virtual reality game audio Asbjoern Andersen


Noted audio director Garry Taylor, from Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe, recently gave a talk about the possibilities and challenges for audio in virtual reality – from a non-technical perspective. I’m really happy to be able to share it here on the A Sound Effect blog, and without further ado, here’s Garry Taylor:
 
This is a talk given at the VRX Europe Conference in London in May 2016 to a non-technical audience. It was not aimed at audio designers or engineers, and so I didn’t go in-depth into any of the technical issues. My goal was to get across to a lay-audience some of the many issues VR development teams may face, in terms of audio, when developing content.

– Garry Taylor. Audio Director, WWS Creative Services Group, Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe.


 

Someone asked me recently what the difference was between audio for TV based games and audio for VR.  After giving it a bit of thought, I came to the conclusion that getting it wrong on a TV is mildly annoying, but getting it wrong on VR and the player will want to kill you.  By that I mean badly implemented audio in VR can be so off-putting, it can seriously hinder people’s acceptance of their virtual reality, to the point that it may put some people off completely, and this is a big problem.  

Michael Abrash at Oculus said that 3D sound in VR is ‘not an addition, it’s a multiplier’. Everybody talks about VR in terms of ‘presence’ and ‘immersion’. The truth is that without a certain level of competence in audio design, there is no presence.  What’s more, because it is a multiplier, there is an extremely fine line between what we would call presence, the illusion that you’re actually there, and annoyance.

The truth is that without a certain level of competence in audio design, there is no presence

Our teams have been experimenting to find out what works, and what doesn’t, in terms of audio.  A lot of the work we’ve done revolves around the player’s acceptance of their virtual environment and the sounds that emanate from it.  We’ve made lots of mistakes, but by making them, we’ve learned where the boundaries are, and how far we can push things before they break.

 

Engineering Immersion

One of the most fundamental problems any developer with no experience of audio on VR will have is externalising sounds.  Let me explain what I mean.

If you listen to any film or TV show that has a narrator, you’ll notice that the sound of the voice of the narrator, due to the way in which it was recorded, sounds very different from the sound of the people you’re actually seeing on screen.  The narrator is in effect, the voice inside your head, and it’s this that we need to avoid if we want things to sound like they’re in the virtual environment.

Next time you watch a film or TV show listen for it, and notice the difference between perspectives.  The narrator’s voice sounds a lot fuller and richer.  Generally, it’s recorded closer than ‘on set’ dialogue.  With a condenser microphone, the closer you are to the microphone, the bassier the recording will be, due to something called ‘the proximity effect’.

Although this is a tad simplistic, if there’s a lot of bass in a voice, your brain will tell you it’s close.  If we want dialogue or indeed any sound to sit in a 3D space, and to sound like it’s part of that space, we need to ensure that the perspectives are convincing.

How we give players information about distance is absolutely critical for them to be able to localise something accurately in VR

If something is close, it needs to sound close, and if something is far away it needs to sound far away.  How we give players information about distance is absolutely critical for them to be able to localise something accurately in VR.

If you were to shut your eyes, you’d usually be able to tell what sort of room you were in just by listening to how sounds tail off within it.  When working in VR, we have to recreate that acoustic behaviour in our virtual reality in order for it to be convincing. There’s a delicate balance between the volume of the sound waves that travel directly to your ears, and the ones that bounce around the room, and we use the perceived loudness of the sound, the length of the reverberation, as well as the ratio between the direct and the indirect sound to judge the size and type of space we’re in and the distance between us and whatever it was that made the sound.

Not only that, but we also have to accurately model how our own heads affect the sounds we hear. We use something called Head Related Transfer Functions or HRTF which gives us the ability to make sounds appear as though they’re behind us, or in fact any direction, including above or below us.  These HRTFs when coupled with head-tracking are very very convincing.

This is different to how we’ve done audio for games in the past.  Now, these might seem like very minor things, but when we get it wrong, it’s little things like this that jar with people.  They might not know why something isn’t quite right, but it will flag something up in the back of their mind that says ‘this isn’t convincing’.  Audio for VR can be difficult like that.  To do it right requires a decent toolset and knowledgeable and experienced sound engineers who know about psychoacoustics; how the brain interprets sound.

 

Information

Audio’s function within any game, film or any other medium is either to give the player or viewer information or to influence their emotional state.

3D Audio is a very powerful way of communicating information, be it information conveyed through dialogue, or information about their environment through directional sounds, but there are limits to the amount of auditory information that can be processed by the brain.

Now imagine that a 3rd person was giving another talk on something else in that corner at the same volume.  That’s where you hit a wall.

