Josh Bell

It's a simple question, but it's got a lot of complicated answers to it. It depends on the manufacturer, the size of the vehicle, the form, the shape, the materials it's been built with, and also the thrusters, and then how fast it's going to go, what its requirement is within the game, and what it's going to do. That's an overview, and the most important thing is any sounds we give it, we want it to actually feel like it's coming from the incredible design of the ship. So that's the kind of headline. And if we dig into that further...

Yeah, I can add to that. Generally, the process is we'll have a team-wide kickoff, which will involve other departments. Usually we'll get a little summary, maybe a few sentences on what the ship's all about. And we'll usually take that, do a little more digging, have a look at the ship. What manufacturer is it? Is it Drake? Is it a little bit more rundown? Is it Origin? Super high tech? Then we'll gather our own references from popular media, discuss it amongst ourselves, get a kickoff from Simon, and that usually gives us a pretty good start and where we want to go with it.

Yeah, Simon comes in and makes some silly noises.

We'll look at all contemporary vehicles, real ones and fantasy ones, and then we'll all get together. I will generally make a lot of noises with my mouth or get very excited about maybe a dragster I might have seen online, or we might draw from any number of sound ideas that we've heard or experienced that we might want to bring to the ship. Recently we've been giving each ship a unique identity, so it's got its own signature, if you like, and you can identify it. So rather than just digging from a pool of sounds and just throwing those in, each ship needs its own considerations. The design of them is beautiful and we want to reflect all of the time going into the design with the sound design. We could draw our sources from any number of things. The ideal scenario is that we create the sounds ourselves now. We'll dig into this further, obviously, but realistically we don't have jet engines parked outside that we can go and record, so we've got to come up with interesting possibilities, and out of that we may record very unusual objects in different ways in order to get them into the game, into the vehicle.

Yes, they will. Because now, how many vehicles do you think we've increased the value of? About ten. So basically, we've got ten we've started with and there are hundreds to do. Yes, of course, we're going to be doing that. How we fit them into the schedule, I can't promise when that's going to be happening. But that's the intent, because the better the recent ships get, the more the divide is from the previous ships, so we want to update everything. I know there's so much more value we need to give the whole experience. I want it to be a great sound experience, a meaningful experience when you fly. I can't wait to get my vehicle to fly it because it's going to give me...

The start-up sound is particularly important as well, because it's your first introduction to how the vehicle sounds and thus how it feels, and it was always quite an enjoyable thing to watch YouTube videos where they get into the ship and then they start it up, and the reactions that they have to it. You know what kind of ship you're flying when you turn those engines on. And that was always kind of the approach with it.

Okay, there's a classic answer. It's 50% of a game or a film, but actually it's a little bit more. If I can just give a very brief... Your field of vision is, I don't know, about 120 degrees, what you can see. And then you've got 50 percent and 70 percent that you can actually visually see. But we've actually got to provide 360 degrees of the sound. So the stuff you can't see, we need to provide as well. And also, an experience is much more fulfilling when you've got, I'm going to use the word immersive and people will laugh at me, an enveloping spatial audio experience, an immersive experience that we can offer you sonically, where you can feel not only what you see in front of you, within the field of view, but you actually get the suggestion of stuff that's going on behind you, like the rockets kicking you and pushing you through the universe, the turn and the vibrations and the whole experience. Not only in spaceships, but to the greatest extent throughout the whole universe that we're going to occupy, in every sonic experience and every visual experience we travel through, we're there to support that.

I have this firm belief that we've got all of these amazing 2D artists, 3D artists, VFX artists, and they create a wonderful canvas. But nothing comes to life until you hear it. For me, the audio is that moment where a thing goes from being a work of art to a living, breathing thing, whether that's a spaceship or a character or a creature. And so when you say it's 50-50, it's certainly there, but I think it actually... it's just art. Not that art is not great.

Yeah, it's the language we're providing for the design. Theoretically things can exist without sound, because the design gives you a real perspective and dimension. But we can add the weight and value to the experience.

I always kind of thought as well, the visuals build the world, but the sound puts you in it. That's kind of how I experienced it.

