Crank It Up
By Mark Kilborn: July 12, 2010
When you play Singularity for the first time, you may notice that parts of the game are much quieter than others. You’re hearing this because we’re working with what audio engineers call Dynamic Range, which is the difference between the loudest and quietest sound in an audio recording. We believe it is the key to delivering a powerful and memorable mix, especially for a game that depends so heavily on sound to deliver its atmosphere and mood.
Volume is not an endless thing. With color, the brightest you can get is pure white. With volume there is a limit as well, and when you hit that limit you hear what is called distortion. This isn’t the cool distortion you hear from a guitar pedal, it’s a really nasty sound that can potentially damage your speakers. Some consumer audio receivers (like the one you may have in your living room) are designed to shut down if the DVD or game being played generates too much distortion. This is a safety precaution to prevent damage to your sound system.
In the advertising world, where I worked before getting into games, our goal was to make everything as loud as possible without distorting. We purchased specialized hardware and software that allowed us to create the loudest possible recordings. If you’ve ever heard the volume jump when a commercial starts on television, you’re hearing the results of these efforts. The commercial isn’t actually louder, but every individual sound in the commercial is so loud that there’s limited dynamic range: even the sounds that should be quiet are loud, so everything seems super loud as a result.
In the video example below, you will see and hear a moment of Singularity with limited dynamic range. This is not how we shipped the game to retail, we manipulated it for the sake of this example.
You’ll notice that when the Zek reaches out and grabs your arm it’s exciting, but there’s not a huge difference in volume. This is because the rest of the sounds around the Zek are already loud. The entire scene is loud and sounds cool, but there’s more potential here. This scene could be even scarier and more exciting if there was a way for the Zek growl to be louder than everything else.
Below is another video of the same scene, but this time we didn’t manipulate it. This is exactly how the game will play in your living room.
Notice how the Zek is much louder than everything else? The hope is that when you’re playing this in your living room, hopefully in surround and with the lights down, this moment will make you jump out of your chair. By balancing the dynamic range and allowing the Zek to be louder we are, hopefully, creating a scarier moment.
Different games have different approaches to this, and it really depends upon the context of the game. Games like Modern Warfare 2 throw dynamic range out the window and deliver a consistently loud experience. You’re always fighting your way through a battlefield so it makes sense that everything should be loud. On the opposite end of the spectrum is a title like Red Dead Redemption. They’ve left an incredible amount of dynamic range in their mix, so the big moments of the story are REALLY loud and exciting because they’re so much louder than the rest of it.
In the future, if you hear a game or movie that starts off quiet, that’s a good hint that the audio engineers on the project are using a larger amount of dynamic range. When you hear this you should turn the volume up and enjoy the ups and downs of the mix. It may seem a bit confusing, but we really have to keep the volume down a bit so that it will sound better on your system. So we count on you, the player, to crank it up.
To read more about dynamic range, loudness and the so-called “loudness wars,” check out the links below. A lot of this is focused on music, but the same principles apply to film and video game sound:
Mark Kilborn
Audio Lead
Raven Software