You can hear me speaking from this stage.  There’s nothing else really going on, vying for your attention.  Imagine someone else was doing a talk in that corner of the room on something else with their microphone at the same volume.  You would probably be able to pick up limited information on both talks, just about.  Now imagine that a 3rd person was giving another talk on something else in that corner at the same volume.  That’s where you hit a wall.  You wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the 3 separate voices, they would come together to form a single incoherent mess.  It would annoy you.

Walter Murch, film editor, called this the ‘Law of Two and a Half’.  One or two sets of footsteps, for example, can easily be isolated by the brain, but 3….instead of being individual elements, 3 becomes a group of things happening, and out goes your ability to distinguish individual elements.

We’ve found that these limits of the brain to process multiple audio cues together must affect how we design our titles, and the events or situations that happen within those titles.  Too much going on will disorientate the player, or stop them making sense of the information presented to them.  This could be dialogue, or it could be the positions of enemies trying to shoot you, or important audio cues the player needs in order to progress through a game.  Any more than 2 positional cues at a time, and the player may lose the ability to accurately place them in a space.

Because of this, we need to make sure that audio considerations are taken into account at the early design stage of any project, and care must be taken to respect the limits of the brain’s ability to process auditory information.  

Having said that, if you want to briefly disorientate the player on purpose, it can be used to great effect, but like anything, you need light and shade.  

 

Bending Reality

One of the more interesting things we’ve found is that whilst audio can help to make or break presence or immersion, it also allow us to bend reality without breaking it, and in some instances mask problems in other areas.

What happens if the player decides to stand up?

In one of our titles called London Heist, the player is a passenger in a van, driving down a road.  Now, there’s nothing stopping the player opening the door and leaning out or putting their head out of the window, and when they do, they hear the wind rushing past them, as you would expect.  However, what happens if the player decides to stand up?

Well, we could create a barrier that would stop the player’s camera from going through the roof of the van, but messing with people’s perception of movement is a dangerous thing, and can cause motion sickness which could put a lot of people off.  However, if we allow the player to put their head through the roof, to break reality, we must also make their experience of doing so consistent with what they would expect if they could actually do it.  So when they do, they also hear the wind rushing past them.  This is surprisingly acceptable.  In some cases, good audio design allows us to ‘paper over the cracks’, and in certain circumstances, as long as the audio is consistent, liberties can be taken in the virtual world.


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    While there are some tasty impacts within, this library’s true focus is on characterful movements: handling, rummaging, opens, closes, ratchets, swirls, rolls, drags, drops, spins, rubs, zuzzes, and bows. Metal containers, filing cabinets, modern appliances, vintage (and very rusty) tools, cymbals, bells, grills, plates, bars, rods, and tubes, and many other props lent their voices to this collection.

    This UCS-compliant library was recorded with a combination of standard, contact, and ultrasonic-capable microphones through Millennia preamps. Sample rates vary based on the amount of ultrasonic content in each file. The audio files are mastered for realism, ready for extreme processing and pitch shifting of your own, but still useful in more grounded contexts.

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    The resulting ultrasonic spectrum is rich and allows for truly extreme manipulation of the content.

    Bonus: Two extra libraries included for free:
    This library also includes two additional releases from Mattia Cellotto - for free: Crunch Mode delivers 230 crunchy sounds made with a variety of vegetables, fresh bread, pizza crust and a selection of frozen goods. The Borax Experiment gets you 158 squishy, gory, slimy and gooey sounds.
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    This library contains multiple recordings of two antique Trench Rammers, the Pegson ER5 and the Warsop Benjo, and also features additional recordings of four antique stationary engines, the Amanco Hired Man (1920s), the JAP 1947, the Lister D (1940s) and the Norman T3000.

    Recorded in Leeds, UK, this library features multi-mic coverage and a range of distance positions captured on all included source content. Microphones used include; Sanken, Sennheiser, Neumann and DPA, captured with Sound Devices and Tascam recorders.

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    You will get variations of sounds in different proximity, size, and style of action. This collection is handy due to the clarity and diversity of the raw sounds. They have both Foley and practical usability and room for further sound design.

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Listen to the player

Most developers have been thinking about how their sound and music functions within VR.  We’ve also been thinking about what sounds we can take from the player, and what we could do with them.

PlayStation VR has a microphone on the bottom of the visor.  This allows us to capture sounds or speech from the player, and either incorporate it into the world, for example voice chat, but also it allows us take the sound, manipulate that data and then use that data to control certain parameters within the game.

For example, in the London Heist, there’s a drink on the dashboard.  What if the player decides they want to pick it up and drink it?  Obviously, they can’t really drink it.  That would be silly.  But they will try.  And if they do try, having the world react in a believable way will increase the sense of immersion.  One of our technical designers, SImon Gumbleton came up with a technique of measuring the power of the microphone input, and then using it to trigger a drinking sound.

