Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/7700
28 Post • March 2010 www.postmagazine.com Reagan and Velasco successfully lobbied for the live choir. Recording the singers at Skywalker "just brought it to a whole differ- ent level — it really brought out the dark- ness we were looking for in the score." Sky- walker's recording/mixing engineer, multi- Grammy-winner Leslie Ann Jones, was "a big reason why the sound's so great — she's an incredible recording engineer."The team tried to avoid aural tricker y: "In most cases the voices just sounded so fantastic on their own." One boy soprano Reagan conducted, Zachar y Weisberg, was "awesome." His mournful vocal plays when you boot up the game's menu screen. F I F A S O C C E R 2 0 1 0 What's the biggest game in the world? Soccer. And EA Spor ts is all over it — 500 international teams competing on three dif- ferent levels, all represented in a single videogame recreated each year for fans. A lot of teams; a lot of players; a lot of games; a lot of audio. EA Audio director Jeff MacPher- son is in charge of all that can be heard on the current FIFA 10. Not only are FIFA 10's teams, matches and players different — the commentators are different, as are their 13 languages. And then there are the crowds — different na- tionalities cheer or boo differently and react differently to events on the field. They also employ different crowds' sing-song chants and fling their own curse words at referees and players. All this must be monitored and controlled. FIFA videogames must be realis- tic and commentar y needs to be fresh- sounding and knowledgeable about a given player's or team's prospects, milestones, per- formance and stats, etc. Otherwise you risk taking the player out of the game. Add to this the vocal interaction among players and managers on the field, as well as their nonverbal grunts and exer tions, and you've got a virtual world of sound. MacPherson and company essentially travel the world recording the (fictional- ized) game play commentary of established soccer broadcasters. "For all of our games we have the real guys," MacPherson says, "as high-profile as we can get. It helps sell boxes, but it [conveys] the authenticity of the product itself. The commentator is giv- ing you the narrative. They're the voice of the game; they're analyzing the play; they're providing an emotional score for you; it's really key for a spor ts game." Authentic-sounding crowd noise is what puts you in the game. Any given team's fans can have a large number of songs they sing; add to that the different hecklers and shout-outs that MacPherson and company call "salt and pepper." For crowd sounds, "We want to get the most robust, biggest texture we can — we create really nice 5.1 soundscapes with our crowds." This often involves using a Holo- phone mic at the match to capture a true 5.1 recording."For our main crowd beds in every major territory we go to matches and set up arrays of microphones around the stadium." Except in the US — EA has a deal with ESPN to use their 5.1 HD crowd sounds. Around the world crowds sound differ- ent and behave differently. "The chants are the single biggest emotional element," MacPherson says, and fans should hear the same chants at home that they do in the stadium. The problem is foul language. "We've got a large group of people who are native-language speakers who review every single file multiple times to make sure there's no swearing. We leave about 70 percent of the content on the cutting room floor." Nu- merous different chants may be sung to tunes like "Hot, Hot, Hot" and "Guantanam- era" so EA has to license those songs. It all gets mixed together to achieve a convincing crowd in England, Germany or Italy, etc. Tyler Berrie is the mix super visor, working with two additional audio editors and three engineers. "The challenge of videogames is the non- linear aspect of interactive media," says MacPherson. "With a spor t like soccer, where it's free-flowing, it's extra challenging. You've got to keep up with it and come across as intelligent. With commentary on a game, I've got over 25,000 samples on the disc. The challenge is to play them back in a natural way that sounds realistic, with emo- tional intensity and analyzing the play that can't be predetermined." Soccer broadcasters are not actors but they are exper ts and encouraged to use their own words, MacPherson stresses. "They're absolute pros when it comes to their spor t." MacPherson comes to record- ing sessions with scenarios rather than scripts. "I'll describe to them a 'context' and I'll need a cer tain number of variations on that context depending on how often we expect it to happen." MacPherson uses two commentators for each game and English-speaking versions of FIFA 10 feature the foremost British broad- casters, recorded in London. All commenta- tors for all languages use the same mics they're familiar with on television.They work in tandem, developing their banter as on TV. Many use Sennheiser headset mics and the British favor Lip mics — so the game sounds like the TV broadcast. "I've made a stylistic decision to not do 'stitching,'" MacPherson says of the short cut of cutting a player's name into a line like "Nice goal by…" "It still does not sound natural. Even if your stitch sounds wrong only once, the user's like, 'Oh, I see your trick!' and all that good work you did goes down the drain." With the amount of teams they deal with, EA is looking at some developing technol- ogy that will allow a subtler version of stitch- ing in the future. EA Spor ts (www.easpor ts.com) uses Digidesign Pro Tools and Waves plug-ins, but they have developed their own audio post tools for actual implementation and realtime DSP including realtime IR (impulse response) reverb. EA Sports' Jeff MacPherson: "The challenge of videogames is the nonlinear aspect of interactive media." Mike Reagan on Darksiders: "We tried to blend the dark- ness of a particular [demon] with the main theme." A U D I O Interactive Audio