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The Sims 3 Showtime is the latest expan- sion in the series. It allows players to choose from four career paths in the entertainment business: singer, acrobat, magician and DJ. For the singing career, players have the ability to choose from a group of actors, which aren't always the best singers. In the beginning, no pitch correction is used, but as the singer's career progresses, pitch shifting and time correction are used to make the perfor- mance seem more professional. "Surprisingly, the shift is pretty natural," says Kauker. "You don't notice it that much, and that comes from years of cultural train- ing in watching people suddenly break into song on TV." Not only does the vocal performance improve as the career progresses, but the music that supports the singer also grows fuller. The singer gets 10 total songs. Each song has three arrangements that open up over the course of the career. If the singer is playing a small venue, bar or street perfor- mance, the arrangement will typically consist of an acoustic guitar and the singing. Later in the career, a full show band will be playing along with the performance. This might include a horn section or string section, and backing vocals. "That's the interesting twist on the singing career. The actual arrangement progresses with you. You pick up back-up vocalists suddenly and you get famous." The music for the singing career consists of all new custom tracks. Kauker provided the style guide for the composers to work with. The tracks range from Aerosmith-type rock to dance floor pop, with the tempo as the only creative limitation due to animation requirements. "We can only create so many assets in the world, so our animation is a fixed linear time. We time-boxed the music so we could match it up to the animation, and that gave us two tempos to work with. There are still a lot of options for the perfor- mance. The singing is broken into five parts of eight measures long that use two tempos. The user can get a very specific performance by selecting which part they want to come next. Or they can lay back and let their char- acters do it all." Similarly, the DJ music is also custom- made to fit the tempo limitations. Kauker worked with four different groups of com- posers to create a variety of styles. Each style has 10-15 sections, and each section is about 30 seconds long. "In The Sims' world this is equal to a couple of hours worth of music. So, the DJ music changes constantly and that makes it quite interesting," Kauker. The magician was another sound-depen- dent career path. Kauker always attempts to Foley sounds first, or draw from the EA sound archives to find what he needs. For the magi- cian, the sound effects included fire balls, magic poofs, levitation, swords in a box and water tricks in a tank. "All of those things are quite interesting because no one has gone around and recorded magicians doing their thing, so we're inventing them. There were a lot of us running around with recorders. For example, we had to record filling a water tank. For that, a small aquarium worked quite well." In The Sims, every little detail matters. Since the gameplay environment is controlled by the player, Kauker never knows exactly what the end user will hear. "We have to flesh it out in very close detail. We don't have anywhere to hide. We only have what the user builds, so the user could be performing magic on a completely empty lot and all of our audio is exposed. We have to do a higher level of detail than many other types of media because we don't know what our users are focusing on experience wise." To help players immerse themselves in The Sims 3 Showtime, Electronic Arts' Robi Kauker focuses on the emotion. www.postmagazine.com Post • March 2012 33