Martin Galway

Last Friday, we recorded our first orchestral session for the game, and all the music is really for the alpha that's coming up, the fighting.

Well, our composer is Pedro Camacho, who has worked on lots of little projects for us, like the Hornet commercial, the Aurora commercial, and the original 300i commercial. And the orchestra is the Capellen Orchestra, which is a group of freelance players from different orchestras around Europe that collect together to play trailer music, the big bombastic scores that you hear playing underneath the soundtracks of cinema commercials. And the recording took place in the Czech Republic last Friday night. And we now have the recordings and we're going to show you them as soon as we cut something together.

Well, Pedro did not know that I was attached to the project, even though we know each other, and he wrote straight to Chris Roberts on Chris Roberts' Facebook page, which apparently anyone can just write to Chris anytime they like. Anyway, Pedro composed a demo and sent that to Chris, and Chris really liked it, and we took it from there, and he became the composer. That's the short version.

Well, they sometimes do. Hopefully they don't. It's a trick. When the loop is 10 seconds long, people kind of get that idea pretty quick. So we generally try to make them as long as possible.

So a lot of the music is loopable, essentially.

It's loopable, yeah.

That was Pedro's recommendation. Pedro said, I know this great orchestra director; he has an orchestra that he collects together and they play music for games as well as trailers. And he was willing to give them a try. He sent a lot of pre-recorded clips of that orchestra already doing their work to us, and we were like, yep, sounds good to us. They were playing other people's music, of course. So we were certainly willing to give it a try.

No, it's a little bit like regular film score musicians. They basically sit down, they haven't ever seen the music before, and they just start to play. There's usually 10 to 15 minutes of trying to play through it. But you get recording almost immediately with these sessions, and they'll never see that music again, because the following day there's some more music from somebody else. So when we hear music, either in a movie or a game, and it's something we fall in love with, and 20 years later we're listening to every nuance of that music and thinking about how great it is, that is something that they literally played in the course of a few hours, having never seen it before. And they never had a chance to play it again. It's amazing how good they are.

There's a lot more music than what we recorded on Friday. It's a four-hour session. You have to play again and again if somebody makes a mistake. And I've said they're really good, but there is an occasional mistake. The benchmark is that you get about 15 minutes of final music, end-to-end final music, in a four-hour session, which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's a lot of time the orchestra director or the conductor is talking to the orchestra, everyone has to sit quietly and wait for the tape to roll, and other things like that. So you don't get four hours of music, is the bottom line. 15 minutes. So we have a lot more than 15 minutes in our game, so we're going to need a lot more of those sessions.

Yes, if I get my way. You want it to be the same players so that they understand the material and they get really into the vibe.

Well, I'm responsible for making sure the audio in the game is top notch. Everything from sound effects to music, actors' voices, character voices, and the way the various audio elements are mixed together.

That's right, I worked with Chris directly in 1984 on a game.

Yeah, my family are basically either musicians or teachers of music. So I knew a lot of musical theory as I was growing up as a kid, and when it came to starting as a computer programmer, I was the only one who could program the computer to play music. So I naturally was specialized into that.

What kind of computer was this?

The very first computer I made any sound on was a VIC-20, a Commodore VIC-20.

Well, our viewers are pretty familiar with games. They have a lot of Foley representing what people do.

Foley is what? Explain what that is.

Foley is a method of mirroring what you see on the screen by physically making the sounds yourself. So you watch a screen and you pick things up and bang them around, or you shuffle your clothes around, or you make footstep noises on the ground without really walking anywhere, and you get real close to the microphone. And that's the standard technique for making character sounds.

We are going to be doing our own footfall libraries for different types of deck surfacing and that kind of stuff.

Right. It's pretty hard because I'm using a conventional post-production editor to put these sounds together against a recording of the animation editor playing the sounds. But each sound has to be individually separated out and then connected to the correct part of the pilot's body, so as he climbs in it's in the right place in the surround field. It's a lot of work.

The end result is exactly the same. The sound emanates from the point where the foot touches the grate, but it's actually on the foot itself.

I work with the artists to delineate every single panel on the ground in the game, every way you can walk. In fact, even surfaces that you can bump into have the kind of surface type written down, so that if you accidentally walk into the wall, it'll make the right kind of sound.

Again, more immersion, right? And then probably we'll have the guy going "ow" or something like that, so that's even more sounds.

Yeah, that would come up from his head area, not from the ground.

Exactly. That kind of footfall technology is on all the NPCs walking around the deck as well as your own character. If you're in a multiplayer scenario and you see your teammates standing there, you will hear all of their footsteps from the right place on the loudspeakers. So if someone walks from right to left, you'll hear the sounds go from right to left.