Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 129 Smalley, who has been a huge creative inspiration for me. I worked with sound and music at the same time. For example, at one point, I did a composition based on traffic sounds I had recorded in London and then turned it all into music. I filtered the sounds, found the harmonies in the sounds and so on. It was still traffic sounds, but it was also something else. I guess that's what you call soundscapes. PA: And then came Limbo, the first video game you did sound and music for and which turned out to be a big breakthrough when it was released in 2010. How did you get started with that? MSA: I started doing a lot of experimental theater and a bit of short film. I was very inspired by Randy Thom and his essay, "Designing a Movie for Sound." Michel Chion's texts and thoughts were also a big inspiration. I even sat and watched all the extras about the sound design on The Lord of the Rings DVDs. Making sound for movies really wasn't that far from what I was doing at the time already. I was working with electroacoustic music, recording sounds and putting them together into some kind of sound collage. I was using exactly the same tools that you use to make movie sound. So, it didn't feel like a big leap to start working with sound design. I made a couple of short films where I did all the sound. I thought of it all as a whole and was very concerned with the musicality of it all. The Foley became a rhythm for me, like music in itself. I was very inspired by what is called acousmatic music, which is a further development of musique concrete. It's very much about free association in the sounds. Sounds create associations, and that's what's really cool to work with in games. And of course, also in movies. You can have something that is ambiguous. People listen and can interpret things into what they hear. A lot of images pop up in their head. That's important. PA: And how did all that bring you to work on Limbo? MSA: I actually read in the newspaper about the director of Limbo, Arnt Jensen from the company Playdead. He received a special grant from the government while working on Limbo, and what he said in the paper about their workflow on the project was very similar to my own processes. There's usually a huge team behind a game, but here it was a small budget and a small setup where things were constantly being tried out and experimented with and nobody really knew where it was going to end up. I felt a lot like that with the sound and music I was working with. There was a certain curiosity. So, we started writing together and I ended up doing the sound for the game. That's how I got into it and I loved the ambiguous universe. Limbo Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus