Game Audio Crit
For this project, I have contributed 4 of the six soundtracks. These are the underwater theme, the ragtime song, the lullaby and the campfire song.
Unfortunately, when making these songs, I was ill for 2 weeks and was unable to record the campfire song. Instead, a free song was used in its place. Whilst this was not the outcome I wanted, the group was happy with what they chose and were not adamant about changing it. This also meant the mastering of the final pieces is quite basic. Next time I have a project with lots of songs to make, I need to start everything at the beginning and then work on them from there, instead of finishing one at a time which is what I did.
In the crit, the main points highlighted in my work were the lack of space in the compositions and how the pieces didn’t last as long as the scenes. Adding lots of space into a composition is something I’m not too familiar with, as I don’t particularly like the sound of panned instruments but is vital to this atmosphere. For this project though, I will have to learn how to make my pieces more spatialised, especially the underwater theme.
While the timing is off, this is due to miscommunication and there wasn’t much time to fine-tune the pieces. I was not too sure how long each scene would be and because of this I essentially guessed, as the people in the group were not too sure either. because of this, I made the underwater theme loop, in case you were there for more than 2 minutes, but the other pieces didn’t like this one so mid-scene the music would cut out. Now that I have the final game, I can remake these to fit each scene perfectly.
To create more space in my underwater piece, I decided to add more panned ambience, by removing the high end and adding a lot of reverb onto cut audio. When panned, this creates the sound of ambience in more directions, creating a larger texture.