Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
130 M PS E . O R G The aesthetic was very bleak and it kind of looks like an old movie, and it also meant that the sounds had to have a very specific character. For example, if you used the sound of a bird that was really well recorded, it just ruined everything. It was important that the sounds were not easily identifiable. I distorted a lot of the sounds really heavily and used a wire recorder to give the sounds a special texture. An example is where you're in the forest in the game. There's no forest sound, it's just this tape hiss and optical noise. I did a lot of that kind of stuff in Limbo. PA: For how long did you work on Limbo? MSA: It was quite a short time, actually only about 10 months. So, it was really busy. I also had to learn the technique of implementing sounds in a computer game, but you learn quickly when you're under pressure. When you have a tough deadline, you suddenly get to know software quite quickly. PA: For how long do you usually work on projects? MSA: It varies and it also varies a lot how much I work on them at different times. But ... it's usually like anything from two to six years or something like that. It also depends on how many different tasks I have. Sometimes I do both sound design and music, sometimes I only do music, and sometimes I help with some things along the way rather than doing it all. I don't do anything but video games all the time, but the way I'm part of them varies from project to project, and that really speaks to me. I'm someone who likes to spend a really long time on things. And it's just great that you get to reinvent the wheel again and again. PA: What was your next project after Limbo? MSA: I continued at Playdead and worked on the game Inside, which was on a completely different scale. There were also more of us working on the sound and music—I worked with both SØS Gunver Ryberg and Andreas Frostholm. It was more polished and there was a lot more detail. It felt like I had started learning to walk and then I had to learn to run. Everything was more ambitious. PA: I remember reading stories about how you recorded some of the sounds of the game through an actual human skull using a contact microphone? MSA: I did both sounds and music for Inside, but we actually ended up using it mainly on the music because we had some ideas that it would be fun for the game to have a bit of a B-movie sound. We worked a lot with synthesizers and a lot of soundscapes, and we found that if we put them directly into the game, it was just too much. Playing them through that skull—actually we recorded mainly through the jawbone—gave them a different feel. You can sense that there's a synth feel to it, but it's still kind of different. Every project is really an exploration: How do you create a particular sound? I think it's funny that there are so many areas that haven't been explored yet in game audio. My friend and colleague, Rob Bridgett, once said that it's almost a bit like movies in the 1950s: There's so much to explore. PA: You're often working with sound people from the film world. You've worked with sound designers and Foley artists like Ann Kroeber, Nicolas Becker from France, and Heikki Kossi from Martin Stig Andersen and Nicolas Becker from recording sessions for Control (2019).