Brad's Sonic Musings

Author: Rev. Dr. Brad

  • The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: Fake Birds

    The natural world we built for Ghost of Tsushima is one of the sonic highlights for me. The world is lush and full of so many different species of birds, insects, amphibians and mammals, many of which were recorded in Japan and most of which are native to Japan. It really creates this wondrous natural beauty for the rest of the game to sit on top of.

    We had our friends at Japan Studio in Tokyo record a lot of ambience for us and I was fortunate enough to travel around Japan for a couple weeks and capture all sorts of wildlife. The ambience was one of the more time consuming systems in the game, but it was also one of the first to get solidified. We had good variety of wildlife species and the world felt rich, but as I explain in the video below, getting towards the end of the project they decided to add a few new specific species. We didn’t have time or resources to fly halfway around the world and try to track these specific birds down, nor could I find a library with them.

    Fortunately, the Slack field recording channel was doing a bird crowdsource around this time, and while discussing our recordings, Alex Barnhart asked if anyone had tried pitching down real bird recordings, performing them, and then pitching them back up to see if you could replicate birdsong in that way. We all thought it sounded fun and cool and it was very shortly after this moment, that they decided to add 3 new species to the game, so I took this knowledge and went for it.

    I went onto xeno-canto.org which is a fantastic website for information and birdsong and found some decent quality samples that I could use as reference. From there I tried pitching them down to various ranges from an octave to four octaves and everywhere in between, trying to find that sweet spot where it was in my vocal range and performable. After performing, and looking and sounding appropriately goofy, I was pretty surprised and pleased when playbacking the results. Once I put them in game, I knew this was going to work!

    They even added a couple more species (a cormorant and a Eurasian sparrowhawk) that I was able to perform adequately. The one place I failed was when trying to augment our existing Black-naped oriole recordings. This is a really important bird in the game, as he guides you to your various objectives. I had captured one while recording in Sri Lanka, but my recordings were limited, so I hoped to bolster our content with some faked versions, but when playing a fake bird against a real bird, it becomes VERY evident which one is fake, so I abandoned it.

    The results were so surprisingly decent, we played a game at work where the team listened to bird samples and tried to identify whether they were a real bird or me, and it was hard. Even I got half of them wrong! So here’s a video that goes into more of these details and also shows the process in action:

  • The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: Horses

    One of the first decisions made on Ghost of Tsushima was that our main means of fast locomotion in the game would be horses. It made sense since that was what was used by both Mongols and Japanese warriors in the 13th century. There would be no grinding power lines or zipping through air vents or beaming from one radar dish to another. So of course we knew the horses needed to sound great.

    Surprisingly I think the only other game I’ve worked on that almost had a horse was a Shrek game that got canceled. In that game in a very on-the-nose homage to Monty Python, there were knight enemies that rode around on hobby horses. For the knights footsteps I recorded coconuts and the results were as hilarious as intended. So for fun, when we first got the horse working in game, I re-recorded the same coconut shells and, while still hilarious, it didn’t quite fit tonally.

    We began to research some places to record horses. The most important thing was we needed shoeless horses. While there was conflicting information about whether or not Mongols shoed their horses, we could find no information demonstrating the Japanese shoed their horses with metal, so we opted to keep things simpler and go for natural footsteps. After calling some places that fit the bill and driving around to check out their properties, assess noise levels, etc., we decided upon the Northwest Natural Horsemanship Center out in Fall City, WA. The owner Jim Hutchins, was keen to work with us and seemed genuinely interested in our work.

    Unfortunately between the time we agreed to record there and the date of the recording, my sound designer had left for another position, so I was on my own for the session. One fewer person to operate microphones posed some problems, so I got creative: I followed the horse with a boom mic and strapped a recorder and a pair of omni electret condenser mics (a Roland CS-10EM) to the saddle which we taped down (and taped all buckles on the saddle).

    Horses are amazing animals and when the horse first saw my furry blimp, it was not happy. We got lots of great nervous vocalizations which ended up as the final assets in the game as it got used to the presence of the blimp. From there Jim guided the horse around on various surfaces in their property (grass, tall grass, dirt, mud, wood, gravel, stone/concrete, and asphalt) at trot, canter and occasionally gallop speeds and I chased after them with my mic. We got A LOT of horse grazing because when a horse is hungry and has the lay of the land, they eat when they feel like it. These assets too were eventually massaged by Erik Buensuceso and made it into the game. In fact, the amount of grazing sounds we got and the frequency with which the horses naturally ate grass was the impetus for us adding the grazing animations into the game!

    To get bigger whinnies and neighs, Jim put two of the horses together who were really good friends, and then separated them. Once one was led far enough away, the other would bellow out a very loud call for their friend. I inadvertently recorded a horse fart at one point, but was too far away so unfortunately it was not usable. Lastly, we went into their gear barn and recorded a bunch of sounds of various bridles and saddles, again taping down any metal parts since we wanted to avoid jangling components in the sound design.

