We often say that humans are visual creatures. The Colavita visual dominance effect demonstrates that visually abled people are strongly biased towards visual information. When they see an image and hear a sound, they might pay so much more attention to the visuals that they entirely neglect the audio. There…

I believe that game sound design is not about designing sound, but about designing the game via sound. Every sound has a function. Every sound needs a purpose. As Joel Beckerman and Tyler Gray write in The Sonic Boom, “Sound for sound’s sake is often a missed opportunity.” But game…

In my two previous posts, I looked for a reliable technique to control the perceived unpleasantness of video game sound effects. Even though I couldn’t discover a 100% working method, there is evidence that it is not an impossible goal. Here I’m investigating if it works the other way around…

Part 2: Practice — In the previous post, I described several acoustic properties that, according to scientific literature, make sound unpleasant to hear. In the second part, I’m trying to apply that knowledge to analyze the actual sounds from videogames. Let’s assume we can reduce the non-contextual unpleasantness of a sound to a set…

Part 1: Theory — After I wrote a post about disruptive audio in games, a few people asked why didn’t I mention any known acoustic features of annoying or unpleasant sound effects. Back then, I did it on purpose. I think it is a vast topic that deserves a separate, in-depth exploration. There are…

Have you ever tried to follow two conversations at once? You probably know how difficult it is. In 1953 E. Colin Cherry conducted a series of experiments on speech recognition, addressing the phenomenon called “Cocktail Party Effect.” The results showed that people who listen to recorded speech fail to comprehend…

How do we know that the sounds we create support the game design and improve the player experience? For many sound designers, the answer is “Intuitively.” Even though I don’t want to undervalue the power or professional intuition, I think it has its limits. In this post, I want to…