MPSE Wavelength

Fall 2024

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AB: I was trying to break into a relatively new industry in Canada that didn't have any kind of formal training programs or standards. I was lucky to have some natural ability in the sound design of my student films and was given an opportunity to join a studio and cut backgrounds for some TV shows. I met some amazingly talented people there who taught me the ropes and slowly worked my way up to eventually land a couple of supervisory roles. At that point, the games industry wasn't really on my radar. Can you share a defining moment or project in your career that significantly shaped your path? AB: Somewhat ironically, it was the tragic events of 9/11 that changed my path from traditional post- production to games development. After 9/11, the post-production industry in Canada took a hit because most of the shows there were American productions, and nobody was ready to fly back and forth at that point. The work dried up, and most of us didn't have anything else. I ended up with a teaching gig at my alma mater, filling in for an ex-professor who was taking a sabbatical and teaching sound design to film students. There, I was lucky to meet a comp-sci student who happened to be taking my course out of interest; he was interning at electronic arts and told me about an open position there for a sound design role on the James Bond game, 007: Nightfire. I applied for the job, and due to my linear experience, they wanted me on the team. It was quite a switch, and the learning curve was insane in those days. We didn't have any middleware or tools like they have now, and we were literally plugging numbers into spreadsheets and parsing those into builds to change the mix. It was very primitive by today's standards, but I loved every minute of it. It was also the first time I got to do vehicle recordings, which led to a lifelong passion for the sound of internal combustion. What inspired you to co-develop the REV vehicle engine sound system, and how did it revolutionize game audio design? AB: When I was in my film program, I took a course in electronic music and learned about granular synthesis, which was quite new and experimental at the time. The idea stuck with me, and when I started working on games with cars and saw how painfully cumbersome, slow (and ultimately, unrealistic) the traditional method of creating a stack of tuned loops was, I started to wonder about using granular synthesis to break down and reassemble recordings in real time using the fundamental frequency of the engine as the pitch map. After many years of R&D, eventually, John and I were able to create Crankcase Audio and build and release our commercial product, REV, which was the only granular solution on the market at the time (about 12 years ago now). What was revolutionary was the amount of time it saved in building functional engine models. What used to take days of effort was reduced to a couple of hours, and the end result was subjectively much more authentic sounding to the original recording than any but the most advanced loop models around. How has REV's adoption impacted game development teams, especially those with limited resources? AB: REV takes possibly one of the most difficult challenges of game sound development (building a good-sounding vehicle and a physics system to drive it) and makes it relatively fast and simple, but with far superior results from rolling your own. The time savings alone are worth it from a time-saving perspective, but we also have an off-the-shelf library of more than 50 high-quality engines that can be licensed for developers who don't have the resources to record their own. REV turns a big team challenge into a task manageable by just one or two people, freeing up resources for other areas of sound design. This is especially beneficial for developers working on open-world games who have multiple sound systems to create and manage. Can you tell us about Rebound Sound? How long have you been operating, and what services do you provide to the industry? AB: Rebound started from a chance meeting between me and Mikael Frithiof, orchestrated by our mutual friend, David Möllerstedt, co-founder of an awesome sound gear company (shout-out to Teenage Engineering)! We met to discuss Mikael's interest in expanding his operation into the US West Coast, and at the time, I was a freelancer with a good network and more work than I could handle, so we decided to team up. We rented an empty building in Culver City and decided to invest our sweat equity M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 31

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