The main goal of my final year project is to see how to sound and imagery effects a person in game.
The need to understand this is so I can farther improve my skills at designing sound effects for games, to do this a better understand on sound and Imagery and personal.
Sound effects people in many different ways it can bring joy, sorrow, and even go back to the basics of primitive scene of danger.
This Blog will be used to used to help with links and ideas that will be used to construct my final year report in Games Design and Development.
Useful Web sites
Designing Sound
Randi Altman’s Post Perspective
Sound designer Simon Pressey
In this website gave an inside to the challenges that come to designing sound for VR headset and went into detail how difference the immersion of sound design from a 2D flat screen to a full VR headset.
Cognitive Fun!
This website / application was helpful get a better understanding of the speed of sound and Visual by taking a test showed the difference in reaction time.
Visually images are reacted to faster than sound due to processing speed of the brain to reaction however sound can identify images faster through gathering information from memory of that specific sound.
It also should be noted that great consideration of the distance of the both image and sound will affect the process time of identification
Visual Test
http://cognitivefun.net/test/1
Audio Test
http://cognitivefun.net/test/16
A Sound Effect
This Website gave a very in-depth look into designing sound effects, showing new comers how to break down every element of making a sound and what to consider making.
For example a gun could have many different elements then just the firing of the gun itself, other elements much be considered such as is the gun a SFI gun does make a charging sound does the gun have to reload what sound does that make ect.
Academic books
Sound Sentiment An Essay on the Musical Emotions Peter Kivy
A “physiology” of Musical Expression Chapter Five
This chapter proved useful proved useful to help understand the effect of music depending on the pitch and volume of the sound change effect a persons reaction
Karen Collins Game Sound
In this book gives a brief historical look into game sound as well the practices of sound design and video game music.
The book goes into detail how immersion works of sound game effect the players feelings towards a character, Object, or environment making visuals more believable.
Sound Design The expressive power of Music, Voice, sound Effects of Cinema
In this book shows how to communicate with sound to people with a wide range of emotions across different media’s.
It shows details how to plan sound design using Visual maps which help design how tense the sound will be and what it could relate to.
Click Sound and Images Prototype examplemr321-Ryan-MooreThe Effect Of Positive and Negative Sounds Presentation
Ryan Moore 
ryanleemoore
October 25, 2016 at 12:45 am
After looking into the subject more the main purpose of the research will be to find the effects that positive and negative sounds have on a person.
The reason for the change is based on after reading chapter 5 Origins of Music by Sound Design by David Sonnenschein explains how the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras using sound to cure and a specific melodies to help with the human psyche to relax anger and aggression in a person.
Shows a good example of how sound can influence a persons actions for example war horns and drums can be used to pose fear into an enemy and rally the troops.
With this in mind the plan is to create two different types of environments with different Colours shapes and sounds to influence the player to feeling relaxed or claim to being afraid or on edge because of the sounds in that enviroments this will be done using Unity and Logic Pro software’s.
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ryanleemoore
November 2, 2016 at 3:20 pm
After gathering various resources I began to work on my introduction for my final project report which reads as follows below.
Sound has been around since the dawn of mankind and has helped mankind understand their surroundings in order to survive. Sound is also used when communicating with other humans an example of this the reaction baby’s cry.
When a baby cries the basic reaction is to see to find out what is causing the child distress be it if it is in danger, hungry or just wants attention.
This is a very basic form of communication that both humans and animals use to communicate with each other, and breaks language barriers just by the pitch of the sound of the cry. (Jha, Alok 2012)
How this is processed through the human brain is by first of all taking the sound pitch of the sound and process it through the superior temporal gyrus, this is located roughly above the external ear to identify the source of the sound and what it could be. (DNA Learning 2003)
The next procedure of the brain use the orbitofrontal cortex that is located above the eyes, the main function of this part of the brain is to make decision of how to react to the sound. (Bechara, Antoine 2013) What also influences the decision process is the emotions that is also simulated in this part of the brain, the locations are shown as below. (Rolls, Endmund T 2004)
This finding is a base starting point into finding out the answer to how sounds can be influence a person’s emotions and actions.
The feedback from fellow students so fair seems to be positive though I plan not to go to deeply into the since behind how the brain works it’s a good example to show the basic understanding how the brain and sound works.
The next step will be to explain how sound has and can be used to militate people for explain a sound of a war drum or horn in battles are used to strike fear into the enemy the modern day equivalent would be a football chat or ruby New Zealand chant.
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ryanleemoore
March 20, 2017 at 2:25 pm
Below is the link to the survey that will be used to help find the effects of Positive and Negative sounds has on a person.
https://surveyplanet.com/58c6ba0ba2b96a7849bea6c8
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ryanleemoore
August 31, 2017 at 4:03 pm
This investigation made into the effects of positive and negative sounds highlighted the importance of the amount of research that is needed when designing a sound for an object, character, or environment. The reason for this importance is due to the impact that sound can leave on a person making it relatable to them much 5 (scratching glass) left a very negative impact on the participants leading them to be very vocal about their hate towards this particular sound – even leading them to remember that sound more than the positive sounds.
Sound design of an unpleasant nature can be seen in many horror games as a Critique, where the sound itself invokes fear into the player which is the intended reaction; this once again can be seen in a comment from a participant about the sound reminding them of a horror movie as in the results in appendix F. In order to achieve the desired emotional effect, it is better to allow sound design to be part of early development of the game or media, as leaving this to be last in the process leaves a high risk of not achieving the desired emotional tension that can lost due to lack of time spent understanding its intended nature. Of the created sounds the results show that a presumed positive sound – ‘Sound 0’ water outdoors shown, in section 6 Questionnaire Analysis Results, showed surprising results as this was designed to be a pleasant sound, however, some participants saw it as unpleasant. Through this study, it has to be highlighted that sound use extends its reach not only in media nut in psychology and medicine.
The limitations of this project were finding more accurate data as most other similar studies as discussed in section 4 Review of other Sound Products section, were equipt with high quality expensive equipment such a MRI scanner, however for something of this magnitude funding would be required as well as more observers that are able to translate the readings into the effects of the results.
Overall, the progress of project went well with many participants very keen and interested in the subject the only real issue that was encountered was the development of the project took longer than expect this is why the creation of the timetable was revisited to balance the workload of other course work, breaking down the tasks making the project less overwelling .
In the future, the study could be replicated with different adjustments. The results of this project showed a mixture of emotional results with certain sounds, the sounds would need to be revised to make them more universally viewed as a positive or negative sound. This would give less unexpected variation in participant results. Visual could be created using different environments, using more innovative technology such as VR (Virtual Reality) the reason for choosing this format as it will be more present in the future, as well as virtual reality increases immersion into the games, changing user perspectives and heightening their senses, meaning that the sounds will enhance the experience of the users. With VR capabilities this experiment could be repeated using the VR technology to see if the results stay the same.
Another reason for choosing VR, is because of the different variations of the sound environment could be developed, this would help to distinguish if subjects could relate to more visually detailed images accompanied with different various of sounds so that a better understanding of the emotional relationships could be researched, lastly having the same participants retake the experiment with extended exposure to sounds would highlight how sounds that could be seen as both positive and negative cause an emotional response. This emotion could change due to longer exposure and different and more intense environments.
Overal the study has shown the importance of understanding and appreciation of the process of developing foley sound effects. This will be taken into account when designing future projects. Sound is a not a one size fit all, design and great consideration needs to be taken into knowing why the sound is being designed as each individual has different preferences.
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