On Tuesday, March 1, Staff Writer Jake Torres attended the Video Game Sound Design Workshop hosted by John Levee in the Music Library. 

When I walked into the Music Library in Dodge Hall, I was guided towards the back of the library to a back room that I didn’t even know existed. It was a small but cozy place that was the perfect spot for a fun casual workshop!

For those unaware, as I was before attending this event, the Music Library is hosting a weekly series of events and workshops throughout the semester about combining technology and sound. This week’s event was about adding sounds to video games and designing those sounds. Next week’s event will be taking place at the same time in the Music Library on Tuesday, March 8, about integrating and using FMOD, a sound effects engine. 

Before the workshop started, I was able to ask John Levee some questions about his studies at Columbia as a Masters in Fine Arts graduate student. Currently, his work focuses more on the creative applications of sound design; however, he previously published a research study examining the relationship between audio and perceived immersion in a virtually simulated environment in VR. His study concluded that there is a connection between audio and a feeling of immersion, enjoyment and realism, but he could not conclude if it caused an increase in perceived video quality. Right now, John is currently working on a series of 108 short films for the Jewish Museum.

After the three other attendees arrived, John started diving into Unreal Engine 4, the game development environment and engine we would be using for the workshop. After giving us a brief introduction to the possibilities of the engine and its interface, he explained how we would add procedural, or randomly chosen, sounds to a template game provided by Unreal. He showed how easy it was to implement this with Unreal’s blueprint system, which is a block-like coding language, similar to Scratch, that allows anyone to create games easily with no computer science or programming background. 

John showed us how we could use a sound cue to allow for dynamic sounds in an Unreal Engine game, similar to how game developers do. Normally the sounds guns make in video games differ slightly and randomly every time you shoot to add more realism to the game. However, with our game, we used wildly different sounds to produce funny results of the tennis ball launcher sounding like everything from a shotgun to a futuristic laser rifle.

Implementing proximity sounds and background music was the last thing we did in the workshop. John explained how collider objects could be added to allow for sounds to play when you enter and leave a certain area. We used these collider objects and a cone to simulate talking to a non-playable character. The background music was surprisingly easy to add by just dragging and dropping the music file, which happened to be named EPICROYALTYFREELIKEANDSUBSCRIBESUPERBATTLEMUSIC.wav, into our scene. He also provided a mini physics lesson about pitch and frequency while we messed around with the background audio settings. 

After he finished the workshop, he gave us time to ask him questions about his work. One student asked about how composition of video game background music works. He explained how he aims for coherence with the theme of the game and instruments and he makes sure that the music is loopable without being intrusive and interfering with gameplay. He also said that adding procedural sounds in background music helps build different ideas while gameplay is happening, like adding specific noises when you reach a new location. An example he referred to was the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild soundtrack with jingle sound effects while climbing a mountain. I was able to ask if his work was affected at all by the Covid-19 pandemic. Surprisingly, it seemed like John’s work wasn’t affected by the pandemic at all since he uses technology to produce everything, but the presentation of his work has been affected.

Overall I really enjoyed the workshop and speaking with John Levee. It was definitely a more casual experience but I learned more about something I was interested in and got to hear what it is like to do research and work in that sphere. I recommend checking out one of the next sound design workshops out with him! You can register for future events by going to the Columbia events page. I am looking forward to going to more in the future! 

headphones via bwog archives