Sound research
Sound is one of the most important aspects of interactive media, it creates the whole atmosphere and ambience of the interface, and this ranges from computer games to websites. Sound tends to have a subliminal role; it works on its audience unconsciously. While all audiences can tell apart various objects in a picture, almost no one perceives sound so analytically; they tend to take it in as a whole, especially in film.
Sound is used to set the emotion. An example is that the emotional sound equation says that low frequencies represent a threat; a distant thunderstorm on an otherwise sunny day could indicate foreboding or doom. They
Ambience is sounds that set the atmosphere. An example of this is maybe complete silence with a slight howling of wind to create an abandoned feel in a city or town.
Foley is a new audio for games. It is basically the sounds that aren’t usually focused on in games because they are considered redundant. These sounds range from the rustling of a leather jacket as someone walks past you to gun shells flying out of a high-speed gun.
Dialogue has a very important and obvious role in games and animated movies. Developers like people to connect with characters on an emotional level, and they try and make you care about the character.
The basics of sound are pitch, volume, tone and duration. All these aspects are very important in creating the right atmosphere and correct setting for a piece of interactive media. Pitch is used to create the right sort of atmosphere, for example as I explained before; the jaws theme is a very low pitch to create tension and fright. Volume is usually used to create a sense of distance, so again in jaws the music starts off quiet to show that the shark is not that close, it then gradually gets louder as the shark gets nearer. Duration of sounds are important, for example when playing an action game you will usually have some up-beat music on a boss fight or something which will last until the boss is dead or you have been killed. This makes the game a whole lot more exciting to play.
Sound on a web site can be used to enhance a users experience. It is normally presented as a music file, video or as flash content. It could be as simple as a small ping sound when clicking on a button or it could be some background music on the site depending on the mood the designer is trying to set. An example of this would be a surfing site having some waves sounds or something along those lines.
Most sound nowadays uses digital sound. Digital sound is stored as bytes of information, which are made into sound by computer processing. Digital is very useful as it can be copied as many times as you want without losing any quality from the original sound. It can also be stored in many different ways, which makes it flexible for different formatting like CDs or on a digital interface. Another reason digital is good is that it can be edited easily.
Analog sound is another sound interface useful for things like music producing. It is mainly used for Vinyl, which is good because vinyl can be turned up louder without the possibility of distortion. Vinyl does have many disadvantages compared to digital as it is not very lenient in the way of converting it into different formats and the sound is quite grainy, which maybe good for horror films for creating the right mood, but otherwise digital is better for crystal clear sound (even though some people may like the graininess of vinyl.)
