presents an overview of different approaches to designing ambient sound. Specifically looking at mood-driven ambience as an emotional drive of a game, methods of creation and implementation will be discussed.

Discussion will focus on abstract and hyper-real ambience creation, and how to have it co-exist with the realistic elements of the soundscape. Attendees will be presented different options on how to evolve ambience alongside gameplay, and will hopefully take away methods of inspiration for their future work.

Takeaway
Attendees will gain a new perspective on audio approaches to enhance emotion in gameplay. This lecture also intends to inspire experimentation with atmospheric content and to discuss how audio can play a defining role in setting the mood of a game.
Intended Audience and Prerequisites

This lecture is intended for audio directors, sound designers, producers, game designers, and anyone with an interest in enhancing emotion in gameplay.

Bringing Ambience To The Foreground:

Enhancing Emotion Through Ambient Sound Design

Introduction

ME:

  • Joanna Orland - Sound designer at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s London studio.
  • Began career in the games industry at EA Criterion where I worked on the Black and Burnout franchises.
  • Was responsible for creating and implementing the Ambiences for the FPS Black.

AMBIENCE:

Sadly, ambience can often be one of the most underdeveloped aspects of sound design in video games. There is a lot of potential with ambience creation to have sound design play an even more important role in the scope of the game, giving the player environmental cues, setting the level’s mood, and enhancing the player’s emotional involvement with a game.

Purpose of Ambience

  • Creating a sense of space and environment.
  • Defining the style and mood of a game.
  • Heightening the player’s emotional involvement with a game.

Ambience is NOT usedfor filling inthe empty background sound, but rather to put the player in a physical and mental space! There are various approaches to ambience design in a game, from the “Realistic Environment” to the darker “Atonal Abstract” ambiences that can also help to drive the mood of the game.

Environmental:

As we all know, environmental sounds immerse the player into the game world. Each level can have bespoke ambiences to reflect the player’s surroundings. The sounds of environmental ambiences include the realistic spatial sounds, as well as well-placedspot fx to represent 3D objects in the world.

Abstract:

Abstract ambiences are used to emotionally involve the player in the gameplay. They don’t necessarily reflect the player’s surroundings in the game world, but often reflect the mood of the level and will enhance the player’s emotional ride whilst they play through the game.

Finding the Right Balance:

In creating ambiences, we are not restricted to using only one or the other type of ambience. The most effectiveand interesting ambiences use elements of both environmental reality alongside abstract mood-enhancing tones. This may be considered as an exaggerated form of Reality, or referred to as Hyper-Reality.

Take this clip from Lost as an example. The environment can be heard in the form of crickets and jungle noises. There are dark droning and heavy abstract elements to darken the mood and imply that the character Clare might be in danger. As the scene progresses, less of the environment is heard and more of the abstract is prominent to imply the danger is getting nearer.

Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See
By WALTER MURCH

We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see it.

A sound designer has the power to influence what the player visualizes in a game’s level. Through the power of suggestion, we can design our ambiences to manipulate the emotions of a player to instil fear, build tension, evoke sadness, create a moment of happiness, the possibilities are endless. But how does this work? Let’s take The Horrorgenre as an example.

The majority of Horror films design their soundscape with realistic sounding characters, and place them in an exaggerated and abstract Hyper-Real environment. By making the character sounds realistic and greatly separate from the environmental sounds, an emotional attachment can be formed by the player towards the character. As the environment sounds more abstract, the player can’t feel that same relation to the world as it does to the character, which in turn makes the player uneasy. This allows the sound designer to manipulate the build up of tension and fear for the player as their beloved realistic character is placed in an unfamiliar, therefore frightening environment.

In this clip from SAW, you can see that two average police characters with normal sounding footsteps, Foley and dialogue are placed in a tense environment with atonal, abstract droning ambience. The policemen seem almost vulnerable just by the sound of their clunky footsteps, while the environment sounds highly threatening as it’s very unnatural and abstract in tone.