That's placeholder, right? I think that stemmed from our old ship system breaking, and it created a game-breaking bug. So we took the opportunity to move on to the new ship system, and basically we had to just put placeholder on for all the other ships. Otherwise... it's better to have something than nothing, sound-wise. So that is something we are going to address.

Yeah, so it was a temporary fix to a game-breaking issue. And instead of reverting back to what we had before, we took the opportunity to work on a new system that brings back the older flybys, or something like the older flybys, which people have been asking for for so long. Hopefully an improved version of that, and that is something that we are actively working on at the moment.

We've already done some and they're going in. It's not... failing or disappointment for the community of the audio that they identify. We don't ignore it. We're going to address it. But the targeted way we're going to change it has to be mannered and has to be in line with the studio and in line with the actual systems that we have to implement them. We can't just drop tools. And yes, of course, we want to do that. It's not a case of just finding a sound effect, 'Oh, that should do it.' It has to be considered. And there's a lot to consider, because not only are we going to elevate the actual spatial audio as we go in the future towards VR and things that we're actually going to physically be able to touch and things like that. We've got to build for the future rather than just band-aid everything and say, well, that'd be fine. We do get round to it and we are getting round to it, and everything is being addressed and approached. But it can't be just done. I know this is probably going to almost feel like a stock answer. It can't be done now. But we want to do that, we do want to do that, and we are doing stuff. We are doing stuff now that isn't available yet. It's not necessarily going to be available for any of the future releases, but there's stuff going on in the background, because we've got no time to lose, I've got no time to lose, and we're growing the department, and we have grown the department in order to change the audio.

I would say this topic is probably the biggest open wound for us, because it's something that pops up a lot and we also experience it when we test our sounds, etc. We work really hard on the individual ship sounds that the players will experience when they play it, but that aspect is a really big part of it. So like Simon said, it won't be a band-aid type of solution. We want to make sure we're doing a really thorough system that will elevate the player's experience. They want to hear an Idris or a Perseus passing by from really far away, and we want them to identify, oh, okay, I know which ship that is just by hearing it. This is basically what we want to achieve. And when it passes over you, you want to feel it.

So the real audio and the real physics of audio in space, the physics with atmosphere. Well, it's kind of rule of cool sometimes. If we've got something we want to make a sound, then I want it to make a sound. Now, we can't just provide a roll-off. We can't just have the bass frequencies or the low pass just kicking in. We've got to feel vibration through our space suit and then through our helmet. We've got to consider how vibration works and how we achieve the real audio. Yes, you can't hear anything in space, but as soon as you start touching stuff, you'll get resonance through your suit and then through your helmet. And that's not just a case of creating a sound and then just rolling off the treble or the high frequencies. It's a bit more complicated than that. Now, I'm sure some people want real audio and some people don't want real audio. I'm not sure what the right answer is for that.

I think we really want to build a great cinematic experience first, because we're going to have to have cinematic sounds anyway in atmosphere. So if we can build on that foundation, then we can move on and do the realistic stuff at a later date once we've got the cinematic stuff in order, basically.

Build from that. I think there are areas of the game that we'll approach that give the feeling of more realism, like the difference between atmospheric flight and space flight, and that kind of juxtaposition between the two. It's like an artistic interpretation of no sound in space. But as Tristan said, we've got a lot of work to do on regular mode first.

It's got to be rule of cool. We're not going to please everyone all the time. But we don't want the game to be like a physics lecture. It's fun.

I think some people do, though. I think some people honestly want the game to be a physics lecture.

Well, maybe in the future we can provide for that. We've discussed it a lot, the no sound in space stuff and the realistic mode. But ultimately we design the sound in full and we shelve that sonic experience until we know how we're going to address that properly.

The benefit of me coming in fresh means I've made a value judgment and assessment independently of any development issues or the scope of development. He probably knows much more about cinema than I do. I've worked on hundreds of films, hundreds of releasable materials, and it's going to be a cinematic game, and that's what I want. I'm going to raise the bar and we are raising the bar. That's the way we're going to do it. Now, that doesn't mean any of these considerations haven't been talked about before. We are not just suddenly coming to the idea. It doesn't mean we threw everything away. And it's unfair of me to suggest that prior to me coming, these considerations weren't active; they were. It's just there has to be a sense of scope for the release of them, and all the different departments have to work together organically.

