A Medal Mix: The EA Sound Team talks Audio Production

By Merrel Davis
Sound & Picture had the chance to chat with the sound team behind the new Electronic Arts game Medal of Honor.  Audio Director Paul Lackey, Audio Leads Tyler Parsons and Jeff Wilson, Dialogue Editor Joshua Nelson and Audio Software Engineer Eduardo Trama sat down with us to elucidate one of the least discussed and oft mysterious avenues of audio production and mixing in entertainment: Video Games.

The newest entry in the Medal of Honor franchise is a reboot of sorts. Everything is real. The Speilbergian World War II backdrop is replaced with a gritty and visceral post 9/11 Afghanistan. This time around, military “Tier 1 Operators” hit the ground to fight the Taliban. The audio in the Medal of Honor series has defined the genre of first person shooter (fps) games. From the true-to-life gameplay to the crisp plink of a spent shell dancing on the concrete; Medal of Honor brings you into a real war zone.

The sound design, orchestration and implementation in the Medal of Honor series are unparalleled. So what goes into capturing the sound of an interactive, dynamic war zone? A whole lot. As Paul Lackey puts it, “Creating the sound is the easy part; on the other hand, sound integration for video games is akin to constantly solving a puzzle.” Indeed, he and his team are very aware and humbled by the tradition of Medal of Honor they must uphold.

In film, some say the sound perspective is dictated by the cut of the film and the single plane of audio. In video games, because it’s interactive, sound has to exist on multiple planes. What kind of audio setups would you describe as unique to the video game industry?
Paul Lackey: I think our work in the field would closely resemble source gathering for film, except we tend to record from a lot of positions at once.  Our recordings need to transition seamlessly in real time from a 1st person perspective in 5.0 (mix) to distant 3rd person or interior to exterior.All the story requirements are the same as with features. The interactive nature of video games compounds the complexity.

Jeff Wilson: Firearms are a good example of how we uniquely use distance modeling for audio assets. We record firearms with multiple perspectives in mind: close, medium and distant. For our close recording set up, we arrange our microphones within 2 to10 feet of the weapon. For our medium perspective, we set up our microphones between 50 and 100 feet away. And for distant perspective, we have recording rigs set up anywhere from 200 to 500 yards away. We simultaneously record from all three locations and then in the editing phase we create distance layers that are designed to blend together to form one composite weapon sound.

Tyler Parsons: Variety is definitely crucial. Something as simple as a “dirt walk footstep” may have ten layers to it. Each of which may have ten constituent sound files to be randomly selected from and assigned semi-random parameters upon playback. Recording and editing massive amounts of source material is necessary in order to deliver a finished soundtrack that feels natural and won’t get repetitive.

What  are your (audio) weapons of choice? What  gear  can’t you live without?
PL: In the field, I can’t live without my Remote Audio headphones. Having hearing protection incorporated into my monitoring is just essential to capturing good high SPL content and on Medal of Honor we record a lot of loud stuff.

TP: I’m a fan of the Sound Devices recorders and RSM 191 (stereo mic) for a lot of effects recording. In the studio, nearly everyone on the team is editing and mixing in Nuendo 4 on PC, which allows us to do all our development (including integration into the game) on one machine.  Sound Forge also came into play quite often for mastering and simpler edit work. Kontakt was really handy as a sampler for ambient battle sounds; it made it easy to rapidly create organic sounding backgrounds with a lot of weapon variety.

JW: I can’t live without the Sound Devices 744t, Nuendo 4.0 and the Waves Diamond software suite.

“Worldizing” is a process of playing back existing recordings through a speaker then re-recording the playback along with new sound recordings. This allows for a more uniform acoustic characteristic – have you used this tactic?
TP: A lot of the dialogue in the game is meant to be coming from across the Afghanistan wadi (valley or dry riverbed). We wanted to get that dialogue to sound more authentically affected by the acoustic space of the wadi than it might if we simply processed it on a DAW.  So we headed out into the Southern California desert and played back dialogue assets into canyons and against cliff faces.  We experimented with different positions for both mics and speaker — some of it came out fantastically well and sounded very natural, while other parts just sounded like a loudspeaker.

Did the team have access to the original Medal of Honor sound libraries? How much of the sound was a synthesis of existing content?
PL: We did have access to sound libraries, but most everything except for explosions and impacts came from new source.

JW: Since Medal of Honor originated at our studio in Los Angeles, we do have a large catalog of specific audio recordings at our disposal.  However, very little of that material was used in the latest title.  We recorded a new set of weapons, cloth and gear foley and a large number of unique sound effects specifically to represent the modern soldier.  We try to capture as much original material as possible, utilizing commercial sound libraries as little as possible.

Josh Nelson:  Additionally, we did almost 9,000 lines of original dialogue that shipped with the game.

Does the sound production team have to take into account whether or not a game is “online” or has an online component?
TP: Not from a recording standpoint and not significantly from an integration standpoint.  For both singleplayer and online multiplayer games, we’re creating and integrating sounds for a first person player’s perspective of non-player opponents; the main difference to us would be in the naming conventions used for the thousands of sound and dialogue cues in each version.

