The positive and negative effects of audio spatialization. — Earlier this year, I wrote two articles on how to intentionally sound design a game to help players deal with in-game challenges. As some pointed out, I ignored the elephant in the room — the recent advancements in spatial audio that enable players to localize sounds with greater precision. Back…

Part 2: Understanding auditory reaction time — My previous article highlighted the ways game audio designers can assist players in challenging gameplay situations through careful assessment of function, purpose, and context of sounds. …

Part 1: Comprehensive and Indicative sounds — In my post about ludic and narrative sound in games, I defined the ludic function of audio as the sound’s ability to help players overcome challenges and achieve their goals. If you’ve read my blog, you might know that I’m really into this topic. That’s why I’m super excited to…

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. …

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…