BTEC Level 3 Games Design
Unit 73: Sound for Computer Games
Assessment 1: Understand the use Sound & Music in games.
The last of us uses calm high pitch and low base to create a dark and depressing atmosphere. During intense and scary parts of the game the music plays to create suspense and a unique feel to certain parts of the game. The title screen, opening of the game and the end credits of the game feature a slow, string piece of music, which creates a dark mood.
The Last of Us
All instruments
The beginning of this piece feels barren and lonely as only few instruments are used as the piece develops more, more instruments are introduced and makes it feel like the plot is developing. This pieces is intended to give the player a feeling of what the characters are going through and how they are feeling.
This piece of musics starts of with a slow tempo and a soft acoustic guitar gradually getting louder. Then a high pitch sharp whine added from a Cello which the pitch fluctuates between high, sharp and quiet to low, load and drowns out the acoustic guitar. The main instrument playing is the acoustic guitar. A mouth harp makes the constant boink noise in the background. The Kazoo adds to the cellos low pitch drowning, the flute adds another high pitch layer and a drum beat from an African drum is introduced that adds base.
The creator of this piece uses stereo or surround sound as it is a complicated piece which benefits from the atmosphere that surround sound creates and lossless file format was used to keep the best sound quality.
All the music for the last of us was created by an orchestra in a studio. They did this to create good sound quality and add atmosphere and feeling to their game, if this was done using sampling or any other type of music creation, i think it would not have as much as an impression, because of this all the music was specifically created for the last of us so there was no copyright issues there.
Ellen Paige was used in beyond two souls as the model for the character Jodie Holmes in the game, The last of us the character called Ellie had a resemblance to Ellen Paige, thought no legal action was taken against naughty dog this is one of the copyright issue they went through. 
Little Big Planet 3
The beginning of this piece feels like you have been dumped into an intense part of the game,lots of base.The piece stay consist through speeding up the tempo a little half way through. This reminds me of mission impossible. Barry Adamson created and composed the piece Dead heat in 1993 for “The Negro inside me”. This means that this piece was not intended for this game.
The instruments that are used are drums, symbols and brass guitar. This piece can be compared to spy music such as the james bond theme tune as they both use similar sounds and feeling.
Comparing The last of us piece and Dead heat the little big planet peice is hard as they are both different styles and intended for different things. The last of us is intended to create suspension, tension and a feeling of what the characters are going through and the little big planet piece is intended as a background theme tune rarely changing except for slightly intenser parts. Also the music used in little big planet was from 1993 and with lesser editing software so the creators of the game would have to edit the quality to try and make it better. The developers of the game would have had to get permission from Barry Adamson or the company that own the piece.
RAM Random Access memory. RAM is short term storage for recently open programs, tabs and files. If you have limited RAM space the more programs, tabs and files your open and use the slower all your memory will run and the slower the programs will run. This can affect sound files and quality of the sound as it can buffer, skip parts and jumps.
No comments:
Post a Comment