How can we hear sounds in a vacuum?

What we want is to create a cool thing, right? And you've got the rule of cool, like Star Wars, cinematic sound in space, but then you've got the full spectrum of also going down to the film Gravity, where it's all contact stuff, so there's no sound propagation in space. So we've got to make a game that's fun, but what we're playing with at the moment is the concept of sound simulation. So there's already current technology. There's a great TED talk where they've got this high-speed, high-frame-rate camera, and they filmed a leaf. There's no microphones on it. And next to the leaf, out of the shot, was a loudspeaker playing Mary Had a Little Lamb. And there's an algorithm that they ran this footage through, and they can recreate the sound from the vibrations that they filmed on the leaf, which is awesome. So we thought that's a great in-lore explanation for why we can hear sound in space. So we're playing with the idea of having this sound simulation unit component in your ship that will analyze light waves and vibrations and then play back what it would sound like in a pressurized environment. So that's how we can justify hearing sounds in space. But it also gives us the ability to say, okay, well, let's have the full spectrum, let's have our cake and eat it too. So let's have the Gravity-esque sound treatment and the full Star Wars stuff. So you're flying around, space battle is all cool, you can hear everything, you know where everything is behind you, all that kind of stuff, and then you get EMP'd. That would be so cool. And then all you hear is your ship, and you see all this stuff going on and you can't hear it, and that's terrifying. It makes you feel really isolated and alone and vulnerable, because all you're hearing is your ship just creaking. There's hush until all your stuff powers up and you get that sense back again. So that's how we kind of justify it.

Yeah, we've got to give it so we can take it away, for interesting gameplay reasons.