Organisational Thread for Music and Sounds

This thread (I hope) will organise and iron out some of the finer details in what we want the music in Thrive to sound like. At the moment, with no posts in the Audio section, I thought it best to start with something like this, rather than having a mass of, “Check out what I made!” or, “Some new sounds today!”

Now, I know audio isn’t much of a priority at the moment. Personally, I think it’s at the bottom of the list of priorities. However, it’s about the only thing I have interest in at the moment (unless you have questions about maths or science, since I am a math major and successfully passed Physics in my final year of high school, but that’s for another topic). So, I have decided to at least make a start on what I hope with be an awe-inspiring soundtrack that’s full of collaborative works.

I’ll start by dividing up, what I see as (and subject to change from the community) areas of audio that can be seen as different, such as SFX and soundtracks. It would be good to organise the musicians around co-ordinate their work so that we all work on one specific area at the same time, for easier discussion to get the best possible final product.

1. Main Theme
Our main theme: the intro music to Thrive and/or possibly main menu and trailer music. Obviously people are going to have all kinds of different ideas about how to approach this. Some might want a loud and awe-inspiring theme, like Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Some might want something a little more subdued and organic.
At the moment, I suggest a full collaborative effort (could will be incredibly difficult) that incorporates all of our idiosyncrasies as composers and, to a lesser extent, sound technicians.

http://www.inbflat.net/

Perhaps something like this? We could set up a few musical boundaries (in this example, it would be key signature and long note duration), and each record our own part and then mix it together. I don’t know; I’m just throwing ideas around.

2. Soundtrack
Now, the soundtrack, in my view, would include the background music during the game and editors. Music could change according to the situations (such as a creature attaching you), a la Spore. I think most of us can agree that the soundscapes that Brian Eno did for Spore were sublime, and we might want to explore going in a similar minimalist direction, but I think we should wait and see how the game will look before deciding on how the game sounds (I should probably keep a closer eye on the Art threads for this). Menu music would also fall under this, as well as music for advertising purposes.

Any other ideas?

3. Sound Effects
SFX refer to all the sounds that add to the realism of the game, such as an animal’s roar, or an urban environment. It also refers to the interface sounds, such as button clicks and slider movements and what not. It will be a challenge to work out how to handle animal sounds, and it’s hard to decide what to do with the interface when we don’t know what it’ll look like It will be a challenge to work out how to handle animal sounds, and it’s hard to decide what to do with the interface when we don’t know what it’ll look like yet. I guess we’ll figure it out when we get to it.

News
I think the first thing we should get started on is concepts for our sound effects, perhaps starting with animal noises. I have made a freesound account for forumers to upload to (and check out other people's stuff too) so we can make a start on this.
The url is http://www.freesound.org/

Username: Thrive
Password: QWEasdzxc123

I think that audio is the second most important part of game, after the gameplay itself. Graphics are in third place in my opinion. While not really important now, they will be needed later to make the game feel like a living world.


After playing Hostile Waters and Minecraft, I came to conclusion that best soundtrack is no soundtrack at all. Silence takes the arcade element away, so even simple games can have awesome atmosphere. However, I would enjoy music in main menu and editors, as it would be boring without anything.

Of course, many other players will want gameplay music, so I think we should just have volume sliders for "Menu music" and "Gameplay music".

We shouldn't have music when a multi-cell organism, or we need to include at least a mute music option, I'd want the speakers free for the sensory input from my critters ears.

EDIT: I agree with what Keen said about the sliders.

i think i said it before somewhere, but players should be able to easily use their own music in thrive, by importing it from a file maybe (what gta san andreas did for the radio could work - you placed the songs in a file and when you pressed update the game would add them to the list of playable songs, i played it long time ago but i think it was like that)

This thread isn't about placing in your own music, gentlemen. And you don't need to input here if all you're going to say is "i'm going to turn my music down". However, if you are making comment on what style or feel you want the music to have that is acceptable. I think that there needs to be some unobtrusive music, kind of ambient stuff (like minecraft had, but with less "silence...silence...silence...music!!!silence...silence". A nice, underlying theme would benefit the game. And for the record, i always listen to the game music.

