How Sound Tells the Story of Night in the Woods

[Music] thank you for coming and choosing to listen to me I'm M and I'm a sound designer at a shell in the pit audio and today I hope that I can help give some insight into how sound can help us storytelling it's been the focus of my work for a while now and I think it'd be great if everyone paid it more attention to it so night in the woods was an inspiration to work on as a sound designer the writer Scott Benson and Bethany Hockenberry included a whole bunch of sound into the story and Alok Alok incorporated it into the music and as a cohesive whole Alex right there and Gordon McGraw Terry and Joey Van Alden of a shell in the pit gave me a ton of support to explore as well as actual

sound and moral and creative support Joey also did the sound for demon Tower the game within the game so the sound design in these ideas I'll be sharing were a collaboration between all of us so this is a story about a place and a time it's told through setting atmosphere and characters and my goal with the sound was to reflect this and bring you closer into the setting to make you feel as though you are may feeling as she would feel in this place and so every one of the five thousand and ninety sounds in the game make a contribution to the story even with the Foley Scott gave me the direction to make maze footsteps and cloths and as if she were an ungraceful potato sack so these two television characters also add by helping establish the mood in this opening scene even without looking at the dialogue things feel a little bit

ridiculous and a little bit off there are awkward silences laughter clapping all entwined with the voices to make it feel alive being alive in terms of sound means chaos it means that if there's a repetitive action like this conversation there will be a corresponding set of variable sounds that trigger randomly being alive also means rhythm and movement in everything it means that sound comes from both known and unknown sources that sense of liveliness is all bundled up under the umbrella of feeling to be alive is to feel so everything inside every scene has its own mood how do you feel about being here and why I

made each different ambience by taking the feelings Scott's art gave me and giving them voice literally what better way to convey a sense of life than human breath so I use my own voice for a lot of the sound effects and ambiences I made most of the wind sounds by blowing into the microphone like this and cutting them into short segments that fade it in and out and turning it into a scatterer ambience which is a sound that gets triggered at random time intervals as well as a random position in space I use this particular layer as an element in almost every outdoor scene to create a persistent lonely atmosphere and I reuse signature or thematic sounds a lot because I find it helps in manipulating you subconsciously also this is our implementation tool of choice f MA I'm not going to talk too much about it

though so here the fireflies change from fluttering to chirping when you jump into a swarm like they're excited to be with you they react both visually and audibly so in the real world we react to things as they happen they give us memories we live with all of our senses so having a character react to a sound at the same time you're experiencing it makes it feel as though all the elements belong together like this is a real world I was pretty excited to discover moments like this throughout the script and a fun fact is that the sound of one Firefly is actually the sound of a bunch of frogs so in this real world the characters have their own agency this ambience was one of the first ones I made I wanted to give give maze home a comforting sense of life and so I decided this meant waking up and hearing your mom bustling around downstairs and humming later in

the process aleck pointed out that it didn't make too much sense because when you go downstairs maze mom is just sitting there reading but instead of taking it out I decided to create a little narrative each morning and have Mays mom finish up and sit down right as you come down the stairs so this is an example of a sound coming from an unknown source as and it also has the special purpose of letting you know that she's there to talk to if you want where's Angus off to yes grabbing the USB stick he is handy under a couple pieces paper on his desk off screens and can really help if you don't have enough time to animate everything and it doesn't have to be something that was left out it can be a choice but rummaging sound only took a couple minutes to make so you can really use that to your advantage if you're a writer you can plan for it and if you're

a sound designer you can look carefully for those moments where you can add continuing movement and fluidity and connect little narrative threads and it doesn't have to be an obvious action either just like Mae's house this location has its own story and we can hear the neighbors which hints that Angus and his partner Greg live in a less than ideal location with thin walls and it tells us that they live among people who are living their own story they're watching a movie and it's outside of what we're experiencing with the main characters so we come back to the town every day so it was important to enhance that sense of liveliness the telephone wires respond to us sounding higher in pitch in the end and lower in the middle and they have a higher probability of rattling in the middle everything we can jump on

