For my professional practice I went to an open talk with the audio/sound designer of Pipeworks Studio, a video game company here in town. For me I’m really interested in sound design and possibly music production, so going to this event really helped me. At the beginning of the speech he talk about his position in the company, how he’s helpful, and what it means to be a sound designer. He then showed us a project he had worked on and did all the audio and music for. The project was a game called Prominence Poker. It’s a third person poker game with different settings and characters to play with. He showed us the gameplay and explained how he went about getting some of the sounds we heard. Then he went into the project files and demonstrated how it was all made. He took apart the game’s audio files, explained the different techniques used to make the sounds, and showed off the different audio programs he uses. He first showed us Sound Forge which is the main audio tool he uses to set up is sounds, and timestamps for the programmers of the game. He had some other programs he uses for various things such as adjusting specific audio files, or recorder music for the games. Other programs he showed us were Pro Tools, Bfxr, and editing software like Audacity.

He then got into his process of how he goes about making sound for a game. Whether it’s recording different sound effect or having spare audio sound effects from spare games. He explained how he went into a dry cleaner and recorded someone’s wash from start to finish. In Sound Forge he was able to set it up to where it changes between sections at random and has rests so that it’s not non stop. He had gone into a casino with hidden mics and recorded his surrounding so that he could implement background noise into the game. He also was saying how some sounds are so simple, you don’t really need to record everything yourself. So he pulls from a library of sounds he’s collected a to help him be fast at setting up the sounds effect  in the game and with his editing. He got into Pro Tools afterwards and showed us the music side of the design where he sets up simple tracks and loops for the game’s menus and gameplay. Seeing the inside work of how game sound is set up by someone who does it professionally was really helpful and open me up to something I might be interesting in doing. I really enjoy the editing side of things and sound design or music production is what I’m leaning towards. He finished off by asking for questions and talking to a handful of us individually. I went up and asked him a few questions about an event he had mentioned before starting. The whole speech was really interesting to listen to, and although it was a bit unprepared at the beginning. Once he got into the programs and sound design it was really clear.