Yeah, nothing we do is there to upset anybody. I read the comments constantly, but I can't address how many hundreds came in. We do listen and we don't ignore those things. I'm aware of many of the topics, which are not worth talking about now because we can't promise anything on that just yet.

And I would also say, in a project that's been in progress for this long, there's a lot of value in having people that have been on the project for a really long time, because they just know the project inside out. They know where the bodies are buried. I haven't discovered them yet. But there's also a big value in bringing new people in, like me, Josh, Nathan Gibson, Ilyas Malkov, our other vehicle audio designers, and Jack as well. And when we came in, we obviously come in with fresh ideas. There are already systems that were created in the past by previous great sound designers, some of them were my friends. So there are systems that pre-existed, but over time, like you said, things evolve, change, plans get scrapped, new ideas come in, and we have our own ideas. We want to make sure things are working, but we also want to improve things. And like with these pass-bys and vibration systems, we have a lot of ideas, but it's always a balancing act.

I think with the scope of the game as well, it can be quite easy to chase after all these different ideas that pop up and that people want. But we're trying to, as you said, tackle things one at a time, like we've improved the system, vibration...

Specifically, so we can start delivering after all the time talking about it. We've started boosting up the vibration system over the last couple of ships, and we're increasing that. We're recording new assets for that, new sounds that we can put into the vibration system, because a very expensive ship is going to rattle and vibrate completely differently to something that is stuck together with rivets. And we're doing that. That's being done.

Can you guess? The leaf blower. Yeah, it was a recording of a leaf blower that I turned into, I think I described it as disgusting, just through pitch shifting it, adding layers of distortion and saturation, and I was like, this sounds like a really gnarly engine, and made everyone individually come and listen to it, and then didn't end up using it on the ship.

You didn't use it?

No. Did use Simon's voice in a ship, though. Simon came in one day and said, I'm going to make you some spaceship sounds with my mouth.

I had a spare minute.

Yeah, so he came in, two minutes. I didn't have high expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised, and it made it into the Salvation, actually.

Thank you. But talk about the stuff we do with the Foley recordings, to create the alien ship and all of the organic sounds that we created. The Stinger.

The ball of goop. We went to toy stores and put putty and shaving foam and vegetables and all sorts and threw it into a bowl, mashed it up, recorded it.

We actually made working more unpleasant, because the room did have an unpleasant odour afterwards.

But we wanted it to sound organic. We wanted it to actually sound like you had some kind of skeletal exoskeleton, and rather than just using metal sounds or other recording sources, we wanted to give it this kind of visceral feeling of an animal. And that comes across. And there are other things. Some of the comments we got were for the Wolf, someone commenting about the seats. How was that done, Josh?

We did a bespoke Foley pass on the Wolf, because we wanted to make it feel like a luxurious experience. It needs to sound like fine leather when you sit down. And we didn't end up using fine leather for the recording, but we did use my rubber green backpack, which just had the right texture to it.

Yeah, and it got a comment. So a very simple sound source like Joshua's bag became part of the Foley experience of sitting in the chair. The smallest of insignificant sounds can give you a fantastic experience, and it's not just necessarily the moving parts, the guns, the thrusters. If something like that raises the enjoyment of the game, we're up for doing that because we want to. We're elevating the richness of the sonic experience.

I was surprised people commented about it, actually, because it is quite a subtle element to it, but it does add to the feeling of the ship, especially when it's your introduction to the ship, when you sit down.

I think we all agree. It's really fun to make the crappy sounds. I don't want to say crappy, but it's a lot more fun making creaky doors. Also, Origin, the high-end stuff, is actually really quite difficult to design for. It's a lot of soft sounds, and when you're using a lot of soft sounds, you can't really convey weight properly for components, so you might have a big door that you just can't really convey properly just because it needs to be high-tech.

We've not actually done an Origin.

Josh, how long have you been here?

Eight months.

Eight months, okay, so you guys have never worked on an Origin ship. We haven't had an Origin ship since, what, 2021? We do have a new Origin ship this year, though. So you guys will get your first crack at Origin and getting to revitalize that.

I think you guys agree though, right? I know Josh does. He likes Drake.