responds to us differently the squirrels react to the environment outside of what the player is doing filling the landscape with little footsteps on each different surface and to achieve this effect I took a little rock and tapped it against some concrete or a chair or my guitar strings which is what the telephone wires are made of and I also made the car sounds using a highly advanced and unique process which I will demonstrate now oh the main town ambience is filled with randomly triggering sounds the train from earlier passing by every 90 to 300 seconds townspeople that we can't see are calling out to one another and we've got the wind and birds chirping between one two three seconds each different time interval was a deliberate choice

that said something so this is a kind of a silly detail but the pigeons have a 44 percent chance of pecking a seed and a lower chance of breaking it open it seems mine eat but adding probability helps make the world sound less repetitive and as creators of this world we never now have intimate you're gonna get with any given space I did all this detail to help sell the idea again that you are May and you're waking up every day and moving through this ever-changing town and it does change visually as well everything is centered around the passing of time so if you decide to stand in one place for a while you'll hear more than a loop the ambiences were designed to situate you in time and in the spirit of the many

procedural visuals are always random so ambiences were really important in the sound design of this game each different atmosphere was another opportunity for immersion whether it's hissing pipes passing by a reverb that suggests a deep dark tunnel or a chef who's humming along to the background music every day we took all the opportunities we could think of to blend sound effects and music together like here Alec who as a composer asked for the sound of the train to have the same BPM as the music the sound effect actually made it onto the soundtrack which I was pretty excited about and we often used a real-time parameter control to determine how sounds change based on the game state or your actions so in this case I like had the idea that as

you climb higher in the town the wind builds up and the music loses its low frequencies and gets quieter so this bottom track is a gradual high-pass filter and the two top tracks are the wind fading in so once you get to the top you can hear once again that lonely wind and it creates a moment for me it feels different than standing on the street like you've accomplished something and you can listen to the pigeons finding seeds similarly when you walk into a store the music is different than on the street it is diegetic which means that it exists for the characters and the story is a part of their world and so here it sounds as if it's coming from the speakers in this location which if it interests you I mean it happened with a convolution reverb called fog convolve her a little bit of EQ in some delay

diegetic music can really help create moments and affect mood so here Mae and her friend B are having an argument in the middle of the conversation the record that was playing fades out and you're left hearing the needle it makes things serious and uncomfortable and sometimes silence is more powerful than music and it can make more music more meaningful and contrast so we should try to avoid carpet-bombing our stories with music even if it's super good I think that you should choose our moments for both we can also get creative with how we transition from one song to another and so how would someone playing obnoxious guitar at a real party do it when we first started in on the sound design work we weren't sure whether or not to include some kind of voiceover I knew we had made the right decision to admit it the first

time I watched someone stream the game they read all the lines in different silly voices and it seemed to me as if they were really able to embody the characters and I think our voices might have got in the way of that a little bit this wasn't immediately obvious though so the original plan was to trigger a vocalization of a single emotion for each different speech bubble we did have an elaborate range of emotions that we recorded and the voices of Mae Gregg and Bruce and it wasn't until the team tested these out together that we realized that it would be unrealistic to implement them all on top of the creative reasons but here's a small sampling of some of the emotions starting with me this is exasperated [Music] here's weird chuckle sarcastic which

probably would have been used alone annoyed drunk we had a lot of fun [Music] and this is mischievious and jump which actually did make it into the game as well as injured and this was a range of Greg who is particularly weird because we were trying to base him off a fox I don't know if you've ever heard of Fox where the mix of a dude Scott showed us from a reality show there's a lot more

of those two I did however using a lot of voice work for background characters in this case to make it feel like there are real live weirdos getting drunk in the woods and I say weirdos because if you actually listen to what what's going on again it's pretty strange greg lobanov and chris hammock helped me out with most of these and we didn't give each other much direction just kind of went nuts and saw how much we could make each other laugh and for some of it we even went into the woods to capture the space and probably seriously freaked some people out and so be as weird as possible because