Hope that helps with ideas, music guys!

I'm glad this was put up. I'm a music lover, and i can think of a lot of things we could do for music in the game.

Wow, didn't expect a response so quickly!

First off, I do agree that an option to turn off "Music" or "SFX" or whatever would be a good idea, and same with importing your own music to listen to (like in Civilisation 4). It's still important for a game to have a soundtrack to "set the scene", so to speak.

I suspect that Ambient music, as Alaska said, would play a huge part in this, as you wouldn't notice it missing, but it still adds something to the overall experience.

Drifting off/interupting the topic, but what about the sounds more complex organisms make? Surely not all of them will rely on sound and perhaps use other sensory systems to interact, but we'll need a decent result if we're going to play as such an organism. Oh, right, and it can't really sound too earth-like (ala Spore, basically using recordings of earth animals.) But I expect that it will be much more difficult to generate as opposed to simple ambient music.

So..

Noitulove wrote:

Drifting off/interupting the topic, but what about the sounds more complex organisms make? Surely not all of them will rely on sound and perhaps use other sensory systems to interact, but we'll need a decent result if we're going to play as such an organism.
Oh, right, and it can't really sound too earth-like (ala Spore, basically using recordings of earth animals.)

Good question. Unfortunately, we can't record alien noises. I'd say that manipulating sounds of both animals and weird human noises could make for alien animal vocal chords (I tried slowing a human growl and adding a little distortion and it sounded like a lion's growl, for a simple example). I'm sure we'll find the answer when we start working on it.

Quote :

But I expect that it will be much more difficult to generate as opposed to simple ambient music.

For some reason when I first read this sentence, I thought that you were talking about the animal noises being ambient music. Now that would be strange!
But seriously, you're right, it will be hard coming up with a sizeable library of animal noises that aren't earth-like that span across all types of animals. It should probably be the first thing we work on in sound.

The ideal for animal noises would be simulate the actual sound produced, but that would be way to complicated to include, so...

The next best way would be to look at the head size and amount of body around the head, and from that make a range of pitches.
Then use the shape, size, and movement possibilities of the mouth to decide what actual types of noises can be made (eg clicks, grunts, meows, etc).
The voice box is then the players method of tweaking the sound to their liking.

This would effectively be a simple simulation of the noise that would be produced, and would mean unearthlike mouths would make more unearthlike sounds.

Is this idea of a simple simulation a possibility?

The Uteen wrote:

The next best way would be to look at the head size and amount of body around the head, and from that make a range of pitches.
Then use the shape, size, and movement possibilities of the mouth to decide what actual types of noises can be made (eg clicks, grunts, meows, etc).
The voice box is then the players method of tweaking the sound to their liking.

This would effectively be a simple simulation of the noise that would be produced, and would mean unearthlike mouths would make more unearthlike sounds.

I like it! I'll make another topic to catalogue stuff like this into something like what Sciocont did with the organism editor.

Quote :

Is this idea of a simple simulation a possibility?

I think it's possible, but I'm not good at what is and isn't possible with on-the-fly sound manipulation/programming.

I have a licensed version of Mixcraft 5 and I'm gonna play around with it and see if I can create a cool sort of theme tune or Trailer sound track.

(Probably beginning calm, then upbeat sort of techno stuff signifying big bang and planet formations galaxies etc, organic sounding music progressing into a deep aquatic/wild jungle/tribal beats/medieval-esque etc and basically phasing up through the progression of music to a techno-esque sort of beat leaving at a ambient calm kind of tune signifying all of space)

Sound confusing right?

I'll give it a shot :]


EDIT:
Made a thread for Theme tunes/Trailer tracks here.


Heres the draft whip up track: (Also on that thread)
Thrive.mp3