I do like Drake, and then also the Drake plus Shiv, which is even crappier.

We went shopping to an actual supermarket and a bunch of toy stores and we gathered a whole bunch of weird things that make weird sounds, basically, and then we slowly started by recording them individually, and then within, I don't know, half an hour, it turned into everything coming together in this goo of soup of, I don't know, beans and lettuce and celery and a bunch of toys, just everything all mashed together, and then we were just making the weirdest possible sounds. And most of them made it into the Stinger's ambience, actually. So if you play with the Stinger, you can hear different ambience when the ship's system power is off. So it's going to feel a little bit like the ship is not doing too much, but when you turn on the system power, it'll kind of come alive and you'll feel this organism coming to life, and a bunch of the sounds that we made that day are actually in there.

I also made... there's a ship I'm working on at the moment where the thruster... we call it 'blaff', I don't know if that's an actual... It's just the sound of thruster fire. It's called blaff. I think we just came up with a stupid audio word for it. I think Alex told me, and maybe he was having a joke with me. I don't know. But anyway, the ship I'm working on at the moment, I wanted to sound particularly dirty, so particularly blaffy. So that was entirely made up of leather recordings.

You had a ship weapon you wanted to sound particularly blaffy, so you used leather.

Not weapon. Thrusters.

On the topic of weird things, though, that go into our sounds, we do have a ritual where we put animal sounds in the toilets. When you interact with the toilet and it comes up, there's always an animal in it. I can't remember what ship I did it on, but there's a gorilla in the toilet. We like to do silly things like that. It's all processed. You wouldn't be able to tell it's a gorilla.

I put a goose in a door, but I thought it was the door that we had to do it on, not the actual toilet, which I only learnt today.

I think it's just any part of the toilet, I guess.

Shut your eyes. And then when you hear the sound of a ship, you know which ship that is. You know which manufacturer it is, you know the voice that's used in that ship, that that's from that ship and that manufacturer. So that's the dream scenario, that we get what's called an earworm. It's something you memorise and you know is the sound of that ship. I can make many references from other films and games, but fundamentally that would be the dream scenario. You close your eyes, you know that ship's behind you. And indeed we have to do that with 360-degree audio. You need to hear it first before you see it. So that's the dream scenario. And that's a whole topic in itself, how we're going to be bringing bespoke sound to each manufacturer, how we're going to play with sound in order to... how do we achieve the sound of luxury leather compared with the sound of a plastic tractor seat? How do we do that sonically? There's absolutely no time to talk about that. But we do want to grade the sonic experience by the price of the ship and the quality of the ship, the weight of the ship and the function of the ship. But the most dreamlike thing for me: shut your eyes and you know what you're listening to.

That includes ships that you're in and ships that are flying past you.

I want people to know that we are listening. There are a lot of suggestions that people come out with, like ship horns, and we have talked about it. Actually, a better example would be ship flybys. We actually pushed the priority right up for that because we really wanted that. I know that the community really wanted that too. We are listening. We're here to improve the experience for you on audio. We want these things too. Sometimes it does just take time, and we are blocked by other things. We do need code support for a lot of stuff, but we discuss a lot of the things that were asked today internally, and we are changing priorities for things like the flybys, for instance. It just takes some time.

Yeah, I would say again the fact that this is a live service game, and our work constantly comes out and we get to see the players' reaction, it's a pretty nice feeling. It's very validating, and seeing the positive feedback gives us more motivation. And when we see things like 'I really like the engine-on sound' or 'when you land the ship', it gives us that extra motivation to keep the standard at least at that level or push it even beyond, so people experience those nice moments time and time again.

If you compare the ship audio experience where it was a year ago to what it is now, we want to do that again next year and again. So we're just constantly pushing for quality.

They're not gone. No, they're not gone. They're just mixed differently. They never went away. I've seen the video that people always show, they're like, when are these ones coming back? I've seen that video around, and those sounds are actually still in there. They're just mixed differently. But the difference is, back then, we didn't really play anything in the build-up to the pass-by sound. And it was just, the ship would go overhead, and then the pass-by one-shot we play in isolation. Now we play a lot more stuff on the approach for distant ships and atmosphere, all this kind of stuff. So I guess the problem is that I'm not saying we haven't lost something in this transition, but I think we just need to mix it better so that when there is a ship flying directly overhead, you do still get that same experience that you used to. But I think from a gameplay point of view, it's better at the moment because you can actually tell where a distant ship is and if it's coming towards you or not. Whereas before that was a lot harder.

