A Peak into Audio for Games
Video games! Today’s exciting topic. A whole world connected to a beautiful and interactive method of storytelling, or a whole world connected via seething competitiveness in multiplayer showdowns.
Games can connect us all and absorb us into their immersive worlds - but what is immersion without sound?
Audio plays a major and often overlooked role in games, much like the Batman of immersion - the unsung hero out of sight, out of mind. However it wasn’t always so immersive … let’s have a peek into the past!
Retro Games
Game audio was born with the game “Pong”. This game was released on Atari in 1972, and features 3 various bleep bloops. They signal the ball being hit against the paddles, against the walls and for every point scored. Even though the audio is only very basic, the monotony of the bleeps and the jarring sound of losing gave the game a lull for the player to become more immersed. Simple, but effective!
As game consoles progressed onto the Atari 2600 and eventually the NES, game audio advanced much further. The NES featured 5 audio channels which consisted of 2 pulse waves, a triangle wave, noise and sampling with basic 1-bit DPCM. This gave creators much more freedom to experiment with music and immersion for video games, now that many different types of sounds could be implemented, such as percussion and vocals. One major hold back for audio was that the game cartridges could only contain up to (average) 384 kb of data for the whole game, so there was a constant fight for space.
With the introduction of the SNES, game audio further improved drastically with the inclusion of a dedicated audio chip called the SSMP. This chip was capable of producing stereo sound, composed of 8 voices and used 8-bit audio samples in addition to various effects like echo. Not only was dynamic range increased, giving samples more clarity and impact but also the stereo field was introduced, allowing audio to be more realistic and immersive.
A huge leap in quality came with the introduction of the CD and the Playstation, allowing audio to play full 16-bit, professional quality audio with extended dynamic range.
Modern Audio Advancements
In modern times, the old and almost discarded concept of “Ambisonics” has been making waves for new technology with VR and binaural audio (see here).
Ambisonics is a full-sphere surround format which covers recording in the vertical and horizontal planes. The signals can then be decoded to play audio in many different formats, including binaural for stereo headphones.
One of the current popular audio techniques is to use de-coded ambisonics to faithfully reproduce localised sound for VR. The other method of doing this without ambisonics is to impart HRTF filters on the mono audio sources which can mimic the nature of our ears.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a trade off between localisation which is perfect for VR, and overall sound quality (as the recording intended). This is because using an HRTF filter affects the timbral qualities of the audio source, often making things sound more “tinny”. However, being accurate with localisation really makes a difference with immersion, check out the video below !
Of course, there are many other advancements that we could talk about - such as Unreal Engine 5’s new procedural audio engine “MetaSounds”. However, this is a wrap for today’s post - but please feel free to check out this small podcast where I discuss this topic with my good comrades Nikita, Argi and Omar !