    Once I chopped up the assets and integrated them into the game I made this delightfully silly video to show at a company meeting:

    But we were still a long way from being done. The horse had to sound great because it was used SO much in the game and we wanted to really push on the detail of everything about the horse from its footsteps to its saddle and bridle sounds to its vocalizations. I think when all was said and done the assets for the horse were probably touched by almost every sound designer on the project. I can think of at least 5 of us that did some work on the horse, tuning and improving and iterating to make them sound great.

    On the mix side, Josh came up with a great idea we used on both hero and horse foley. We created an RTPC that tracked how long the player was running or the horse was galloping, which we used to subtle mix down the non-footstep sounds after 10-15 seconds. This served the purpose of helping reduce ear fatigue and allow other sounds to cut through the mix on long traversals. With this attention to detail we got some really nice dynamic behavior in the sounds in game.

  • The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: Dogs

    The dogs in Ghost of Tsushima are fun to talk about because, like so much of the soundscape of the game, we started with a lot of research and then recording them was a blast. Let’s just ignore the fact that Jin kills so many dogs in his journey and rewind a few years when we first started talking about having dogs in the game. The impetus for adding dogs was to have a unique enemy type that was also more adept at hunting Jin than the Mongols. Like everything else in the game, we did a bunch of research and found that Mongols did indeed use dogs and that from Genghis Khan on, their dogs were ancestors of the breed now known as the Tibetan Mastiff (which technically is not a mastiff, but I’m not here to get into a discussion about dog breeds). So the art team began working on models of Tibetan mastiffs, which meant we needed to find some sounds for them! We started looking online and these dogs looked and sounded fierce, but also fairly unique. So I started looking to see if there were any Tibetan Mastiff breeders in the area and I struck gold: there were actually a handful within a few hour drive from Seattle!

    We ended up connecting with Debbie Parsons of Dreamcatcher Mastiffs. She mentioned they had several Tibetan Mastiffs and we were welcome to come record them. So Josh and I packed up our mics and recorders and headed out to Graham, WA, just an hour south of Seattle on the way to Mount Rainier. As soon as we showed up, we were greeted by 3 VERY large, scary and seemlingly angry dogs. We started recording immediately and got some terrific barks and growls (unfortunately interspersed with chain link fence rattle as they were pretty excited). Debbie was super helpful and started taking most of the dogs inside and allowing us to record each one individually. We got a good range of growls, snarls and barks. Debbie even ended up putting on a hooded sweatshirt and acting like a prowler to get them riled up. After getting all these great barks, we went into the property to record more and these dogs transformed into the cuddliest, sweetest bears (seriously they looked like bears in dog suits).

    We were able to get panting and breathing and even chewing on bones as they had settled down and got used to us. From there Josh took the recordings, cleaned them up and got them in game. Rob Castro did a final polish pass towards the end of the project to make them even more terrifying. As you can hear from this video we created for a company meeting, the were already pretty scary before the sonic magic was applied.

  • The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: Combat Impacts

    We knew as soon as we began working on Ghost of Tsushima that swordplay would be a major part of the game and that the swords had to sound dangerous. We had been working on some close quarters sword-based combat prototypes and in moving to the world of feudal Japan, we wanted to approach combat from a grounded perspective but also really make the sound of the swords slicing through enemies feel razor like. Lots of games and films go for a really meaty, thuddy impact to make things feel powerful. We wanted to go against this trend and make our swords SOUND sharp.

    To do this, we really focused our impact sounds on elements of slicing rather than hard impacts. But of course it took a lot of experimentation and a lot of recording. Josh Lord (our senior sound designer) and I amassed a collection of various blades and other sharp objects and applied them to myriad fruits and vegetables. There were some surprising results: digging into celery with the tip of a knife sounding like cutting through bone; a razor blade through an onion sounded like a gut being opened; a serrated bread knife created interesting zippered slicing tears.

    Once we got all this source material together, we started experimenting with integration techniques, adapting a technique utilizing sound states in Wwise tied to our animations to trigger different impacts based on animation data. Towards the end of the project, we passed off our combat sounds to Mike Niederquell from Sony for some final polish and for him to work the magic he does. We ended up abandoning our state-based multi-impact approach and Mike made bespoke content from our recordings for the various impact types as the animations weren’t so excessive, and the state rigging introduced unnecessary complexity.

    Here’s a short video of some of the props that sacrificed themselves for the greater combat good as well as how they ended up sounding in game:

  • The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: the Mongol Warhorn

    A sound we knew we needed early on was a war horn for the Mongols. It had to be iconic and immediately recognizable so that a player could hear it nearby or in the distance and know “uh oh, there are Mongols nearby, and they may already know about me.”

    In researching both samurai and Mongols we found many musical instruments used by Samurai to both communicate on the battlefield and attempt to instill fear in their opponents. We were fortunate enough to record some of these instruments including the horagai, a conch shell horn, at Komodahama during their yearly festival commemorating the first Mongol invasion of 1274. In all the research we did on the Mongols, however, I couldn’t find much in the way of music used for war purposes. Most of their music practices were either for celebrations such as marriage, played at imperial court, or just to pass the time. The Mongols were a nomadic people and while their main instruments were stringed instruments like the morin khuur they did also have horns, including some that were made of either wood or animal horn.