Creation

The ambience creation process begins with the asset selection. It’s always the preference to record bespoke ambiences for your game, but this might not always be possible. But even without original recordings, it is still easy to make a distinctive ambience.

One way to be original is to not necessarily go for the expected sounds. Choose a unique source to compliment your soundscape. For example, in the forest level for the video game Black, I chose to leave in a bit proper wind noise from the location recording in the windy forest ambience. I didn’t really think of the implications this had that I would be using what we all consider to be throwaway “noise”, my thought process was that when you’re in a really windy environment and the wind is strong, sometimes your ears pick up the wind noise in a similar fashion to how the mic picked up this particular wind. It was a risk, but it paid off as this wind past the ears sound helped to immerse the player in the environment and give them the feeling that they were really there surrounded by this cold gusty forest wind.

Finding the balance between the Real and the Abstract can be a challenge. You want the environment to be believable, therefore adding the realistic sounds, but you want the environment to evoke emotion in the player, therefore adding the abstract or hyper-real sounds. It is up to you to decide how far you should take it in one direction or another. Only experimentation can really lead to innovation.

While abstract elements can sometimes confuse the player, realistic elements can have the same effect. For example, in a war game, distant gunfire can have two effects. One is to confuse the player into thinking they are being shot at, the other is to make them feel as though they are right in the middle of a war.

This leads to another question of how close should sounds be within an atmosphere? Again, that is up to experimentation, but generally if you hear it and do expect to see it then it is too close. If you hear it and sense that it is near, then that is a good audible distance.

A really good example of a distant battle ambience is in the film Children of Men. There are lots of close gunfire sounds in the ambience, but it’s mixed in such a way that the viewer feels the danger the character is in, rather than expecting to see the bullets flying past the camera at all times.

An example of this used in game is in the city level in Black. The ambience pads out the enemy gunfire to give the sense that there are dozens of enemies firing at you, when in reality the player is only hearing up to 3 enemies at any given time.

One of the most important aspects of creating a solid ambience is to create the sense of Space. This is not just the physical space of the player’s environment, but it is also a sense of space within the ambience itself. There is no need to have a heavy loop as the main focus of an ambience. Sounds should come in and out of the ambience, with a base loop that leaves room to breathe. You want dynamic range in your ambience which is a useful method of preventing White Noise from just layering and leaving a very noisy ambience.

Implementation

Implementation often consists of the combination of setting an underlying base ambience per zone with various 3D spot emitters dispersed across the level.

The ambience can evolve based on gameplay, not just location. So, a forest level might play a dark droning ambience that implies impending danger for a Prebattle ambience. If there’s a key gameplay trigger that kicks off a battle, we might want this ambience to change to play ambience with distant gunfire for a Battle ambience. After the battle, we might want this same location to play a more realistic forest ambience that suggests that the player is now in the clear, as our Postbattle ambience.

Mixing of assets plays an important role in how your ambience is used. For example, how does ambience work with music and when is it best not to use ambience? A situation like a chase scene might not have any audible ambience, but instead be driven by high-action, percussive music. Anything less fast-paced doesn’t necessarily need the percussive drive.

Here’s a quick example from Lost, where the chase scene is music based and immediately afterwards, the audio focus changes back to the ambience.

Conclusion

  • Creating a sense of space and environment:
  • Light ambience base loop
  • Add 3d Emitters and other one shot sounds for dynamics
  • ROOM TO BREATHE – space in ambiences!!
  • Defining the style and mood of a game:
  • Use Abstract elements
  • Experimentation leads to Innovation
  • TAKE RISKS!!!
  • Heightening the player’s emotional involvement with a game:
  • Evolve based on gameplay
  • Environmental vs. Abstract
  • FIND THE RIGHT BALANCE

The Future

Hopefully in-game ambiences will become more often mood-driven based on Gameplay rather than just static location.

It’s key to work closely with the designers to set the mood of a game and map out key emotional moments where mood-defining ambience will be key.

You need to have a system in place to have the game engine understand the concept of what mood the game is at certain points and feedback into the system to playback the appropriate ambience.

Thank you!