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Primal, Gran Turismo 3 and Kung-Fu Chaos Sound Designers Bob and Barn chat with GameZone
Gran Turismo 3 engine sound recorder Bob and Barn recently composed the music for Sony’s gothic action game, Primal. Bob and Barn tell us about their game development experiences.
What do Primal, Gran Turismo 2 and Kung-Fu Chaos have in common? All three have completely different gameplay mechanics. One is a dark, hack-and-slash-type action game. One is an innovative racer with realistic racing physics. The third game is a multiplayer party game with an emphasis on punch and kick-style fighting. And they all happen to be on different game systems (PS2, PSone and Xbox, respectively).
The only thing that these games have in common is Bob and Barn, a music studio that designs sound for video games. Bob and Barn was founded by Andrew Barnabas (guitarist and trumpeter) and Paul "Bob" Arnold (pianist and oboist). Their work on Gran Turismo 2 was so well received that they got the chance to record real engine sounds for the series’ first installment on PlayStation 2. They then went on to write the music and produce all of the sound effects for Kung-Fu Chaos, and composed the soundtrack for another Sony game, Primal.
Wowed by their marvelous talents and intrigued by their unique credits in the gaming industry, GameZone Online tracked down Bob and Barn for an interview about their sound position in the industry.
You guys have a great relationship with Sony. How did that begin?
Bob and Barn: It kind of started when we took up full time employment with them in 1997. Sony bought the small Cambridge-based game developer we were both working for at the time called Millennium Interactive. We thought that our relationship would come to an end when we left to set-up Bob and Barn Ltd., but all credit to Sony - they were ecstatic. They couldn't wait to see the back of us ;-) They did give us Primal though, so we must have been doing something right!!
Primal had a long development cycle. When did your work on the game begin, and when was it completed?
B&B: Our first efforts on Primal were completed before we left at the end of May 2001. In fact, we conceived Jen's Theme in April 2001. At that time the music was intended to be more rock based, much akin to the style of music you hear on Buffy or Angel. The "test-tune" we did at that time was pretty much a "rocked-up" version of track 5 on our CD. It's the same theme and chord progression, just with different instrumentation.
Emotions – love, happiness and anger – those are the kinds of things that inspire music. What inspires sound effects? What makes you look at a piece of game animation and say, "I know what that should sound like..."?
B&B: Pretty much the same actually. You appeal to the emotional quality of a given situation/object/person to inspire your sound design. Take the sound of a car for example. It should be fairly straightforward on the surface. However, should the vehicle be carrying the bad guy of the game, then you may use some artistic license in order to make it sound more evil. The use of samurai blades whizzing round for the wheels and perhaps the odd processed lion roar as it drives by the camera. It's important as a sound designer to think on a much less literal level, although this can, at times, prove to be problematic in game development. If you are doing something creative with a particular entities sound, bugs can be returned saying that it is playing the wrong effect!
Bob and Barn have fun at a local restaurant.
Tell us about your experience recording real motor sounds for Gran Turismo 3. What was that like?
B&B: Incredible!! Perhaps one of the most opulent displays of wealth I've ever had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of! We were traveling all over Europe to record some of the rarest and most valuable performance cars ever made. One example was when we flew to Germany to record the Volkswagen W1 concept car. I was picked up at my house in Cambridge at 3:00 a.m. and driven in a taxi to Heathrow Airport (picking up the other team members along the way). When we got there we were taxied to the Volkswagen research plant in Hanover and escorted to a private showroom where the car was being kept. It took only 20 minutes from start to finish committing the sound of the engine to tape as well as taking some valuable digital images of the car to allow very accurate in-game modeling down to the finest detail. On completion, we immediately caught a plane home and I got back to my house in Cambridge at 12:00 a.m. What a day!
That sounds incredible! That’s cooler than what some rock stars have done!
What kind of a recording device did you use? Are different kinds used for different sounds?
