Reverberations & Applications | Journey to 4.0

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   At CitizenCon 2952, we introduced a new initiative called Journey to 4.0, showcasing stories about development specifically for 4.x branch of release. Uh from new mission types, like investigations, to flight experience changes, such as the master modes, from life in the verse altering resource management systems, to anything and everything Pyro related, the Journey to 4.0 is our chance to, well, to step outside the traditional weekly update cadence and look farther ahead than usual. And knowing Star Citizen, this journey will probably be one filled with plenty of twists and turns along the way. And the initiative itself will extend beyond this year's CitizenCon to become a semi-regular series of stories and showcases, as you're about to see today.

2. 00:00:47

   Now, most folks are familiar with the process of concept art, that act of creating expression to discover that which you want to add your project, as well as determining that which you most definitely do not. It's perhaps the most exploratory and experimental part of any development process, and it extends beyond just the visual. Now, today's Journey to 4.0 presentation is from senior sound designer Matt Gabnai, a discussion of the process of creating audio concepts for environmental reverb on the distant alien worlds of Pyro. Hello everyone. My name is Matt Gabnai. I'm a senior audio designer at Cloud Imperium Games, and today I'm here to talk about reverberation, ambient sound

3. 00:01:35

   design, and a few concepts we're experimenting with for Pyro planets. Without extensive soundproofing, most spaces will produce many closely spaced reflections, which reach the listener shortly after the initial dry sound. We hear this series of reflections as a single continuous sound, which we call reverb. Reverb is created when a sound occurs in space with pressurized atmosphere, sending sound waves out in all directions. These waves reflect off surfaces in space, decaying in amplitude until reflections eventually die off. It's my own hypothesis that the experience of sound is about 30% of the human experience and possibly up to 50%

4. 00:02:23

   of the game experience. Different reverberations give us a rough idea of the space we have around us. During a phone call, for example, where we can't see the other person we're talking to, it's still easy to get a rough idea of the physical space they're in. The reverberation does that. Oh, hi Mom. Uh I'm I'm sorry. I can't talk right now. We're We're filming. I'm going to call you back. Thanks. Ah. So, that's where I put it. Hey, Mom. No, I'm sorry. I'm We're still filming. I can't I can't talk right now. I'll

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   I'll call you back, okay? Thank you. Bye. Checkmate. Here's one reverb for it, for example. And here's how the other one sounds. In video game development or in audio production in general, getting the right feel for space is absolutely crucial for the immersion of the audience. As audio designers, our task is often to recreate an effect that closely matches the visuals. In reality, often the best sound design work is what doesn't get in the way of interpreting the scenario. So, our work is unnoticed until there's an issue with what you're hearing. Basically, there's two schools of

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   thought in layman's terms, analog and digital. Either there's a software generating reverb on a signal based on a complex algorithm, or you capture an area that you like the natural reverberation of and use the created impulse response or IR for short to generate reverberation through it, which is what we did at the basement of CIG. One big advantage we had with the CIG parking lot is the huge surface area on both levels with a lot of parallel flat surfaces that can create delays, all kinds of distortions, and it's pretty much one driving element that I wanted

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   to use for Pyro. How cool is that that the new building we just moved into could be used this way for the new solar system? Of course, the IR we captured is also digital, which allows us to use them in game. So, where would it make sense to use IR in game? My current task as one of the new senior sound designers in the team is to get some concepts together for the new Pyro solar system we showed some videos of during the latest CitizenCon. Based on the art direction I received, Pyro is a hostile environment. Any life developing on those planets is based on very different rules than what we have on Earth and in Stanton as a consequence. And the basic idea is to make the planet sound otherworldly, unusual, a bit different, but still create something that pleases the ears

8. 00:05:43

   of the players. It's a fairly contradictory pitch, so if you're me, after receiving such a task, you go home and cry under the shower for a bit. What I came up with is a list of complex systems that will allow us to generate several layers of reverberation that often doesn't exactly belong to the physical space you're in. It has a certain musical tone, plus some other granulated effects to give you sounds that could not possibly come from our solar system, making the familiar sound unfamiliar in subtle ways. This involves a lot of experimentation.

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   So, anything I can show you now is purely so we could have a clearer conversation about concepts. It's not confirmed, validated, or even

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    discussed at this stage. I'm just coming up with ideas on my own to have a content and possible systems to talk about later when Pyro audio goes into production. And so, why do we use IR instead of algorithmic reverb? The reason is simple. We're generating content on a planetary scale. The basic idea is to come up with a typology of sound parameters that would essentially allow us to procedurally generate audio. But, with what we're designing uh for a system this size, your absolute first priority is optimization, while being able to control and test for all the parameters. So, the design has to be clever, and the

11. 00:08:53

    resources are controlled. IR takes substantially less processing power than algorithmic reverb. What I often did for the concepts of Pyro is to layer several different sized IRs on top of each other. This gives you an odd feeling about the space around you, and allows me to treat the layers differently with a few parameters and a few knobs. So, that is a quick look into one aspect

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    of sound design for Star Citizen. I hope you enjoyed.