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Video Sound Design:
Interview with the Pros

[ by Bob Boster]

Turn those images on!!The world of electronic-game making is a strange one: groups of computer programmers (almost always men) work together to produce what they think will be exciting to middle-class white male teens. The largest concentration of people making these games is in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through Mills College (where I'm in school), I tracked down a group of women involved in the production of sound for these games. (By sound, I mean all aspects of the sound spectrum of the game: sound effects of the game environment, action, effects, music, etc.) -- Bob Boster

JEANNE PARSON came to the industry in 1990 with a degree in electronic music and a background in pop music. Jeanne has worked for Broderbund and Atari Games on a variety of games from the education-oriented Living Books series to the almost stereotypical Primal Rage game (an arcade game that was later adapted to the home gaming market). Since the success of Primal Rage, Jeanne has been able to freelance. Most recently, she did sound design for a talking globe educational toy.

JUDY MUNSEN started out doing television sound, first doing music for 15 Charlie Brown specials, Sesame Street, and some B movies. When Judy switched over to digital audio, she moved into multimedia, working on the Star Trek-Next Generation CD-ROM, as well as stuff for a 3DO internet link game. Another one of Judy's credits is sound design for an interactive college prep title called College Edge, which works with high school students to examine what they might need to improve their chances of getting into different schools. Starting with that project, Judy began a service called Audiologo, which makes sound clips for websites.

SF!: Bob Boster
JM: Judy Munsen
JP: Jeanne Parson

SF!: Is it somewhat strange for you, as women, to work in an industry that is so male oriented?

JP: Atari was very much a company where the mentality is "target 13-year-old boys." You work in coin-op engineering where you are working in teams developing arcade games. It's really a bizarre atmosphere; when I started working, there were 7 or 8 women that worked in that division and then they hired a new supervisor who really had that boy's club attitude. By the time I was laid off last spring, three of 115 employees were women. Then they laid off two of those women, so there was one woman left in that department. But it really depended on what team you were working on.

SF!: At Atari, you worked on Primal Rage. What's Primal Rage?

JP: In 1994, Primal Rage was the number one arcade game in this country.

SF!: That's a fighting game?

JP: Oh yeah, it's got souped up dinosaurs beating the crap out of each other. It went to the home game platforms last year at Christmas time, which is the typical thing to do. The subsequent team, which was working on Primal Rage 2 (which tested not very well this fall and they decided to can it as far as an arcade release), was just horrific. There were three or four guys that were "in charge." They had ideas about how the game should sound, and I think even if I had written exactly what they wanted they wouldn't have liked it because I was a "girl." But then I worked in a different team this summer for another Atari game and it was a really different experience. This other project was a puzzle game. It's gonna be released on the home market. They tried it as an arcade game in Japan and it didn't test high enough, but it's going to be a home release.

SF!: Is there a division of labor or status differential between the artist/programmers and the sound people?

JP: The audio people always have several projects going, whereas the artists are dedicated to one project for a year and a half or whatever it takes. The graphics take longer to develop than the audio.

SF!: Does anything stand out as being particularly illustrative of the gender inequity in the development teams?

You're missing the best part JP: There was one thing in the Primal Rage process... I grew up with four older brothers and I was a real tomboy. I had no problem saying I was going to work on a fighting game. I made some great sound effects that everyone liked, gory sounds: rip someone's head off, bonecrunching, bloodspurting, etc. But there was one character that was just supposed to be very rude. It farts a big green cloud that goes across and chokes its opponent. I had great fun making a huge fart sound and things like that, but the guys on the team came up with this move where this character urinates on his opponent at the end if he killed him. They called this the "golden showers" move. And I was the only one on the team that said that was going too far. All kids have moms, for one thing, and the only references that I can think of for a move like that is that it relates to pornographic movies or to rape or war crimes. These guys were like, "Oh no, it's like a dog marking its territory." "No, a dog doesn't kill something and then urinate on it." Well, the company let them leave it in there. When it went to home games, one of the platforms (maybe Nintendo) left it in, one of them blocked it. Then there was writing in one of the gaming magazines about why this move wasn't in this or that. Though the company swore the name would never get out, there it was, in magazines that are aimed at boys in their early teen years, being referred to as the "golden showers" move. One mother in Arizona got really mad and wrote to the paper about it and as a result one of the larger retail chains, I think Wal-Mart, pulled all the copies out of the store. On the sequel, they decided to back off this but originally they had wanted to do more.