Again, audio can paper over the cracks.  Audio, this time from the player, will allow another level of interaction between the player and the virtual world.

How can the player affect the world through the sounds that they make?

So the question our teams should ask is; instead of the player just listening to the world the developers have created, how can the player affect the world through the sounds that they make?
 

Linear VR Video

Before I go, I want to speak briefly about audio for linear VR video, as opposed to interactive content.  At the moment, most teams I know that are creating VR video are doing it in Unity, or some other game engine.  This, at the moment, is by necessity.  There is no support for VR in any of the off-the-shelf audio packages at the moment.  There are though quite a few plugin manufacturers working on tools to allow teams to design audio for VR, and as time progresses those tools will improve.

Ambisonics is a 40 year old sound format for encoding 3D audio that up until recently was considered a bit of a relic, but it translates perfectly to VR, so expect it to make a resurgence in the coming years.  This will be helped by Google’s adoption of it for VR and 360 video on YouTube, which was rolled out a couple a weeks ago.  The new MPEG-H format also supports 3D audio, but it’s very new and no applications support it at the moment.  The same goes for AC4.

 

So, to sum up, the switch from developing for screen-based entertainment to VR is not straightforward.  It’s literally a whole new world, and we’re still finding out the rules.

However, because of the fragility of the player’s acceptance of the virtual world within VR, audio should be an integral part of the design process, to be considered from the very start of a project, from both a creative and technical point of view.

If immersion and presence is your goal, your sound team will be the ones that will have to deliver it.

 

Please share this:


 

A big thanks to Garry Taylor for his insights on audio in VR!


 
 
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  • Electricity Sound Effects Polarity Play Track 975 sounds included $72

    Polarity delivers more than 950 sounds of electricity, science and technology – captured in several locations around the world, from electricity museums to science labs. About 50% of the library is all about electricity, with various types of Jacob’s Ladders, Tesla Coils, Ruhmkorff lamp and all sorts of impactful bursts of energy.

    Then we go through welders, plasma spheres, 3D printers, starting to cover a more broad technology theme – like old phones, telegraphs, dynamo wheels, rotary dials, whirling watchers, alarm, lab centrifuges, something scientists call a roller and a rocker, servo sounds, neon lights, a wimshurst machine and sparklers.

    Many sounds in this section were captured from vintage equipment, from a 1928’s tram to old telephone switchboards, high voltage levers and control surfaces.

    All content was recorded at 192KHz with a Sanken CO100K, a couple of Sennheiser 8040 and a Neumann 81i, translating into final assets that have plenty of ultrasonic content, ready for the most extreme manipulation.

    Bonus: Two extra libraries included for free:
    This library also includes two additional releases from Mattia Cellotto - for free: Crunch Mode delivers 230 crunchy sounds made with a variety of vegetables, fresh bread, pizza crust and a selection of frozen goods. The Borax Experiment gets you 158 squishy, gory, slimy and gooey sounds.
    20 %
    OFF
  • Metal Sound Effects MetalMotion Play Track 2000+ sounds included, 239 mins total $110

    MetalMotion is a sound design construction kit that contains four hours of moving metal mayhem: clicks and clanks, rolls and drags, wronks and squeals, scrapes and rattles, ranging from from tiny to monstrous. Nathan Moody’s unique performances with unusual combinations of props produce everything from Foley-like movements to intense groans and howls.

    Whether you’re covering a robot’s movements, sweetening weapon Foley, making crafting or pick-up sounds in a game, placing unusual layers beneath a kaiju’s roar, or crushing a submarine with undersea pressure, this collection covers the full range of subtle to raucous. Each file has many performance variations for creative choice and game audio asset creation.

    While there are some tasty impacts within, this library’s true focus is on characterful movements: handling, rummaging, opens, closes, ratchets, swirls, rolls, drags, drops, spins, rubs, zuzzes, and bows. Metal containers, filing cabinets, modern appliances, vintage (and very rusty) tools, cymbals, bells, grills, plates, bars, rods, and tubes, and many other props lent their voices to this collection.

    This UCS-compliant library was recorded with a combination of standard, contact, and ultrasonic-capable microphones through Millennia preamps. Sample rates vary based on the amount of ultrasonic content in each file. The audio files are mastered for realism, ready for extreme processing and pitch shifting of your own, but still useful in more grounded contexts.