B&B: We used two Sennheiser MKH160 shotgun mics into the left and right channel of a professional portable DAT machine. The left channel was used for the actual engine sound itself, the right channel being used to capture the sound of the exhaust. Each of these two elements were implemented separately into the game and controlled differently by the audio engine to provide a more evolving organic sound at run-time. The same recording equipment was always used (by both the European and Japanese audio teams) in order to maintain a consistent quality over the recorded sound.
Did you help implement those sounds into the game, or were you just responsible for recording them?
B&B: We were only responsible for capturing the sound. Once we had completed this task the recordings were sent to Japan for the audio team there to edit and implement the final sounds.
Are you working on Gran Turismo 4 or any of Sony's other upcoming releases?
B&B: Sadly we are no longer responsible for recording the engine sounds. This job has always been handled by the in-house audio teams at Sony. The job is now being very capably handled by Garry Taylor (much to our annoyance ;-)) We hope to continue our relationship with Sony and there may be more interesting collaborations in the non-too-distant future. Watch this space!!
Sony would probably force us to eat mushy peas through a sweaty sock if we were to divulge any of their deepest darkest secrets, so I'm afraid we can't say anything more at this stage. I don't particularly like mushy peas! If it were baked beans though....
More top-secret info would have been revealed,
but Bob and Barn got eggs stuck in their mouths.
Do you think that a game with a stellar soundtrack, but absolutely no sound effects, would be able to provide a good experience? Does music have the power to stand on its own, or vice versa?
B&B: As with film, I feel that the listeners expectations are fairly ingrained by now and to release a contemporary game with any combination of the three vital sonic elements missing (Dialogue, Sound Effects, Music - in that order of priority) would be heavily criticized by all. And rightly so. I think that, for example, the destruction of your enemy's base should be rewarded with a satisfying over-the-top atomic bomb sound effect. The music cannot provide this kind of interactive response. Should it even be possible to synchronize a musical moment with such an occurrence in-game, I feel that the end result would still fall short with only music providing the impetus. There are times when music is more suited to carry most of the emotional energy of a scene (look at the final cut-scene in Solum to see this first hand) and times when sound effects do this much better.
That's not to say that music cannot stand on its own. I think the relative medium of delivery is crucial in determining music's success to stand on its own. If you synchronize music with visuals they will always be judged together. If the visuals are not liked, then the music will not be successful either. However, if the music is listened to in isolation, then it will be possible to appreciate it on a different level.
On your Web site, BobandBarn.com, it says that for C-12: Final Resistance, you broke away from the traditional "one song per level" formula and decided to divide up the enormous levels into 'zones.' Each zone would trigger different musical/sound design cues at key moments throughout the levels. That sounds like a pretty interesting (and exhausting!) concept. How did things go during the game's development, and how did the game turn out? Was it what you wanted?
B&B: The idea was interesting and worked to a point. It is a good half-way house in the battle between quality and interactivity. You still have the ability to stream audio (meaning that there is no ceiling on the quality of the musical content) whilst still allowing the music to respond, reasonably promptly, to the onscreen action.
One of the main drawbacks was that the game code wasn't ready to implement music in the way that we wanted. Medieval 1 and 2 did not implement music in this way and this was a fairly radical alternative to what had gone before. We constantly came up against problems of there being no opportunity to trigger a music track at a particular point because the code "doesn't work like that." That said, we overcame a lot of these issues by getting the audio programmer to implement some ad hoc solution and we were pretty happy with the end result.
If we could do it all over again, we would ensure that the audio API supported this type of interactivity on a low and fundamental level. We now realize that it is a concept that needs to be supported by a game right from the start and anything less will cause disappointment later on during implementation.
What is the most important thing that you've learned over the years about music composition?
B&B: Less is more. When we first started out we had a tendency to clutter our mixes with too much content. The more mature we become as composers the more we realize that simple tunes with basic harmony have the ability to catch the listeners imagination and embed themselves deep into their subconscious.
Thank you for a great interview. We’ll be listening for more of your ear-pleasing creations.
For more information on Bob and Barn, visit: http://www.BobandBarn.com
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