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Cut SceneGame Sound SpecialSpeciald Game Sound Sound SpecialSpecialGame Sound SpecialSound Game Game SpecialGame Sound Sound Game SpecialGame SpecialSound Game SoundSpecSPERFECTION WITHOUTPUSHINGSolid design advancements withGenelec’s 8000 MDE and 7000 LSE Seriesmeet the demanding world of gamesproduction.Pushing theBoundaries of GamesAudio Media talks to DICE’s Stefan Strandberg about ideasand vision, and the biggest gun shoot in the world.DICE is a Swedish video game productioncompany based in the nation’s capital,Stockholm, whose fast paced Battlefieldadventure games benefit from the skilledattention of Stefan Strandberg and his audio designteam. Strandberg is the Audio Director on thecompany’s latest release – Battlefield: Bad Company 2,as well as its numerically deprived predecessor – bothof which are available for the Xbox 360, Playstation,and PC. Like many people who end up in the audioside of the video games industry, Strandberg was amusician first – but he was also a player of games too.“In the 1990s I started freelancing and I noticed thatpeople actually bought my sounds and started hiringme for my sound design,” he says. “So seven years agoI was hired by DICE.” The company employs a crew often people working specifically with audio – threeprogrammers and seven sound designers, each withtheir own area of expertise. “One specialises in voiceover, one on the vehicles, and one on the ambienceand so on,” says Strandberg. “We work on everythingfrom field recording all the way down toimplementation – and everything in between. We doa lot of recording together with professional fieldrecordists – here at DICE we are kind of rookies in thatarea! So we‘ve gotten help from professionals withinEA (Electronic Arts)” – of which Dice is a part.“We’ve worked with the EA people in the USA and someof the best sound recordists around – for example, onwhat I think was the biggest gun shoot in the world,we had 83 channels of recordings made withStefan Strandberg, DICE.everything from small portable recorders and videocameras all the way up to the best microphones andpreamps available. Equipment is secondary here; I’dsay that ideas and vision and implementation are inthe first room – rather than us being anal aboutequipment.” However, Strandberg is at pains to pointout that the company does take pride in deliveringhigh quality content, but feels that his is an industrywhere the execution and the idea are more importantthan the equipment used. Having said that, suitablemonitoring does play an important part in the audiodesign work. “We have Genelecs throughout thestudio – I’ve always used the company’s products,” saysStrandberg. “The 8030s – I really love those!They produce a perfect sound at the perfect level –you don’t have to push them.”Strandberg says that his team “really pushedsome boundaries in the audio department for afirst person shooter” with the Battlefield series,and elaborates on the difference betweencreating audio for a game and audio for a movie.“The fundamental difference is that there is a playerinvolved!” he laughs. “So if you don’t give theplayer any feedback, they wouldn’t be doinganything. The obvious answer is that film is a linearmedium whereas games are a non-linear one – andone of the first problems you encounter is how tocombat repetitions. You give the player a set oftools to interact with the game world – in our caseit’s a weapon – and the player is going to fire a gunone million times in ten hours. In a movie, everysound can be unique as it’s only played back once!You have to create a non-repetitive soundscapeusing something that is by its very nature repetitive.You need to expand on how you perceive soundand present different, subtle layers of variation.You can still perceive that the identity of the weaponis the same, but there are changes in how it soundsin different environments, for example. The morefreedom you give to a player the less control youhave over the player’s perceptions – you have togive them a toolset which allows them to identifywith, and navigate through, the story.” ∫Finnish-based speaker manufacturer Genelechas spent decades measuring, analyzing, andcalibrating its monitoring systems, both in itscustomers’ working environments and thecompany’s own testing chamber. Genelec believesthat, as modern digital production environmentsbecome more commonplaceand vast amounts of digitalaudio are produced, processed,and transported around theglobe, that the addition ofDSP (Digital Signal Processing)technology will allow speakermanufacturers to expandtheir toolset to reach ‘a new target resolutionfor acoustic calibration of monitoring systems’.All rooms impart their own audio signatureonto any monitor system – after all, a monitoris only as good as its acoustic integration intoa room. The advancements Genelec has madein the development of the 8000 MDE series and7000 LSE series products haveprovided significant performancegains, both in the test chamberand in conjunction with customercontrol rooms. Genelec’s new8200 and 7200 DSP Systems arebased on the solid foundationsof the earlier 8000 and 7000 series, and havebeen designed to be suitable for wide rangingapplications such as post-production in film andvideo, large and small broadcast environments,and the demanding world of music recording,mixing, and mastering. An extremely powerfulfeature of the Genelec DSP systems is automaticcalibration using the AutoCal algorithmwhich Genelec says ‘provides the industry’s firstintegrated process for the complete automatedmeasurement, analysis, and adjustment of everyspeaker in the network, enabling the engineer tocorrectly integrate each speaker into the mixingenvironment.’ AutoCal has the potential to savethe user hours of work and provides well-balancedresult in just a few mouse clicks. The company saysthat it is suitable for use even in the most difficultroom conditions.............................INFORMATIONwww.genelecdsp.comAUDIO MEDIA JULY 2009 – PROMOTIONAL FEATURE33