SF!: Were they fixated on it because it was offensive?

JP: Yeah, I think they thought it was so offensive that kids would think it was so cool. To me, a lot of it needs to be strategy and game play. There's certainly nothing educational about it, but I knew this was a company that doesn't do educational titles, it's just fun and games and quarter drops. So now I'm working independently, mostly looking for projects of interest to me, different types of scoring, different types of environments. Hopefully someday my work will include films or something like that, but it may take awhile, or it may not be the kind of stuff that pays the bills.

SF!: It seems like you've had a lot of different experiences with commercial audio, do you have any comparisons you could make between work for TV and film and the work experience of games and multimedia?

JM: Well, as a freelancer, I haven't done as many games as Jeannie has. They usually have real specific instructions--compose the music to timing so it fits certain visual action in the animation, stuff like that. In general, the money is not as good and people don't seem to know what they're doing as much as in film and television, in commercials.

JP: About ten years ago, for the most part, whoever was the lead programmer was in charge. It's coming around so that most companies have producers for games, and they have people who specialize in game design and things like that, but it is still fairly loose, not well established like film. This one team I worked with, the Primal Rage sequel, the producer wanted everyone on the team of twenty people to "buy off" (his term) on the music that I did. He wanted everyone to accept that and be happy with it. It's just impossible and ridiculous, it just isn't gonna happen and it just created complete bedlam. Even at its best, video gaming is usually nowhere near as structured as other mediums.

SF!: Sounds like a normal situation where people who don't know how to communicate are put in a management situation.

JP: They think they've communicated something, or else they want something in the music and something in the sound effects that you can't get to happen together in a multimedia system. They can't accept that it isn't going to work, whether you're working on a CD-ROM that you know is going to run on somebody's little home system or headphones at best, or an arcade game. It's not like a movie theatre where you've got surround speakers, and a center speaker to center dialogue, and huge subwoofers to give you big explosions. And they'll want some music that has some big rap beat, pounding sort of thing. Then they want these sound effects where something has this big punch and they want a big whump for when something hits. And you say, "We can't have that kind of music with that kind of sound effect because the music--the incessant boom, boom, boom of the kick drum--is going to totally negate any of these types of sound effects that you want to come across as very powerful." A lot of times, the response is just "well, it's you--you don't know how to do this. I'm sure somebody else can do this for us." But you can't do it, you have to be reasonable. It's like saying you only have eight crayons for the whole thing in the audio, because you have a limited delivery system. You have to work, and do something as good as you can with those eight colors. If somebody asks you to make other colors or shadings and things that you know isn't going to work, then you just have to try and explain to them why it's not going to work. A lot of people just don't understand.

SF!: Do you thing there are gender competence issues at work there?

JP: I think that guys are still less likely to accept a woman telling them that this isn't going to work. We don't have the B-A-L-L-S to do it or something.

JM: Or that we don't understand technical things as well as they do. In terms of the sound spectrum, they don't understand that two things in the same frequency cancel each other out.

SF!: Because they always think about sound last?

JM: I don't think they understand how frequencies work, that they tend to collide. The same things tend to cover each other up--rather than having it get bigger/louder/stronger it diminishes what they're trying to do.

SF!: It sounds like both of you are doing music and sound effects for these projects. Is that standard practice in the industry?

JP: I think so. I don't know anybody who's only doing one, do you?

JM: No, I don't know anybody who just does one.

JP: I've done voiceovers, too.

JM: Which is not how it is in television and commercials. The composers rarely did that kind of work. The lines are blurring somewhat, but a few years back if you were a composer you didn't do sound design, that was some editor's job.

SF!: Do you think that's a good way to work?

JM: I do, absolutely. A big part of the creation is designing the sound that will work in your arrangement. Even if it's only a synthesizer sound, or your own version of a flute, or an ambient bass or something--when you make it yourself and control it, you can really design it to fit well with the other sounds that you're going to be using.