  • Ice Sound Effects Ultrasonic Dry Ice Play Track 635+ sounds included, 71 mins total $38.40

    Ultrasonic Dry Ice is a library containing over 600 sounds themed metal resonances, scrapes and all sorts of weird.
    All the content has been recorded at 192KHz with a Sanken CO100K, a couple of Sennheiser MKH8040 and a MKH416.
    The resulting ultrasonic spectrum is rich and allows for truly extreme manipulation of the content.

    Bonus: Two extra libraries included for free:
    This library also includes two additional releases from Mattia Cellotto - for free: Crunch Mode delivers 230 crunchy sounds made with a variety of vegetables, fresh bread, pizza crust and a selection of frozen goods. The Borax Experiment gets you 158 squishy, gory, slimy and gooey sounds.
    20 %
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    Ends 1712872800
Explore the full, unique collection here

Latest sound effects libraries:
 
  • Trench Rammers is a one-of-a-kind sound library, created by sound designer Barney Oram. It features recordings of two 20th century Trench Rammers, some of the last operating machines of their kind in the world. The library features 48 files in total, capturing the Trench Rammers using a variety of microphones and perspectives, supplied in 192kHz 24bit WAV file format.

    This library contains multiple recordings of two antique Trench Rammers, the Pegson ER5 and the Warsop Benjo, and also features additional recordings of four antique stationary engines, the Amanco Hired Man (1920s), the JAP 1947, the Lister D (1940s) and the Norman T3000.

    Recorded in Leeds, UK, this library features multi-mic coverage and a range of distance positions captured on all included source content. Microphones used include; Sanken, Sennheiser, Neumann and DPA, captured with Sound Devices and Tascam recorders.

    This library includes detailed SoundMiner metadata and utilizes the UCS system for ease of integration into your library.

    Behind the Scenes Video:


    Trench Rammer


  • The cozy natural rhythms of hums, scrapes, splashes and thuds soundtrack the pottery workshop where the earth meets art. Find the true sound of it with Vadi Sound Library.

     

    About Pottery Workshop

     

    84 sounds that are clean, subtle and capture pretty much every object and action of the magic of fire and earth.

    From the rhythmic hum of the spinning potter’s wheel, to the splash of water, the scrape of clay with the tools shaping and smoothing surfaces, listen up for the symphony of creation.

    You will hear the tapping and thud of ceramic pottery, wooden ribs, wire cutters, loop tools, and sponges, all kinds of rummage, and mud actions on the potter’s wheel. The clicking and whirring of mechanisms during firing cycles add a mechanical counterpoint to the workshop’s natural rhythms.

    You will get variations of sounds in different proximity, size, and style of action. This collection is handy due to the clarity and diversity of the raw sounds. They have both Foley and practical usability and room for further sound design.

    You will get intuitive, detailed naming, UCS compatibility and the usual Vadi Sound craft and attention to detail in 84 pristine sounds. Recorded in 24bit-96kHz.WAV format on our favorite Sennheiser MKH 8040 stereo pair and Zoom F6.

     

    Keywords

    Pottery, workshop, electric potter’s wheel, wheel, oven, heat gun, mud, clay, ceramic, glass, wooden, metal, cup, handle, push, pull, move, remove, shape, tap, shake, clank, level, lid, tool, organizer, toolbox, rummage, fiberboard, button, bucket, sponge, plate, Dremel.

     

    What else you may need

    You may also want to check out Drag & Slide for 477 sound files of dragging, sliding, scraping and friction sounds of different objects made of wood, plastic, metal on various surfaces. Our bestseller Crafting & Survival is another good choice to get access to 1000+ survival, gathering, movement and crafting sounds.

  • All files are recorded 32bit, 192 kHz, with Shure KSM 137, Line Audio Omni1, FEL Clippy XLR EM272, Sonorous Objects SO.3 and JrF C-Series Pro+ microphones, Sound Devices MixPre-6 II & Zoom F3 recorders. Library contains wav files of driving, interior and exterior foley, mechanical and electrical sounds. It is also available in UCS.

  • Introducing Devils Bane Trailer, a chilling symphony of horror encapsulated in 533 meticulously crafted sound files, ready to unleash terror upon your audience. Dive into a nightmare realm where every creak, whisper, and shriek is meticulously designed to send shivers down your spine.

    • 533 files
    • 3.5 GB of game audio assets
    • All in 96k 24bit .wav
    • Dark Horror Movie Trailer Sound Effects Library
    17 %
    OFF
  • Birdsong from the countryside of the Swedish rural region of Värmland.


   

One thought on “How to unlock the creative power of audio in VR:

  1. Thanks for this post!

    Michael Abrash’s quote about 3D sound (‘not an addition, it’s a multiplier’) reminds me of a quote from Akira Kurosawa, the famed film director, sharing his thought about the relationship between sound and image: “sound is that which does not simply add to but multiples the effect the image.”

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