Because it was overwhelming before. Yeah, there's a bit of a cinematic element that's maybe been lost slightly because we're trying to tell the player more about what's happening in the ships in the area. But yeah, it's always that balance between the two.

So would you say it's something worth looking into without committing to one action one way or the other? Because even just looking in the chat right now, there are some folks who like it, and it's an improvement, and there are some folks who are like, no, we want the old sounds back. So you're knowing there's no way to please all people all the time. Is this something worth at least taking a look at?

It should be possible to get both. It should be possible with the proper mix and the proper ducking of things and the context, we should be able to get it so that if it is one of those situations where it's directly overhead and really close, you do get the old experience, but in the situations that benefit from what we were talking about, where you can hear them more clearly at distance and that kind of thing, then we can have that. It should be possible.

We'll make the sound for it if it's something Design want to do. It's not an audio-driven feature really, but we'll make it sound really cool when that's asked for.

That's actually an interesting point. Obviously, the question would seem like it's an audio question because it's a sound that folks would hear. That would be the final deliverable. But the actual origin of a feature like this would actually come from system design, where the system designers have to actually create a multiple alarm system in the ship with different lights and the triggering mechanism and display panels like this. When that stuff is done, then they would come to audio as sort of a client of theirs and be like, okay, now we need three different sounds and stuff like that. So while it seems like it's something that would originate with audio, it actually doesn't. It comes from system designers.

Our job would be more like to say we need these different sounds to differentiate different kinds of alarms, and our job would be to design that language to be able to quickly tell what's happening.

Yes, we'll improve them at some point. We did a rework of them like a year ago, I think. That improved them quite a lot, but there's definitely still a lot of work to do. And I think there's a few bugs in there as well. That means we're not getting the sounds of other people entering and exiting quantum travel, which obviously is something really cool and something you want. It's quite an interesting challenge with our QT mechanic because they mentioned Star Wars and Star Trek. The Star Trek warp jump is like the ship's stationary and it's an instant into the warp bubble. Same with the Star Wars hyperspace jump, it's pretty much ship's stationary or moving at the speed it was and then space starts to distort and you're in, whereas ours there's a long sort of ramp-up where the ship's going very fast but isn't yet in the tunnel. It needs a bit of a different treatment.

I'll hold my hand up here and say, the quantum travel exit sound, I've got a bug on me for that. So hopefully that'll be improved soon once I've fixed that bug.

It also points out, it's similar to the ship startup sounds. There's the problems with the different perspectives that people have on the ships. Are you in the ship coming out of quantum travel? Are you on a space station while another ship comes in off quantum travel to where you are? And then what if 50 ships all exit quantum travel around you in the same place at the same time? There's systems that we need to deal with, things like that.

I've certainly been aware of someone who added rumble to a sound effect by taking a bass drum from one of their favourite heavy metal bands and just stretching it out with a fairly well-known tool called Paulstretch, and they sort of just wanted elements of things they were fans of. I'm not going to name who it was or what the song was because we could be sued. No, we couldn't. That was one example. Certainly, recording electronic interference, that was something that we've done quite a lot of. We have quite a big library of that. I don't know how much of that you use, Josh.

Yeah, I've recorded quite a lot of that stuff myself that I think we all use in a lot of UI sounds. It's like a telephone coil mic and it picks up all the electromagnetic radiation from things. There's a lot of that in the game. There's a dolphin in the Vanguard toilet. There's a seal in the Argo MOLE toilet.

Hold on. There's a dolphin in the Vanguard toilet. Go on!

I was looking for a little squeaky element to use for one of the little tiny servo movements or something, and it just happened. It made it in there.

I will say, one of the most interesting actors I did get to record was for this project, actually. That's why I wasn't sure what's been announced. But it was for Squadron, and it was for one of our aliens. Just a really amazing voice. Deep voice, and just the things he was doing with his voice.