JW: For titles that have an online multi-player component, you have to consider the number of audio voices that will be used. Since gaming consoles have a set ‘voice limit,’ you have to implement a system for filtering the number of active voices being used based on priority and distance. If you exceed the console hardware voice limit, without a voice limit/priority system in place, important sounds may be prevented from playing or prematurely cut off. This is an issue in offline games as well, but is even more of an issue when you join a server with 60 other players.

Biggest pet peeves regarding audio in video games?
JW: Lack of variety. Especially with dialogue. People rarely use dialogue well. A line like “I’m reloading” in the middle of a battlefield is not realistic, but if you only have three asset variations, and they trigger once every few seconds, that noticeable repetition completely removes you from the experience.

TP: Mix dynamics. There are lots of first person shooters that gradually devolve into a “wall of sound.”

JW: Definitely, dynamics.  Silence is sometimes just as important. We excel at a very cinematic mix. We give the player a sense of space as opposed to a nonstop barrage of sound.

Do you have any stories or tricks up your sleeve for a good unique sound?
PL: Never assume that what you set out to record is going to be the best or most useful thing you capture.  In fact, I was at Fort Carson to record Apache “live fire” training. Before the range went hot, I placed portable recorders near the targets. I really padded my recorder’s inputs as I expected the rockets and 30mm to be exploding. I was pretty disappointed as the first attack took place and nothing went boom!  I did not know “live fire” meant inert projectiles. Two hours later I retrieved my recorders, and I found just above the noise floor some amazing ricochets and impacts.  After a shameful amount of gain and EQ, these became the basis for the 30mm and 50 caliber impacts that break apart walls and rocks.  However, had the practice rounds been explosive, I never would have captured these gems.

JW: Loose change makes good whizbys. (Note: The team used little slingshots to propel the coins into the air, to create a whizby effect for various bullets.)

TP: Looking back, I’m amused by the number of washing machine recordings that found their way into the game.  We had a session in which we destroyed an old washing machine in creative ways.  I ended up using impacts, ronks, and scrapes from that session as sweeteners in vehicle collisions, RPG impacts on helicopters, anti-aircraft gun explosions, and more. Still more washing machine source came from a recording I made while vacationing in Sydney – my friend had a very modern washer that generated an intense, almost sciencefictiony roar/whine. The spin cycle sounded so much like a big turbine that  I ended up sweetening some of our real Chinook helicopter source with it.

What resources are there for designers and mixers interested in being involved in the industry?
TP: Game development conventions like GDC  (Game Developers Conference) feature presentations by game audio teams discussing their recent work.  There’s also GameSoundCon, a convention dedicated entirely to sound and music in games.

PL: The Game Developers Conference is a very good place to start and make connections.

How did you end up in the industry?
PL: I had been working in TV post when my roommate who worked at a small game company said “Hey…we are hiring a sound designer” in a voice that indicated he wasn’t sure what a sound designer would do.  “You interested?”  This was for the Nintendo 64 and I thought games would be fun for a year or two…but with every console transition has come new challenges and features that have kept each new title as fun and interesting as my first.

TP: I went to school for film production and computer science, leaning at first toward editing picture, but got interested in production dialogue mixing and then sound design. After working on a number of student and independent projects, I got a break in 2004 when Electronics Arts LA was looking for audio integrators to help finish Goldeneye: Rogue Agent. A friend at the studio recommended me for the position and I was lucky enough to get hired. I started doing technical sound design on my second game Medal of Honor: European Assault and have been loving it ever since.

JW: Definitely attend GDC (Game Developer Conference) and meet people who worked in the industry.  Most game companies have job postings on their websites and at that point it becomes like any other job search. However, the only way you will get noticed is if you have some basic knowledge of interactive audio.  If you are new to the industry, research the tools and methods used by interactive sound designers (this is not a linear medium, so it requires a different way of thinking). Your skill as a sound designer is important, but knowing how to author audio for interactive games is key.

What is the biggest challenge in this line of work?
TP: The toughest part is probably just keeping our sounds integrated and playing as expected. Given the vast number of changes being made to the game as it evolves, it’s not uncommon for sounds that were working exactly as intended yesterday to be somehow broken by a well-meaning designer, artist, or animator within a week or two.  We record, edit and integrate the sounds to play exactly the way we want them to, but the real fight is shepherding them all the way to the shipped product.

PL: Honestly, making good sound is the easiest part of our job…still hearing it in the game as intended on the shipped product takes a lot of vigilance and time. “Optimized out of existence” became a late night catch phrase on the audio team during finaling. Because audio is attached in so many ways to bring animations, physics, visual effects, design scripts and coded events to life, a lot of our work tends to get unintentionally broken by last minute changes in other areas of the game.

As we were leaving EA, the sound team shared wisdom from Erik Kraber, the senior audio director on Medal of Honor, who oversaw all dialogue recording and coordinated its entire musical score. His wisdom: “without a valley, a peak means nothing.” Indeed, in playing Medal of Honor, the level of audio detail is truly a feat to behold. The world is organically punctuated by the warmth and depth of an interactive seven hour movie that can be dynamically played out anyway you’d like it. You can hear the crackle of machine gun fire in the distance, the wind in hollowed out fuselage or prone yourself to the ground and drag your body over the rocky riverbed – whatever the scenario or sound, the Medal of Honor team has got you covered. Now, duck!

Tags: EA Games Electronic Arts Medal of Honor Video Games