sometimes something you laughs forever at with a friend is also something other people think is funny this was turned into a 10-hour YouTube video [Music] we all saw all voice different genders because I think it's always good to blur those lines another fun fact is that I can do a pretty good grandpa laughs so be weird and always be imagining what could be happening in each different space I imagined this loudspeaker lady being really bored like maybe she's actually just sputtering nonsense because it's all she has to do so now we can talk about the fun creepy stuff for

maze dreams I once again breathed weirdly into a microphone this time with as much creepy intention as possible I made a palette of sounds to use in connection with these extra astral projections Mae starts having I made one sound especially for the dark being in the universe who I won't say too much about except that if you listen you'll hear a deep slow pitch down breathing track and to get you more into maze head during the scary scenes or when you're sleeping I also recorded some shallow breathing using binaural microphones so it can sound like your own I also used some of these senses scatterers so they behave just like the wind I talked about before and I did in a few cases add too

much detail and had to scale back for performance issue reasons so if I did it again I would start by making the ambiences more condensed but it was a learning process so my interpretation of this dream is that errors made in the universe and it unleashes all the horrible sounds that continue to pop up after this as if it breaks open May's head and leaves a portal to this dimension which is why I added all those ambient layers to this big important moment so you make those associations and this breathing tract that comes in now was actually an accident where for some reason the track in the event itself didn't fade out with the rest of the sound between scene transitions but I think sometimes accidents and the randomness of the system kind of work and I ended up quite liking that effect

so I took those signature sounds from the dreams and placed them at moments in the story in the real world that meant something to emphasize a connection I added the sound whenever a particular being is around and made it get louder the longer you stay there using an ad HSR and I imagined again that it's coming from Mae's head as if you're hearing what she's hearing and it didn't do any of this imagining that you would think about it consciously but I think that just because something isn't consciously noticed doesn't mean it's not working as a functional part with a story and it doesn't mean it's not notice at all sound is an emotion it's an intangible feeling and we notice the feelings it gives us even if we don't pinpoint the source I didn't find that discouraging but I find it powerful one of my least favorite expressions in the sound design industry is that if you've done a good job people won't notice and

I would argue that we shouldn't go seek to go unnoticed but instead to provoke people into listening by making them feel and sometimes the game can respond to the sound I implemented that signature sound idea and was surprised and super excited to discover it written into the story later on I got this idea to try to affect you emotionally with a signature sound from inside I was terrified by the horrible water demon in that game and I realized that I could tell when it was near because they would play an ominous musical tone which I first noticed my approached a hatch and it had been placed there was a spot ambience and I felt fear building and I didn't want to

open the door and confront the creature and he would be there I spent a long time just standing there and it made a huge emotional impact so whenever May is approaching something dark the volume of the horrible sound is increased the closer you get I wanted to make you uneasy and reluctant to move forward so when May starts out on the right in this scene you can hear an active forest there are birds and movement in the bushes and as you progress they all go silent which again was all in the script and then as the horrible scent then the horrible sound starts coming in [Music] and that loud sound you heard has a very

specific purpose in the story but it won't say what it is so to give you a little summary with interactive narrative all the different possible ways the game could sound is what turns it into something special just like in life the world responds to our actions it would be impossible to predict all the interpretations but what I tried to do here was lay out the clues and suggest certain feelings I went about it by playing the game over and over and over with an open mind each time trying to think of what details might be noticed I was always trying to make connections influence emotion and insinuate that the characters are doing their own thing and that the world is changing so this neat little presentation may

