Gamasutra Feature with Rob Bridgett

I've put a permanent link of Gamasutra Audio Features under my Audio Resources, but I thought this one was worth sharing with my formalist friends.

Here's a look into the process by which some audio designers might create the dramatic audio curve in the development cycle of a game. To quote the beginning.

Video game sound can often be perceived as a car-crash of sound effects, wall to wall music, and out of context or hard-to-understand dialogue. However, there are some well established artistic techniques within similar media, such as TV and Film sound, that can help allow for moments of relative calm which serve to intensify moments of subsequent chaos, without needing to turn everything up to 11 all the time.

This feature examines common examples of dynamics from horror cinema and how those rules can be adapted to game design and game audio in any genre through graphic visualisation and planning techniques.

(example of a graph to plot out the audio intensity curve)