Andrew Weisberg - Week 12/13/14 Devlog

(NOTE: These devlogs span from Week 12 to 14.  Sumimasen.  Again.)

Sound Design
(~4 hours each week, 12 Hours Total.)

I've been making great headway with a lot of sound effects work for Spit it Out, and I've a lot of neat stuff to show for this devlog.

To start, I wanna talk about sfxr.  In one of the previous meetings we had around 2 weeks ago, Sarah and Grayson gave me some good insight on the overall sound design of Spit it Out.  In general, we found that we're looking for 16-bit effects and chiptune throughout what we had prior and what I was composing for our levels.

16-bit effects are pretty easy to implement in Ableton, and I was able to find filters for all of our previous sound effects to go through and see how they sounded.  In specific, I was also looking for ways to make the sounds from scratch as well, which brought me to sfxr.

Sfxr is a cool little program made by DrPetter during the 10th Ludum Dare competition in 2007.  Multiple entrants needed sound for their 48-hour projects, and this helped them get the work done.  The interface is a really simple one, but there's some cool stuff to tinker with and I found that I could make sounds very similar to the references that Grayson and Sarah provided.

For anyone who's just looking for quick sound effects, you mostly start with sfxr by pressing the randomize button and hoping for the best.  The desktop version of the program allows you to save the sounds that you like, and export them out to .wav files.  Unfortunately, these .wav files aren't exactly the greatest in quality; you can only export to as high as a 16 bit-depth (what we want, sure), and a 44.1 KHz sample rate (which means less information is stored in the sound file, which generally means that the quality of your sound will be lowered as a result.  For context, the industry standard for audio production is a sample rate of 48 KHz with a 24 bit-depth).

File quality aside, we're also able to tinker with our sounds.  Sfxr has a healthy amount of controls that you can use to tweak your base sounds; you can adjust your attack and sustain times for your sounds, frequencies, the slide of each frequency, how much an effect punches when it plays, phaser offsets, high/lowpass filters, so on and so forth.

I'm doing work with sfxr in conjunction with what I already have going on in Ableton, so with this, I've gotten to work on death sounds, hit sounds, an "ahh" sound for the brain and body, and some other neat sounds that I'll link here.  Sarah provided me with a good sound log for the next sounds I'll be making, and I'll be working extensively to get them done.