have made it seem like I knew it I was doing all along but I want to assure you that at the time I certainly did not feel that way it was a learning process and it wasn't as distinct as this and I say this to encourage you not to worry about that in yourselves I was able to do this work just because I loved what I was doing and I love this game and I immersed myself in it and didn't think about all the people that were gonna play I pushed away my awareness that this was my first release as the lead time designer and didn't let that make me too afraid to try all this stuff I just did what I know I got weird and I experimented and followed my intuition along the lines of what the team created and on the topic of encouragement I also mentioned that coming to speak at GDC was real scary for me but I did it anyway because I think that we who might be more anxious about this sort of thing especially as few women are not binary people in games and even fewer in game audio you need to

start pushing that fear of being seen away and show each other that we are here and that we were doing cool stuff and that being here is lots of fun so if you want to get into this kind of career you should no matter who you are and once you do don't be afraid to put yourselves out there I think each time you do something like this you grow exponentially with it lastly I want to stress again how much of a team effort the sound was especially with Alec and I can't really express how lucky I feel I've been able to work on a project like this with these people so try to find people who inspire you to tell stories and keep thinking of new ways to tell stories and think about how much sound can impact those stories we have a lot more exploring to do so what Shar Cole leads you to the stars thank you

[Applause] so I think we have time for questions do we have time for questions okay so you can ask those now here's my Twitter also I think there's a microphone if you if you have them that's cool too if if no one does Hey so very good talk thank you for it one thing that I got out of this and out of playing night in the woods was that I really appreciated your ability to do so much with so little and to really contribute to crafting this world with such a delicate touch and I'm wondering if you have any tips for so I'm coming

from as a sound designer I feel like a lot of what I need to do to feel like a good sound designer is its focused a lot on quite the opposite it's putting more and more into it and I'm wondering if you have any tips on how to train that sort of restraint and focus on the little details I would say to I guess I guess my strategy is to record as much as possible so I when I use library sounds I often tend to put a lot of layers in as opposed to just finding the right sound that you don't need to add more to make it sound good and I think yeah having going out and just finding it in real life and recording it is a nice way to do that make sense Thanks was there a particular environment or set of sounds that you found particularly challenging I think I

guess I don't know if it was particularly challenging but the all the dark sequences definitely took a lot more effort and the the dreams I went through a lot of iteration where I was constantly going back and tweaking little things they felt really important in the story so I went to make sure they were just right hello so as someone who also really loves recording just a bunch of random things and like finding cool combinations what was the most fun or like weird thing you full lead for the game I think I mean it's not really fully but the weirdest stuff we recorded I think was definitely the voice yeah it's kind of hard to

remember everything but I'll just say the voice hi brilliant presentation you should be proud you mentioned at one point you sometimes when a little too far unlike we're going into too much detail or complexity in designing something so when that was happening how did you what made you realize you were going further than you needed to did you realise yourself or did other people say maybe we don't need this much well it when I really realize it was technical and it was actually it was kind of a mix of going too far and also just setting stuff up wrong so I had all of these layers in the Town ambience and one of them was a scatterer which is the one that gets triggered at a random time and

I had it getting triggered like way too frequently and it was just a mistake and it kind of made me go back and reevaluate you know how many voices I was using and and think about performance a little more on a whole so but in the end it just made me realize that that's that's a really good thing to do from the start thank you very much no problem great work I love this sound designing this game so much and the dream with the Train sound effect was like my favorite dream so yeah that one was fun a personal curiosity I had is like when you're in that like under tunnel with the the cook it's got like that kind of Bhoomi reverb was that baked into the sounds you were playing or did you have like a live effect yeah so I have everything going through sends and I have a few different reverbs for each different location so in that was all done in F mine okay yeah

thanks hi wonderful talk thank you um when you were designing did you think of the characters as people or animals or kind of birth i I think it was a mix of both I mean they are supposed to just be people but I guess cuz we started out with those voices it kind of just put me in the mindset of that like the voices I did for me I was kind of going like Mara [Laughter] but mostly people I think cuz yeah thank you very much yeah no problem okay looks like all the questions I can go to the wrap-up room for 20 minutes and then I would encourage everyone to attend there's a women in game audio roundtable in the South Hall that's always really

good so I'm gonna go to that directly after [Applause]