Sonic Design — Final Project

21.06.2024 — 26.07.2024
Rachel Madeline / 0356994
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Final Project — Game Audio

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❥INSTRUCTIONS 

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❥TASK 

For this task, we are instructed to choose a video game clip and add sound effects to it by recording with our own materials and editing and manipulating the sound effects using Adobe Audition. For this project, I went with Hollow Knights. 

1.  OBSERVING & PLANNING OUT PROCESS

First off, I wanted to observe the video game footage and take notes of every action or object that would make a sound. This includes the actions from the characters itself as well as its surroundings and environment. During this process, I also had some ideas on how to execute the sound effect so I wrote them as extra notes as well, then I grouped the sound effects under each category so I had a rough idea of what sound effects that I have to come up with.

Before starting on the editing process, I also watched the gameplay since I wanted a reference on how the actual sound effects sounded like and made some observations. 

Fig 1.1 Hollow knight gameplay 

Fig 1.2 Audio Assets Sheets

2.  RECORDING & EDITING PROCESS

For the recording, I had to do some in my room at home since I flew back to my country earlier thus I didn't have the opportunity to do the recording at the studio, but I noticed that recording with my earphone mic wasn't really effective for some sound effects since it didn't really capture the base sound and there was also white noise in the background which means extra work since I'd have to edit that out, so I had my friends help record in the studio on campus. 

I imported the video into adobe audition so I could time the sound effects along with the video. 

Fig 2.1 Progress on editing

Starting off with the coins, I wanted to make the sound effect where multiple coins were falling when the character was hitting the stone so I mainly used my keychains and keys and shook them but since I recorded them myself, I had to use noise reduction to remove the background noise then only started editing it. I used pitch shifter to adjust the pitch of the sound to achieve coins falling noise. 

Fig 2.2 Bunch of coins falling sound effect

To differentiate the sound effect between the coin falling and the coin collecting sound, I took the audio from the keychains shaking, cropped it and used pitch shifter to adjust it. 

Fig 2.3 Collect coin

For certain sound effects like for instance, the electric spark and the bug buzzing noises, I adjusted the volume graph according to the distance of the character from the object to get a sense of proximity and depth of the environment meaning that the further the object is from the character, the ore faded the sound is. 

For the ambience background noise, I used pitch stretch and effect multiple times on top of each other to achieve that distorted sound effect. 

Fig 2.4 Pitch and stretch effect

For the sword, I made a woosh noise using the hanger I mainly relied on distortion effect to achieve the high pitched woosh noise and used reverb to emphasize and dramatize the sound effect but I felt like it was too similar to the jump sound effect and needed to mimic a sword sound noise so I used the metal scraped against surface sound and adjusted its pitch and reverb to layer it along with the woosh noise.

Fig 2.5 Distortion on sword sound effect

Fig 2.6 Sword swoosh sound effect before shing

Fig 2.6 Sword woosh noise before adding layer with "shing" sword slice noise

Footsteps were made by poking a plastic bag with fingers then to create that "footsteps on cobblestone" sound effect, I played around with the pitch shifter, reverb and paramatic equalizer. The reverb gave more depth to the footstep sound and really helped a lot to achieve that footsteps sound effect. I then cropped it and timed it according to whenever the character walked. 

Fig 2.7 Footsteps reverb 

For the landing I also took it from the footsteps audio but wanted it to have a heavier impact than what the footsteps sounded so I added more decay time for the reverb and added 2 pitch shifters to adjust the pitch to be lower.

Fig 2.8 Landing pitch shifter

I decided to create two different sound effects for when the bug gets hit and when the bug dies, so I took the audio of the wet tissue getting squirted to make the bug shriek getting damage. This sound mainly relied on distortion effect and chorus, by adding more voices and increasing the spread. 

For the bug death, I decided to use the bottle of pills shaking since it had more of an impact than the wet tissue squirting and added more voices for the chorus modulation to add depth to the shriek. To top it off, I added pitch shifter to adjust the pitch to be higher and reverb for both of them but the bug shriek when it dies having more reverb to exaggerate it more than when it gets hit. 

Fig 2.9 Chorus Modulation on bug shriek when hit

Fig 2.10 Chorus Modulation on bug shriek when dead

These two sound effects were also used for when the big bug gets hits and dies except the pitch was lower since its a bigger bug and the reverb was also increased.

I adjusted the volume levels for each of the objects and the creatures according to the proximity and distance between that object and the character to make the scene more dynamic and realistic. 

Fig 3.0 Final Game Audio Edited

Fig 3.1Audio Journal

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❥REFLECTION 

Throughout this project, I got to explore and experiment with various aspects and features of Audition that I have never tried before to achieve the desired sound effect which was a pretty fun process of trial and error. This project was overall pretty fun and new to me as I've never done anything like this before but one missed opportunity that really made me regret returning to my hometown early was having the opportunity to record in the studio with my friends. Throughout the process of editing, my laptop took sometime to playback the preview and also kept freezing and loading so it was a pretty meticulous and time consuming process as well.