Sound and Image - Part Five
This post was originally published on January 14th, 2020.
Sound is one of the most crucial elements of this project – I began by tackling some of the basic sounds using online libraries. I really wanted to get some of the sounds in the UI and some of the harder scripts out of the way so that it would be easier to just implement the models into Unity and go. I’ve already done a lot of basics with sound in Unity and used sound in scripts before – like playing sounds on interaction, collision, etc. I knew my project was going to be washed with a VHS look, so I began looking for some sounds like VHS’ being inserted, computer sounds, beeps, synth-y sounds and bitcrushed noises like I said I wanted to in my research phase of the project.
I wanted a kind of “cinematic” opening, but rather than editing a bunch of audios I found together to get the effect I wanted, I made a script that turned the sounds I wanted on and off at certain intervals so that it could coincide with what was going on on the screen. I thought it would be easier to do it this way rather than animate on time with the sound or try to create one timeline. It also meant that I could re-use the original sound assets later without having to edit one long string of audio – so I just thought it would be more efficient. So I created a UI segment where the screen begins black, turns on and then turns off at a certain interval and had the audio sync to this.
In the next scene, I had my menu. I didn’t want the menu to seem repetitive in terms of sound and wanted to test out the idea of having a playlist/randomized sounds – so I threw together some background effects and noises like white noise and drone-y/humming noises for a base effect and then created a short script that takes sounds from an array and plays them randomly. I used an online tutorial that was really helpful and game me the exact effect I wanted. In the future, I would love to make it more customizable as I found I was a little bit limited by what was in the inspector. This is something I would like to work on in the future.
I also wanted to make the menu feel a bit more responsive, so when the player hovers over one of the option, it glows a bright yellow (falling in-line with the aesthetic) and then I created a script that creates a sound when the user hovers over. The interesting thing when I tested the script is that the sound “glitches” and gets “jammed” at the start of the clip and repeats, creating a heavy noise as it repeatedly restarts. It only plays the clip correctly when the player removes the mouse from the object. I actually liked the way this sounded – it kind of felt like a “roll-off”. So despite the fact it was unintentional, I decided to keep it in as I thought it would be interesting. It works with the aesthetic of the menu. To save myself sometime, I also repeated the sounds in the level select menu.
I created a small opening for the main scene which is a repeated version of the actual opening scene, but with a few of the sounds removed. I wanted it to feel more like a loading screen rather than an opening, so I removed the sound of the VHS being loaded in so that it felt like more of a progression from one section of a VHS to another, rather than putting in a new one.
In the main scene, there were a lot of things I wanted to do with sound – and a few of these I needed to record and create myself. My lecturer wanted at least one looped sound in the project, so with the help of a friend I created a song for the main scene. I’m not actually a huge fan of it (it’s the first song I’ve ever had any hand in making), but I needed at least one loop and I thought it would probably be easier to just stick to what I made rather than find someone else’s work and loop it. I also wanted to put a couple of pieces of voice work into the project, so we sat and recorded some vocals and bitcrushed them. I wasn’t a fan of my voice and the way in sounded in the end, so before I put them into the game files I pitched them down a little bit so it didn’t feel so jarringly me. I don’t mind them, but I don’t always feel like I’m a fan of the way I sound. Oh well. During this time, I also took the time to create some whispered ad-libs that I wanted to use during the main scene. It was mostly whatever came to mind at the time – it didn’t matter as it was inaudible. The whisper is played throughout the scene as a subtle solution to allowing for more to go on in the scene. My last vocal was made when we were messing around with the settings and playing around with the intensities and styles of the bitcrushing and downsampling. We found a really deep and distorted effect. I decided to recite some more of Whitman’s poetry as fast as I could speak and this was then used as a kind of “jumpscare” when the player interacts with the pinboard on the desk. I really loved the effect here.
All the other effects were found effects, perhaps edited in different ways in the Unity inspector. Most of the scene is activated by sound on click. I also use sound at a specific time interval again with a lightning/thunder effect I use. I just wanted to add a bit more animation to the scene as I felt as though a lot of the work was in the post-processing.
At the end of the scene, I added a game-kill. I didn’t really know how to finish the scene, so after about a minute and a half of exploring the scene the player is booted from the scene and given a kill screen. I kind of liked this idea, because I feel like it because the scene represents my mental space I wouldn’t want people “overstaying their welcome”. When this happens, the screen goes blue with a message and all the sounds in the scene stop. I liked this idea because I thought it perhaps felt like a representation of brain fog/noise – sometimes you just want everything to stop. Akira Yamaoka, the composer for the original Silent Hill’s said it best when he said silence was just as important a sound as any other. Sometimes I just want to feel the silence.
