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house sound design tool that allows us to create all these audio behaviors that we can then trigger with Logic. So, we can say, when you're at this velocity, move to this and pitch it up this amount, and based on the angular velocity, pan it this way. There is a lot that goes into it to actually making it feel not only real but hyper-real." At its core, SSX is an extreme snowboard- ing game, but it's also a fantasy game. Durity wanted the sound to be as realistic as pos- sible before adding in the hyper-realistic ele- ments. If a player races by, there is a Doppler effect on the voice. If a player goes through a tunnel, they'll hear reverb and tunnel effects. If the player is jumping off a 400-foot drop with the board spinning on their back, and suddenly their hands ignite, then the sound will bring that experience to life as well. "For SSX, we combine the philosophy that the music will give the player an emotional response and the sound design will actually ground them in the space. Even though this is an adventure/fantasy aggressive snow- boarding game, the whole presentation, the whole feel should be very smooth and engaging. That was one key to the game. The sound has to move and modulate, and the mix has to be dynamic and change based on what's going on in the world and what actions the player is taking." THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is considered an "open-world fantasy epic," which means the player can interact with and explore the world as they want to. This created a lot of opportunity for sound design. It's a good thing that Mark Lampert, audio director at Bethesda listen to my recordings and decide that a particular bird or ambience might sound like something you'd hear on a snowy day, or like a lush green piney forest. Certain sounds just fit the picture to me. It's a fantasy world so I got to mix and match a lot of bird songs. I could reverse them, or pitch them up, and make a whole new species out of several bird types. It's nice when there are no rules." Composer Jeremy Soule created much more music for Skyrim than he had for the previous release, Oblivion. Since players spend hundreds of hours in-game, varying the Softworks (www.bethsoft.com), likes doing the detail work. "I look at it like there are peaks and valleys, and I worry more about the valleys, that underlying bed of sound that's there all the time. All the mundane sounds, I actually really like working on even more than some enormous magical sound effect. The mundane things are the things that you are going to spend the most time listening to." In particular, Lampert enjoyed building the nature sounds. Skyrim is composed of various biological regions such as pine forests, decid- uous forest, snowy regions with ice, and the marshes. Lampert spent a lot of time out- doors, capturing field recordings of birds and insects in the Maryland/DC/Virginia area, as well as in North Carolina and England. He then mixed and matched those sounds to fit the regions in Skyrim. "Our artists spent so much time making a very beautiful, lush, living landscape — I wanted to match that. I would music, as well as creating breaks, was impor- tant to prevent the soundtrack from becom- ing stagnant. Players have a lot of time to explore the landscape and therefore spend a lot of time listening to the music and sound design. With more music to work with, Lam- pert was able to divide it up into four times of day, as well as by region. In addition to these tracks, which Soule terms "narrative" music, that have a traditional structure and are meant to play straight through, he also created ambient tracks called "palettes." According to Lampert, "The palettes were more synth-based. There was no central melody, nothing recurs in it. They were arrhythmic. I took those tracks, cut them into little pieces, and sometimes added a little bit of reverb. I have those palettes come in and out at different layers. It's so randomized that you don't hear the structure underneath it. It doesn't follow anything that the player is doing in the game. There is a timer running in the background, and after a few of the narra- tive pieces play, it switches over to a palette piece for a little while. It's just to break up the soundtrack and give you a breather." Lampert focused on creating a constant background wash of palettes and sounds that support the scenery. As the player walks through a mountain pass into another very different area, the whole soundscape changes too. This attention to detail helps immerse the player into the Skyrim world. "I really like put- ting that stuff together. When you transition from day to dusk to night to the early hours, the crickets change and certain birds disap- pear, and certain ones come in as the sun comes up. After awhile, it's like you have this living system working in the game even though it's really just a suite of sounds that are following a set of rules you've established." One challenge for Lampert was the magic sounds in the game. The magic spells were created using a combination of natural recording, either from Lampert's own field recordings, or pulled from commercial librar- ies. "The magic is supposed to be born of your own hands, this sort of natural power, and in the end it turned out the best way to go was to use recordings of the real-world items. I would start with natural recordings of things. If it was a water-based spell, I'd try recordings of streams, or if it was cold and icy, then sometimes I'd use fire elements because they're crackly, and if you run it through a filter to bring out all the high end, then it sounds like ice crystals." Skyrim is set in the land of the Nords, which is a northern region. When it came to creating the voice of the Nords, there was some debate as to whether or not there should be an accent. After trying several variations, it was decided that a faintly Swedish accent worked the best. "There was a very fine line of what sounded good and what was laughable. The target we would go for was something Swed- ish. It worked best when it was almost indefin- able. Once we had a few characters all speak- ing together in the villages and cities, then we were immediately glad we made that decision. It almost went the other way for a while when we heard a few different takes or versions and thought it was going to sound completely ridiculous. We wouldn't have the time to go back and change tens of thousands of lines, so thankfully we went with it. Now the game has this whole different flavor because we went with an accent for the Nords." Creating a believable world, visually and allows the player to become sonically, immersed in Skyrim. From the dungeons, caves and ruins to the changing forest land- scapes, Lampert used the sound to set the stage for game play. "I think of it as a set design for a stage. I'm arranging for these backgrounds in a way that makes you more focused on the players as they come out. It's the best opportunity for me to immerse the player. The mixture of all the back- ground sounds along with everything that the composer had done, if those two ele- ments work together, that really completes the picture." www.postmagazine.com Post • March 2012 35 Bethesda's Mark Lampert: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is filled with sounds that represent nature.