MDes Sound for the Moving Image School of Innovation & Technology
Calum Whytock
Glasgow-based with an undergraduate in Computer and Electronic Systems from the University of Strathclyde, I came to the Glasgow School of Art to seek a change in career. I have long had a passion for music, so I wanted to study the professional practice of designing sound and music for various media, such as film, TV, and in particular, videogames.
Despite this course being a complete change of field, my time at the Glasgow School of Art has been enlightening and fruitful thanks to the teaching material and the aid of the extremely talented staff. I have been able to learn about and gain a degree of proficiency in various pieces of technologies, the highlights being Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Unity, and FMOD, with supplementary experience in Reaper, Max/MSP, SPAT Revolution for 3D spatial audio, and Adobe Premiere Pro.
I am particularly interested in the impact sound and music have on both setting and enhancing the narrative of pieces. I hope the pieces of work I have on display here showcase the highlights of what I have learned and been able to put into practice.
Ex Oblivione
The project for my Master’s Dissertation, this original videogame is based on the short story by H.P. Lovecraft of the same name. The story tells of someone in their last days, how they find more refuge in their sleep and dreams rather than being awake, and how they try to unlock the next level of existence and understanding of the dream-world by exploring their dreams.
Featuring writing and voice acting by Tom Beecher, this game uses adaptive audio to help tell the story and create high levels of immersion for the player. The ambience and original music adapt as the player explores the dream, and realistic 3D audio spatialising helps establish the environment for the player to explore.
Download and play the game from itch.io: https://whitehawkgames.itch.io/ex-oblivione
Slender – Spatial Audio Piece
Contains loud and unnerving sounds. Features a loud jumpscare at 2:40
This piece uses 3rd Level Higher Order Ambisonics to create a spatial audio piece designed to be played in an environment with 16 speakers. Based on the online mythos known as the “Slenderman”, this piece tells the story of someone brave enough to traverse a dense forest at night, in an attempt to discover more about the elusive Slenderman. Proximity to the Slenderman invokes an onset of what is known as “Slender sickness”, where victims can experience nausea, headaches, paranoia, and delusions. This piece makes the most of spatial audio to replicate what it would sound like to gradually be exposed to such symptoms, and conclude with a climax where the Slenderman chases and catches its unfortunate victim.
This binaural render of the piece is best experienced with headphones.
Image credit to flux.audio
‘9’ – Sound Redesign for Surround Sound
Practice for sound design for surround sound environments. Mixed for 5.1 surround sound, the challenge of this piece was not only to design sound that fitted the visuals, but also have them feel cohesively contributing to a consistent narrative. Placing sound effects in the surrounds is a delicate matter, as they need to enhance the realism while not be too distracting to the viewer.
My interpretation of this excerpt was to highlight that the characters are made of material rather than flesh and bone. As such, they only make inorganic sounds, such as fabric rubbing and metal scraping.
Best experienced with headphones.
Astrobot – Sky Garden – Music Redesign
This year marks the first year where the MDes students on the Sound for the Moving Image course partake in a “Self-Directed” project, where they have freedom to choose a subject matter of their liking to produce a piece for. As someone with a passion for music and a long interest in videogames, I decided to take a videogame that I had zero knowledge of (in this case, Game of the Year winner Astrobot) and compose original music for one of the levels of the game. In this case, the first level “Sky Garden”.
The main goal was to improve my skills in working in Digital Audio Workstations for music production in particular. I learned how to use Ableton Live, and various techniques that are applicable to composing, producing, and mixing music. It was important that I had no prior knowledge of what the original music sounded like, and instead generate a concept based on the visuals alone. Given that Astrobot has themes of modernity (impressive graphics, robots as the characters) and videogame culture (features heavy theming around the PlayStation 5), I decided to combine modern and retro sounds by composing a piece that uses the strengths of both a full orchestra, and retro 8-bit style instruments.
Gameplay footage from MrZebraGamer on YouTube