05/05/2010: game sounds

The last couple of days were spent on the search for and the creation of all kinds of sounds. The tool Adobe Soundbooth helped with all common audio tasks such as cut/paste and noise removal.One cool feature of this tool is the 'Spectral Frequency Display' (see the colored part of the screenshot) which can be used to modify the sound. This is handy to remove some pops and clicks or other sounds that shouldn't be there.

Adobe Soundbooth CS4: the waveform of a crow.

The sound recording was done with a Sony dynamic microphone. The microphone is good, but the mic input on the laptop is really bad: recording sounds and voices also includes some unwanted strange high frequency sounds. Connecting the microphone to a creative X-Fi card on my desktop is a complete difference: sound quality is much better.

Not all sounds were recorded of course, since I don't have animals here in my living room. Luckily, some sites exist with free sounds: http://www.freesound.org, http://www.grsites.com/archive/sounds and http://soundbible.com. These sounds cannot be used out of the box; some manual modifications are still required.

Since I only have only one week for al game sounds, it has to go fast... It is amazing how much work goes into the sound part of a game!