1. Audio: Composition and Sound Design
The job of any musician brought in onto a video game project is to convey the emotion the director is trying
to portray within a scene, not only this but it also adds and extra layer of depth and atmosphere to the game,
a wide variety of instruments are used within The Last of Us, Gustavo experimented with many instruments
he had never played before in order to get the right tone for the game.
The composer works hard on each different track, a track is never complete. What a lot of composers do
when working with video games is use sounds that sound like they belong in the environment, Gustavo has
done this a few times, listening to his soundtrack I can hear sounds
of what appears to be windows creaking, or someone moaning in
the distance, this adds an extra layer of complexity to the music and
makes the game just that much better by adding more thought into
the dynamics of your song.
What a lot of composers do nowadays is use a combination of
electronically generated music and traditional music, the electronic
music is good for adding
tension and atmosphere to a
track as the sound can be easily controlled and manipulated and
changed, Gustavo has used this a fair amount in his work for The Last
of Us. He uses Electronically generated music along side traditional
instruments particularly on sadder moments within the game, again
that added atmosphere from electronic music works well here. Itʼs also
good he does not go for completely electronic music for this project,
the fact that it takes place is a post apocalyptic world does not good
hand in hand with electronic music, the traditional instruments allow him to convey emotion very well, for
example when playing a guitar you can hear when he lets go of a note, or when he slides to the next note, it
sounds real and emotional.
Working with the composer are the Sound Designers, there job is to
take the music and put it into the game and make it sound natural, they
are also responsible for all the ambient and foley sound within the
game. Their job is a hard one as they must be creative in the way that
they think, in order to get the right sound they must layer different
sounds together a lot of the time, in The Last of Us the Sound
Designers had some samples from a women doing some screeching
sounds, and overlaid them with the sound of clicking which they made
from using their tongues, then they cut them up and overlaid them
slightly to create a very unique and realistic sounds.
One thing which is vital the Sound Designers must not do for this project which most people working with
audio do is compress the audio, this basically means compressing the
audio right down bringing down the high volume areas and bringing up
the low volume areas until theyʼre about the same volume, then push
the tune to max volume so itʼs not peaking. This is common practice in
the audio industry today but it would ruin the music for a game like this,
compressing the audio lowers the dynamics of the songs, something
which Gustavo has been careful to have a lot of, itʼd ruin the tension
and the atmosphere by compressing the audio.
Getting the foley sound for a video game is not easy, this is where a
great deal of the Sound Designers creativity comes into play, thereʼs a lot of sounds which you canʼt just go
out and record and you need to creatively think of what could sound like that, of course there are sounds you
can just go out and record, such as the sounds of water, or frogs to build up atmosphere and the scene
which was used in The Last of Us. As a Sound Designer once you have the foley you then have to EQ the
sound to remove unwanted frequencies, and then get it suitable for being in the game, itʼs a lot of hard work.