    With all that knowledge, but a lack of access to traditional instruments, we opted to take some liberty in crafting a sound that we could tie to the Mongols, and would sound unique from the samurai horagai. In their native lands (and by extension the lands they conquered throughout China and the Korean peninsula) the Mongols used several domestic animals for food and drink. The horse was the most important delivering them everything from transportation to alcohol (airag, also known as kumis, is fermented horse milk), but they did also use yaks and cattle. Using this as a jumping off point, I found some steer horns and purchased one, hoping I could teach myself to blow through it and that it would make a sound unique from the conch shell. Fortunately it didn’t take long for the gasping breaths and pushed air to turn tonal and we recorded a bunch of variations on the war horns. We experimented with different calls to signify different enemy states, but in the end we opted to use it for a simpler enemy alert.

    We processed the recordings to provide greater reflection and distance modeling the further away you go, and so we could fire off closer or more distant variants depending on what the in-game action called for. Here’s a short clip of recording some of those horns and then what they sounded like in-game:

  • Website Resurrected!

    I don’t think anyone actually reads this site with any regularity if I’m not sharing on the social medias, but my wordpress went down maybe a year ago or so? Probably longer. Looks like my database got corrupted. Finally got it back, except that I lost most of the posts I’d written since December of 2020 or so (which includes all of the Ghost of Tsushima related design posts). In the next few weeks, I’ll try to get the lost posts restored and will hopefully post new stuff from time to time. I don’t expect to do anything frequently but at least the content has been restored for posterity or history or ego stroking or whatever. Thanks for reading!

  • Protected: The Sound Design of Ghost of Tsushima: the Furin (windchime)

    This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

  • Wwise Tour 2020: Sonic Storytelling

    I finally updated my website’s backend after being on PHP v5.6 (current version is something like 7.4) for far too long. Good news is now you can access the site via https for better security. Now that that is done I hope to post some articles soon about some of the specific sound design and recording we did on Ghost of Tsushima.

    For now, here’s a talk we did in December about Sonic Storytelling and exploring some of the ways we use audio to tell our stories. It was a lot of fun to share some of the world with the audio community:

  • Ghost of Tsushima Shipped!!!!

    Apologies to the one and a half people that may actually check this blog frequently for new content. Needless to say, I’ve been busy for the past few years working on Ghost of Tsushima. I’m SO excited that it has shipped, is in player’s hands, and they seem to be loving it. It’s been especially humbling to see people calling out audio as something they love. We knew the music and voice acting was pretty top notch, but to see so many comments about the sound design and even the mix has been such a treat. I’ve got a handful of posts and videos I’ll be sharing over the next few months going into some of the detail of the sound design for the game, some of our recording practices and other fun stories from the field.

    For now, here’s an interview I did with Jennifer Walden for A Sound Effect that talks a little bit about some of the fun we had creating sounds for this special project:

    Crafting Ghost of Tsushima’s Tremendous Sound

  • The Playstation 1 as you never heard it

    The Playstation 1 turned 25 this month, and I was just going through some old recordings when I stumbled upon this gem (warning: it’s a slow build, but it gets loud!):

    For reference, here’s what that SHOULD sound like:

    I have no idea how our Playstation made this sound, but here’s the story:

    Travel back with me if you will to the year 1999. Y2K mania was sweeping the world as QA Managers were stockpiling canned goods and weapons (at least mine was). Cellphones were slowly creeping into peoples pockets, but were mainly used for talking. And a hot tech device, the Palm Pilot, was taking the way we wrote letters and transforming them in a stylus friendly way (R.I.P.).

    I was a recent college graduate living with a house of fellow humans who were trying to find their way in a post-graduate life. One of my roommates had bought a Playstation back in 1995 or 1996, and it lived a rough life bouncing from house to house. Needless to say, by 1999, it was on its last legs. I remember popping in a disc sometimes and hearing the platter spin and wondering if it was melting. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t.

    Often, when it wasn’t going to work, it went through its boot process at a glacial pace. The startup sound (and visual) would play at that crazy speed above turning a 15 second synth stinger into a 2 and a half minute opus that Vangelis himself would have considered composing on his latest album.

    I thought it was the coolest thing and, as a newly minted sound designer, thought it would be a really fun thing to capture. I truthfully can’t remember how I recorded it, but with the amount of hiss on the original recording, I’m guessing I used a cassette recorder pointed directly at the TV speaker. Hi-tech solution, I know.

    Obviously, I’ve never used the sound because it’s property of Sony (who is coincidentally now my boss), but I’ve kept the sound around because I love it as an example of what we do in our craft: take some sound and via trickery, design, tools, techniques, and happy accidents, turn it into something wholly new and unique.