Sunday 13 September 2009

The sound of Music

I've been scouring as much music as possible looking for a piece of music. I finally came across this one:
Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor Op 26: III Finale – Allegro Energico.
(if you have spotify installed, click the link below to hear it)
http://open.spotify.com/track/0AQgdCMaVwtTMERCznaa1i

it's by Max Bruch (what a name :) a 19th century German romantic composer and conductor. It's a beautiful piece of music that's light and uplifting with plenty of drama. Lots of fuel for the imagination to generate ideas from.


Sound
I believe at its a core, a game should be a program where, when you press a button, it makes a cool sound. With that, the game should have a fantastic soundtrack. Sound is one of if not the first sense we develop in the womb. It goes reaches deep into our subconscious. To really effectively communicate it is vital to correctly engage someone through sound. Whenever we hear comedy's tapes such as Blackadder and Yes minister we don't need to see them because the scripts are so well written that the visuals aren't needed. I think its vital to get the sound right as it will make the rest of development easier.
Unfortunately sound is for some reason totally overlooked by too many people, perhaps because it is taken for granted, perhaps because it is rarely consciously processed and perhaps for both those reasons.

note: I'm worried about what will happen if a game is tied too tightly to a piece of music. What will happen if a player gets stuck on a sequence and hears the same piece over and over and over again like a broken recored increasing their frustration and leading to a loss of interest in continuing?
This should be examined in a focus test.

1 comment:

  1. Small comment here Oliver. I've been recently thinking that recently sound has been much more conductive to image than image to sound (for me.)

    I have no problems directing a scene in my head to the appropriate piece of music but sometimes feel that completely muted visuals are vaguer as far as which sound piece would fit them better.

    Just 2 cents.

    PS: Did you ever end up making that focus test? I'm curious about the results.

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