SF!: Do you feel like you've had any training for making sound effects, as opposed to music?

JP: When I was at Mills, I got some good training with that. I worked with Larry Polansky and David Rosenbloom. I got some really good training on trying to figure out how to imagine something and make a sound that you can't model on anything else. And that's a lot of what sound effects is: you have some idea in your head of how you want something to sound, but there's not already some physical model of.

JM: I didn't have any training. It just came from learning to program synthesizers. I just read manuals and magazines, and then when I got into digital audio it was just a matter of experimenting. It was fun, playing with sounds and seeing what effects what, and how to put them together.

SF!: Do you favor either the sound effects or the music when you're working?

JP: Depends on the game. In some games the sound effects have to be most important, and that's not usually the way I would prefer to work, 'cause I really love to write the music. In some games the sounds are more important. In others, maybe not, like a role-playing game where you're really creating a longer-lasting mood. I figure if I've done a good job with a game, I should know which characters are playing just by listening to it.

SF!: That's an interesting a way of transmitting information, considering what people assume the role of sound in a game to be.

JM: Sound is very underrated in multimedia right now. So often the people who are in charge and have the power over the game are amateur musicians and they know music so it's hard to get around what this guy does in his garage. In commercials, they are very aware of how you can be manipulated; your moods and your attention are completely under the control of sound.

JP: That's a big problem, people want to hear what they like. You get people on a team or project giving you CDs, "we like this". I've had problems where people say, "Well we want it to sound like it just came off the radio." "I thought you wanted it set in a different time period in a different world." "Yeah, but we want the music to sound like it's something really cool, like right off the radio right now." "But how is this going to help you feel like you're in a different world." You know?

SF!: Influences? Favorites?

JP: There are some games and certain things, like the game Mortal Kombat. When the first version came out, the teenage boys loved it and anybody who was working on a fighting game was going to be listening and watching that game a lot. It was very interesting because it was very jazzy. It was not at all rocked out or anything like that. And it was really just surprising that these guys could accept it in this game, because it really worked. It created an ambience of you being in some different place, at times scary and a little bit tense, and stayed out of the way of the sound effects enough. And yet you present something to them to let them listen to just that without playing a game on top of it, and they are like, "Oh, no, this music doesn't make me feel like fighting." But I think as you work that relates to projects that you have to deal with.

JM: I really liked Total Distortion. That really had good quality music. Have you heard of the game or know it? The premise is that you're on a spaceship, or going to other worlds, and you have the ability to obtain video-making equipment

JP: For making music videos.

JM: Yes, and what keeps you alive is making music videos. You have the phone numbers of four producers. They all have very distinct personalities and you have to keep trying to sell your videos to these producers. All of the music is already written, so you hear different things and music and you plug that in, and you have to control which pieces of graphics go with the music.

SF!: Interesting. Has it done well?

JP: It gotten some very good reviews, not just in game magazines, but Entertainment Weekly.

JM: But I don't know how it sold.

JP: I'm not positive, but I think it did pretty decently.

JM: Oh good. But for the most part, the more I get into this area the less time I have for games, for CD-ROMs, it's really sort of sad. I haven't put a CD-ROM into my computer just for fun in months.

JP: A game, now, is something for me to study.

JM: Yeah, it's not for fun any more.

SF!: Do you think this work is being made for all aspects of the market, male and female, all ages?

JP: I think there's a move to broaden it. Traditionally it's been aimed at teenaged boys, as far as the big-selling titles. I think it's moving away from that. Newsweek this week has got an article about the computer in the home, and it has one page saying that some of the best CD-ROMs this year are aimed at young girls. Companies that are trying to work towards that having realized, "Gosh, what's going on for the girls of that age group?"

JM: Interval International, Paul Allen's company, has spent two and a half years researching what girls want from computer games and programs. I think they have just released, or are ready to release, two games. They worked with a company called Convivial Designs in San Francisco to create a game for girls which should be out this spring. Before that, biggest product so far has been "design a dress for Barbie," that sort of thing.

SF!: You think we'd be past that by now.

JP: Barbie's back.