Description
You may not even realize, but the music and the sounds of a game, and the emotions they evoke, are bound to be what you’ll remember the most. It gets you pumped for the arena, makes your gunshots echo off the walls of Monaco – and the inner walls of your chest, and fully immerses you into the world of THE FINALS.
Andreas and Carl are responsible for the soundscape of THE FINALS, from the direction, music, and voice-over, to the sounds of the trailers.
Transcript
You may not even realize, but the music and the sounds of a game, and the emotions they evoke, are bound to be what you’ll remember the most. It gets you pumped for the arena, makes your gunshots echo off the walls of Monaco – and the inner walls of your chest, and fully immerses you into the world of THE FINALS.
Andreas and Carl are responsible for the soundscape of THE FINALS, from the direction, music, and voice-over, to the sounds of the trailers.
And watch our trailers. They tell the sonic stories of Embark's worlds. Okay, let's get into it. Today I am here with Andreas and Carl. Welcome, guys.
Speaker 2 (01:29)
Hey.
Speaker 3 (01:29)
Hey.
Andreas and Carl are responsible for the soundscape of the finals, from direction music, voiceover to the sound of the trailers. To get us started, can each of you please take a moment and introduce yourselves and tell us what you do here at Embark? Who wants to start?
Speaker 2 (01:45)
Sure, I can start. First off, I want to start off by saying it's not just me and Carl that makes the sounds. For the finals. We have Ludwig that works with voice, marcus, Simon, and Olaf that works with our tech workflows and implementation, and Benso, of course, that works mostly on arcaders. But I'm andreas. I work here as an audio designer or director or something. We don't really stick to titles too much here, as we want to keep it flat and collaborative. But my responsibilities involve working on most things core, such as movement, weapons, gadgets, basically all the stuff that you as a player does. I try to work a lot outside my craft as well, with writers, designers, animators, and VFX, as sound is part of the puzzle, not just a layer of paint on top of it. Speaker 3 (02:41)
And I'm Carl. I'm also an audio designer, but I work a lot with the music, the narrative, UI, UX, game modes, levels, and such. And as Andreas, I try to be in close collaboration with the entire team. So me and Andreas, we have worked a long time together, and we collaborate in a really good way. He was actually my mentor when I first started as an intern at Dice, and he has taught me incredibly much. So when I first started here, andreas joined a little bit later. It was important for us both that we try to sort of share the burden of the direction part of the game, to try and create something that was our united vision. And I think the best thing in the whole world is when someone gets an idea and then the other person gets inspired by that idea and then it goes back and this ladder of inspiration and creativity just keeps on going.
Speaker 1 (03:41)
Thank you both. Okay, now that's over, let's get right into the questions that we got from our community of players. Taylor asks the finals kill sound effect is reminiscent of the one from Battlefield One. What is it that makes these sounds so satisfying?
Speaker 3 (04:00)
So, first of all, that's a really good observation. So Ben Ser, who did the battlefield one kill sound. He works here at Embark, but mainly on arc raiders. He's a great guy, by the way.
Speaker 2 (04:13)
And yeah, the Battlefield One kill sound was very much the template that we used for the finals because people loved the sound and we wanted to sort of recreate it in a different context. And it consists of three parts. Basically, it's timing, frequencies and association. And the timing part is important since especially kills, they usually happen when you are shooting. So separating the kill sound, the answer in time will give it more room to grow and peak when hopefully there is nothing colliding with that sound like hard transient grenades or gunshots and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (04:58)
And you also want to get into a satisfying rhythm like, but I'm bum bum or something like that, because if everything sort of happens randomly, you can't really attach your attention to the sound in the same way.
Speaker 2 (05:13)
Yeah, and the second part is frequencies. So the kill sound is played in both the bass and treble registry, so you can actually peek through the soundscape. So whereas the main combat and voices, they're sort of in the mid range and this sound plays both above and below in terms of frequencies.
Speaker 3 (05:35)
And then lastly, association. So we used everything that is sort of associated with money and excitement, like slot machines, pinball machines, cash registers, et cetera. The main part of the resolver sound is actually one of the bells that we have down in the reception that we recorded, which is super satisfying to hear. So I think there's something pavlovian with humans and their love for bell sounds.
Speaker 2 (06:04)
At least mammals, right? Yeah. But the function of the sound, obviously, is to reward a play with something exciting, like an addictive birthday cake with everything you love, like sugar, cream, jam, chocolate. Yeah. What's your favorite cake, Dusty?
Speaker 1 (06:23)
Hey, I'm asking the questions here, but if I have to choose carrot cake all the way give me that spice.
Speaker 2 (06:30)
I'll add the root vegetables back to the list.
Speaker 1 (06:35)
Thank you. Rat Mouse asks who did the voiceovers and adds, they sound really authentic.
Speaker 2 (06:43)
So here's the kicker. What did the voiceovers? So the thing is, we use AI with a few exceptions. So all the contestant voices, like the barks, and both our commentators are AI text to speech for things we call vocalizations, like player breathing, vaulting jumping. That's something we use us in the studio to record. Like just grunting. We can't really get the AI to perform those kind of tasks yet. And since it's only assertive sounds, they will mix pretty well with all the AI text to speech voices. And the reason that we go this route is that AI text to speech is finally extremely powerful. It gets us far enough in terms of quality and allows us to be extremely reactive to new ideas and keeping things really fresh. So, for instance, if a game designer comes up with a new idea for a game mode, we can have voiceover representing that in just a matter of hours instead of months. We don't have to do temp recordings that needs replacing. And I think we're really coming into like a new dawn when it comes to video game voices. And if it sounds a bit off, it still blends kind of well with the fantasy of the virtual game show esthetically.
Speaker 3 (08:12)
Yeah, definitely. And what you might notice is how we sort of stepped up the voiceover between CB One and CB Two. Ludwig did a fantastic job with that and that's a lot since we have switched and experimented with different suppliers. And what is so incredibly cool with the time that we live in is that the quality improvements are exponential. Things happen so fast. Just a few months back, we couldn't get our TTS to produce projected shouting. And now it is possible. It's incredible. What a time to be alive.
Speaker 2 (08:47)
Yeah. Shout out to Eleven Labs. You're awesome.
Speaker 1 (08:51)
Who knows? Maybe I'm AI. I'm not.
Speaker 2 (08:55)
Okay, that's what I told you to say with my keyboard.
Speaker 1 (09:00)
Junior the clown asks where did the idea for players turning into coins come from? And how did you make the audio for?
Speaker 2 (09:10)
Oh. So the idea of the coins that's Gustav, that you probably heard yesterday, if you listened in, and I think I've heard him describe it as violent, but not gory and celebrative, like hitting a strike while bowling. It's like a physical cause and effect, but with a sort of glamorous twist.
Speaker 3 (09:33)
And creating a sound for it is actually kind of funny because we wanted to make it our own. And to do that, we needed to record a lot of money getting thrown at the ground. So we went out and acquired around 300 Swedish crowns of coins, which actually was pretty hard. We needed to find a place that actually carried that much coins. But in the end, we...