New Year, New Start

New year’s resolution: Post things on this blog.

With the first month or 2 of this blog being very slow I’ve decided that this year I will start to make more regular posts on here.  This post will mainly be about my work at university and will mostly be for my own benefit but you are more that welcome to read them too.

This week I have had to focus my attention towards finishing a group project I have been working on with 4 students from the Game course. The task was to create a game that would utilise the Kinect system. While the game students worked on this it was down to me to create all the audio for the game.

First and most obviously I need sounds of a bowling alley. After some phone calls to some bowling alleys’ it was clear I wouldn’t be able to get in and record audio before anyone turned up. So unfortunately I had to make the most of free sounds online with lots of editing. I used 2 online sounds to create the key things I needed. One the sound of a strike and the other a thunder rumble.

The strike sounds was cut up to single out a pin sound. After this the clip was copied and each then given slight variations in pitch and timing. This gave me 7 very different sounding pin strikes.

The thunder rumble was used to help with the sound of the bowling ball rolling. I recorded a coin rolling along a desk several times, once crossfaded this gave a long noisy rolling sound. I needed to fill out the low end. I tried to some EQ and pitch shift but still couldn’t get the right sound so instead I used the thunder rumble sound and it worked a treat.

Game music was also created and needed to fit in with the game. I opted for a laidback jazz style piece created entirely synthetically. The key reason for this was that it needed to be done over Christmas and I did not have access to the studios. I’m usually one to favour recordings over synths and don’t often enjoy making synth based music but I did enjoy this project.