Seven steps to scary
Earlier this week, the BBC Radio Wales aired a Science Café episode focusing on psychoacoustics featuring some of my colleagues, and also me interviewed via telephone. If you are fast, you can still catch the show online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/sciencecafe/updates/20111115.shtml Adam Walton and I talked a bit about scary game sound, and I thought I’d post a short recap on some of the primary tricks to achieve a sense of horror with game sound.
HORROR = FEAR + DISGUST
To start off, horror basically lives off a combination of two emotions: fear and disgust. Fear best built taking into account both the sounds and the game mechanics, whereas disgust is less dependent on gameplay and can be realized with less attention to game action.
FEAR = WEAK PLAYER ACTS IN A SCARY WORLD
In gameplay sense, the fear comes from constant threat & limited resources and the general weakness of the player character. The sounds should emphasize the player’s lack of power over the situation by) helping to portray the game world as a hostile place and by portraying a weak and fragile player character. In order to heighten emotions, it is also of particular interest to maintain a positive main character so that players can relate to and emphasize with him/her.
DISGUST = IT’S NOT HUMAN AND IT MIGHT RUB OFF
Disgust is an averse reaction to something that is rooted to a sense of contamination. Being disgusted is neurophysiologically linked to the feeling of nausea and throwing up, literally with getting rid of contaminating substances. The aversion to touching, tasting, and even smelling disgusting substances is similarly a way to avoid contact with something that might be harmful to us. This is also the function of disgust as part of horror - it makes the scary part of the monster unbearably scary by hinting that the monster’s hideousness might somehow rub off on us. Notably, the things we find disgusting tend to become more numerous as we learn about contamination, moreover, disgust can also become associated with processes that have no roots in the physical notion of contamination. Specifically, disgust seems to be triggered also by things that violate our category of what constitutes as human.
So, lets see at how these emotional processes can be geared towards horror with sound.
1. Hostile environment (fear)
To build a scary environment, all the classics of horror are ok: ambiguous noises, unpredictable (timing) and sudden volume changes, "double scares" (anticipate, first scare, lull, second scare). Traditional horror often uses a string orchestra playing tremolo to create a stylized wall of noise, because a noisy background is both less predictable and more open to listener interpretation (the ear has a tendency to try and hear specific sounds even when there aren’t any). Wind sound is another typical background that covers a wide frequency spectrum.
2. The game world is sentient and evil (fear)
A special case of hostile is when the game world is portrayed as living and sentient. To be fully effective, this requires support from game mechanics, there needs to be a sense of intelligence behind how the world responds to player action. However, some parts of this can be created by adding antropomorphic hints in the sound design: utilizing breathing patterns and mixing human or animal sounds into ambient or object sounds.
3. Counter-functional sounds (fear)
In addition to the general soundscape, there are a few specific tricks bound to gameplay. They are counter-functional sounds, and they build on the interaction that is necessary for progressing in the game, and somehow go against that goal. For example, you might have audio cues, but a background that make these cues hard to hear. Or footsteps that are loud when you’re supposed to sneak. The balance here is of vital importance - you need to keep the annoyance level in check so that the player gets slightly unnerved, but not outright annoyed, even after several tens of hours of gameplay.
4. Weak character (fear)
The weakness of the player character is relied through character’s action sounds: interacting with the game world, breathing and even footsteps. Especially important here are the sounds the character makes when s/he is hit or hurt or performing demanding tasks; the effort and the pain should be subtle but clearly discernible. It is a good idea to add tactile cues to heighten the impact of physical injury, and tactile cues are also often used to signify the character’s scare level e.g. with a heartbeat through the controller.
5. Contamination (disgust)
For portraying disgust, sound is used to make both the monster and the surfaces relevant to it seem as contaminating as possible. Contamination portrayed by foul air and slimy surfaces can be enhanced by suitable choice of sounds (foul air is tricky, whereas slimy surfaces are not). Often the sound is useful in filling in the gory detail where visual cues fall short, adding tactile sense and texture to game world objects.
6. Body sounds (disgust)
In terms of conveying emotion, body sounds can be immensely powerful. The shared reference - we all have a body, and our bodies are remarkably similar in function - makes them immediately recognizable even on an unconscious level, and we may become influenced by sounds without paying attention to them. Just one example is listening to a hoarse voice, which may cause our own throat to tighten. Other, more disgusting, body sounds that also play on this same effect are, for example, burps, farts and popping knuckles.
7. Human but not human (disgust)
Finally, disgust can be triggered by playing on the borderlines of humanity, by hinting that something both is, and is not, human. This trick uses a deeply rooted models that we have that dictate what categorizes as a normal human being, a definition that is refined and revised along our lifespan. This is a recurring theme in monster movies: vampires (the Nosferatu version), zombies and often aliens both are human and are not. In a game, this can be used to guide the sound design for NPC:s, for example by mixing human sounds with sounds of insects, machinery etc. Unnaturally long breathing patterns (or continuous sound signifying no need to draw breath) are often used to signify the supernatural, whereas metronomically rhythmic sounds draw our thoughts to a mechanical origin.
EFFECT IN SUBTLETY
Finally, emotion relies on subtle. This is especially true for sound design. There are two risks associated with too prominent sounds: First, if sounds are too unpleasant or annoying, the player might choose to switch them off. Second, obvious sounds may get "caught" and loose their power, either because the player recognizes them as cliched and the effect is spoiled by other associations, or because players are able to actively discount the emotional effect of a sound when they realize what it is there for.
That’s all for this time. Hope you enjoyed reading and as always, I’ll be happy to read your thoughts and comments on the topic!
