sound design with fmod

.aa - week five.

FMod seems like a fairly useful program for sound designing a video game, even if its user interface is a little bit confusing to get used to. I used Plogue Bidule to knock together a few example game sound assets - in this case a waterfall, wind and a teleport device (like the one in halo 2). The examples I grabbed from FMod actually sound a bit less realistic than what I originally created in Plogue, because the parameters of the sounds have been randomized. In hindsight I do not think randomising the pitch of the waterfall, nor wind, was such a great idea but at least I can tick that box for the exercise. Here's the 'event editor' for the teleport sound and an mp3.

teleport.mp3 (32 kB)

Next up are the two environmental sounds I created. These are deliberately lower in volume.

waterfall.mp3 (208 kB) | wind.mp3 (208 kB)

Getting over the initial frustration of learning how a user interface works is a common task nowadays, not least for geeks like me. It's fair to say that FMod is one of the more frustrating of these, however I think once you get down to the nuts and bolts it is pretty awesome.

.sources.

FMOD 2007, "FMod Designer," accessed 28.08.07.

Haines, Christian 21.08.07, "Audio Engines Analysis," EMU, Adelaide University.