Articles
Part of our mission at Gigantic is sharing what we\’ve learned. Our work makes us friends all over the world, and we\’ve learned something from every one of our customers.
And our customers do the coolest things in the world. Really, they do. They get to make up the sounds that define the way the world listens.
You\’ll find people we\’ve met, and places we\’ve been, and things we\’ve learned in our articles.
If you find a particular article that inspires you or educates you, please be sure to share it, so that we can push the state of the industry forward together.
The future of game audio
When you need lots of takes and variations on a few sound effects, you can make them the old-fashioned way. You can record hundreds of takes, open them up in a sound editor, rearrange and resweeten those elements yourself, and save each take to its own file. That’ll take hours. Or days. Or weeks. […]
This is why artificial intelligence won’t take your music composition job – Part 2
When I first started demonstrating Varantic within the movie industry, I got to demo the product to one of my heroes: an Academy Award nominee for sound editing. I showed him how, with Varantic, he could drag in a few sound effects in, and generate a ton of similar high quality sound effects. And he […]
This is why artificial intelligence won’t take your music composition job – Part 1
Let’s you and me talk about the state of the art of procedural music generation for video games. Recently, I got the chance to review a procedural music system, developed by a big publisher. To prove that the system worked, they took several 18th century composers like Mozart. Then, they encoded Mozart compositions into the […]
Richard Ludlow talks about bringing the world of Blade Runner: Revelations to life with sound
Richard Ludlow is on a roll. From triple-A video games to films to commercials to television, Richard has a laundry list of credits in every media field. His team at Hexany is pushing the old-school boundaries of sound, with a great deal of new-school work on virtual reality simulations. Hexany is no stranger to huge […]
The Force is with Tracy W. Bush, audio designer for Star Wars toys
We had a chance to talk with Tracy W. Bush, audio director at Sphero, and get details on how he created the emotional language for Sphero’s newest and hottest line of Star Wars toys. Tracy Bush is a seasoned industry veteran, who’s held key audio positions at 5th Cell, Sony Online, NCsoft, and Blizzard. When […]
Robert Rice makes the “scariest game ever” in Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul
Thanks for agreeing to this interview. Would you tell us when you figured out that you wanted to make sounds and music for a living? It didn’t happen overnight. I’ve been making noise and playing games my whole life and never planned to do it for a living. It’s something I genuinely love and inadvertently fell into professionally. Around 2007 I started gigging as a solo electronic artist in clubs and warehouses in Charleston, […]
Can you convert between sample rates by skipping samples?
Can you convert 88.2 kHz samples to 44.1 kHz by skipping every other sample? Instead of theorizing about whether this works, let’s actually try this in real life! To start with, let’s go to AudioCheck.net and get a test tone containing a 88.2 kHz WAV file with a sine sweep from 0 to 44.1 kHz: […]
Three things I learned from Jory Prum
This picture was taken about a month ago. It was the last time I got to see Jory. Many others have already spoken well about him. Jory taught mostly by example. Jory never wrote the following rules down, as far as I know. But this is my interpretation of how he treated me, and how he […]
Digital signal processing in a spreadsheet: an experimental toy
Two women are watching an organ grinder. The organ grinder wheezes music while a monkey in a red hat ambles from foot to foot. One woman says, “That monkey dances badly.” The other woman says, “It’s not that the monkey dances badly. It’s that it dances at all.” People have abused spreadsheets since spreadsheets were […]
Whither ultrasonic: what experts can really hear
The year is 2030. A large Japanese electronics company has just come out with a new television: the UltraStarNavTV. And this television is so advanced that it now generates light in the spectrum from 400 nm to 10 nm. And the marketing flyers read as follows: “With our new LCD projection technology, we can now display colored light […]
Crosshatching: when a mistake becomes music
CAUTION! This article contains some very loud, mathematically synthesized tones that may damage speaker equipment if played at excessive levels. Check your playback levels before playing the sounds in this article. One of my great teachers at Harvard was an early electronic musician by the name of Ivan Tcherepnin. After I played one of my musique […]
Sound engineer’s guide to defeating Batman
Here is a well-known fact about me: I love Batman. In Batman Beyond, one of his enemies is a sound designer. No, I’m not kidding. His name is Shriek; his principal weapon is sound. He has the ability to enhance or dampen any type of sound. And when he goes mano-a-mano with Batman, Shriek uses the suit to create […]
Thou shalt not break this one law of audio design
Admit it. You’ve driven five miles per hour over the speed limit. You’ve cut off those little tags at the bottoms of mattresses that say “Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Death.” And you’ve sung Happy Birthday To You at a party, without paying the requisite ASCAP licensing fees. But there is One True Law of Interactive […]
The most important sound effect ever
I’m about to play for you the most important sound effect ever recorded. You’ve heard this one, a million times before. It’s your old friend Castle Thunder, of course. It was recorded for the movie Frankenstein in 1931 and it hasn’t changed a bit since then. Have you ever noticed that Castle Thunder sounds nothing […]
This is why you can’t hear what you otherwise would
Whenever you’re composing, editing, or mixing sounds, it helps to keep one salient fact close in mind. Everything is music. Of course, we’re used to treating dialog, and sound effects, and music channels differently in every phase of the audio pipeline. But I suggest a different way of thinking, and one that ultimately produces a […]