Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 95 (dialogue works in their world, sound design works in their world, music works in their world), everything goes in without any thought about how they can coexist. It can create some tonal dissonance, gameplay information dissonance. So being able to reapproach things once the final music went in really made the game a lot stronger. JF: Speaking of these music moments, we knew right from the trailer that the sound of electric guitar really sells the pathos and the conflict between Higgs and Sam. So early on when we're working on the trailer, we knew sound design needed to find a way to support an axe that is both a shredding machine that produces music, as well as a weapon. There are a lot of great musicians on our sound design team who all started thinking about a prepared guitar. "Where do we create space for the score?" When they're just handling these guitars, how much is Foley vs sound design vs prepared guitar? How much do you want to feel through the haptics of that? Early on, SIE and KJP acquired some prototype haptic pickups that were able to mount on a large, five-string bass and electric guitar. We set up a whole rig on our Foley stage to capture the sensation of having that guitar in your body and trying to translate that to haptics. Charlie Ritter, Adam Wollach, and Andrés Herrera built a multi-speaker guitar amp to experiment and capture all of the other sounds that weren't inherently music. One of our haptic designers, Daniel Ramos MPSE, actually took the score and transcribed every single note into musically correct vibrations in the controller. When you're playing, you can feel Sam's guitar- playing vibrating in your right hand as if the player was holding the guitar, and you can feel the antagonist Higgs' guitar vibrating in your left hand. To test his accuracy, Dan actually took the DualSense controller after he finished transcribing the solos and mounted it against an acoustic guitar as a resonator. The guitar started humming perfectly in sync and pitch with the score. We were trying to find all these unique ways to really let the player feel the music. JW: Music was also a big creative driver in how we approached dialogue. There are so many moments where characters sing in a scene, or move from spoken dialogue into musical vocals, so that became an ongoing collaboration between the dialogue team and the music team throughout the whole process. We worked closely with the KJP and SIE music teams to make sure we were aligned through production, even early on before the score was final. We worked with temp music and had the actors sing to different click tracks to make sure everything stayed in key and in time. We also handed off our edited dialogue and vocal stems to the music team as reference so those moments could sit naturally inside the score. For gameplay, we really leaned into what the music was doing. Once the final music started coming in, we wanted the dialogue design to feel connected to it, rather than sitting separately on top of it. In some moments, for example, there would be enemy combat yells happening over the score, so we looked for ways to shape the voice in a way that elevated the moment and supported the musical side of the game. One design element we added for Higgs was running his voice through a guitar amp simulation so it had a similar energy to the guitar in the score. It also felt connected to his character's weapon, a battle guitar, so it made sense creatively. We also added dialogue delays synced to the BPM (beats per minute) of the music, with the goal of making his voice feel like it was part of the soundtrack. That connection felt especially important since Troy Baker, who plays Higgs, also performed backing vocal elements during some of those moments. So we were always looking for ways to Fragile (portrayed by Léa Seydoux) Score producer Andrew Buresh and composer Ludvig Forssell recording guitar at Blackbird Studio