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 83 Halo, we had been doing adaptive music for a while. Other game developers and friends that I would meet at GDC, we would trade and have talks like, "How are you doing it?" "Well, we're doing it this way." So, I would borrow ideas—it was a very open society. All the composers and sound designers would get together and share information because nobody was too precious about their proprietary engines. We couldn't share code because that was unique to whatever you were making, but we shared a lot of concepts. This was not at all the only adaptive music that was happening at the time, but we were all pushing the envelope to try to make it more and more responsive. EM: Let's talk about the other sound work you all did in this game. In terms of the rest of the sounds of both in-game and the cinematics, what was your workflow like? Did your team do everything in-house? And how do you divide up your team's time between cinematics versus in-game sounds? MO: I don't think we had any outsourcing on this game. We had some people help us outsource some of the cinematic sound effects beginning on Halo 2, but I believe everything here was just me and sound designer Jay Weinland. Jay was primarily responsible for sound effects. I was primarily responsible for music, casting, and directing voice actors. The two of us worked together really well. We both worked on the Warthog engine. I remember Jay came up with a system, and we were trying to tune the engine as you rev the engine. We had to try to tune the engine sound in a sense, which is the way you tune music. I did some of the gun sounds, but he did most of them. It was a great partnership. There was a lot of seat-of-our- pants Foley and sound effects creation and technology of getting this stuff all working in sync. And not getting repetitive and boring, that was the most important thing. By the way, if you listen to "The Flood," that's me too. I'm the voice of the Flood. It's one of those little tricks, that is make noises breathing in and it's monster noises, and you can pitch those down and up and do crazy things with it. It's just like, "All right, we need some sort of ugly noises for 'The Flood.'" so I went into the booth and did something. I did the majority of the music and then I would have Michael Salvatori in Chicago do more music, have him send it to me, and then I would implement everything. You said a word that's Master Chief shoots enemies from a Warthog vehicle. Halo: Combat Evolved audio director Marty O'Donnell at his Bungie workstation.