作者：Brandon Sheffield

什么声音让你觉得有科幻的感觉？每个人都有自己的想法。有些人认为是《星球大战》中的光剑和移相器爆炸发出的声音。有些人认为是《星际迷航》的监控系统发出的声音。还有些人认为是特雷门琴、音锯和慕格电子音响合成器发出的声音。

在电影、游戏和音乐的历史上已经诞生了许多经典的科幻声音，那么后人应该如何开拓新的听觉视野，特别是在射击游戏中？我们采访了5th Cell的音响总监Tracy Bush，他最近刚为第三人称射击游戏《Hybrid》创作了音速风格音效。

scifi sounds(from gamasutra)

1、枪

Bush解释道：“每个人都有自己的方法。我的方法是使用枪。我们希望首先形成一种真实感。当你制作射击游戏时，枪就是你的材料。在我希望枪出现的地方，我们循环使用大量枪声，这样玩家才能感受到枪的命中率和威力，至于那些杀伤力不大的小型手枪，我们要使它们听起来不像玩具手枪。”

但单靠这个还不够科幻。“科幻也是以现实生活为基础的，况且我们使用的仍是散弹枪。又因为游戏世界的时代并不太遥远，在弹药粉和子弹等方面还没先进到那个程度”。但对于比较不寻常的武器，你必须发挥想象力，这样才能把武器做得有趣。有些武器效果显然就是未来派的，比如扫射。它的攻击会形成半球形的有效区域，导致大量伤亡，这在现实中是不可能的。这种武器需要充电，所以在游戏时我会听到许多电流的声音，也就是能量产生的劈啪声和吱吱声。”

2、模拟

我们已经习惯于被在数字化声音环绕，老式模拟电子设备的声音听起来确实有一点儿怪异，但可以让你联想到现实，同时又激发你的幻想。

“对于科幻武器，我只是模拟它们的声音，比如使用吉他音响电路。为了捕捉音效，我要做许多工作，我要录音，然后存进我的iPhone中，然后把声音用吉他的踏板效果进行处理，再通过电子管功放播放出来，并再次录音。总之非常复杂，但最终效果很好。”

Bush表示他不喜欢单纯依靠标准的声音设计软件制作音效。“我努力跳出工具的范围，因为只有这样才能做出有特点的声音。我做过的一个让我非常自豪的机器人是Preyon，是个高级杀手机器人。制作它的声音时我使用了吉他音响电路和电子滤波器等。（在原始录音里），我要猛吸气然后尖叫。我竭尽全力，录音、调整，终于做出这种怪异的声音，我为它感到骄傲。”

3、合成

“在声音方面我做了很多工作，至少就我们希望的音乐方向而言。为了找到合适的乐器音调，我们重复了好多次。最终成功后，我们才能够开始记录音轨——主菜单的声音、游戏内的音乐和所有环绕音效。然后，我们还做了场景音效，那些更简单明了。当你看着宇宙空间，你觉得会听到什么声音？我们根据地图上的物品指定声音，我们一样一样地做，然后组合起来，然后游戏世界就生动起来了。”

hybrid(from joystiq.com)

4、逼真

怎么样才能让科幻声音听起来像真的？如何把这些声音与现实世界联系起来，且不至于太偏离人们的期望？“这些问题能否解决要看你怎么制作这些声音。我使用了很多老式合成器类型的声音，如模拟生成器等，这些声音有科幻的味道，又不至于让人觉得怪异。”

他补充道：“做这种声音设计的一个技巧是：当你只听声音时，那种声音听起来要合适，你的大脑不会老是思维中断，然后提醒你哪里不合谐。这就是你的思路。但我喜欢有声音、有画面的科幻世界。比如在某个科幻的场景中，有一艘大飞船降落了，摧毁建筑物，然后又飞走了。你不能使用大家都用过的东西，飞船用激光扫射的声音不能听起来跟你早就听过几千次的声音一样。”

5、不要使用素材库

不能使用别人用滥了的东西，意味着你不能使用素材库。光剑的声音、激光的声音和移相器的声音早就存在了，几乎成为历史遗产。你怎么才能避免走老路？“你必须有意识地回避。几年前我和一个团队一起制作一款游戏。我们制作了40到50种武器，数量真是庞大。其中有一样武器的声音是高级音响设计师直接从样本库里拉出来的。所有武器的声音我都听过了，效果不错。当时我说：‘这声音……呃，我觉得可以。’”

“当我们发布游戏时，我接到其他音响设计师和音响总监的电话，他们说：‘为什么你们使用了相同的枪？其他游戏中已经出现过这种枪了。’正是在那个时候，我意识到的确要处处留心，毕竟你不希望使用别人已经用过的声音。甚至只是好像最近才有人使用过的声音，我也不会用它了。”

当我提到2000年以来所有游戏预告片都出现的“人落下和尖叫”的声音时，他变得有点儿激动起来。“还有火球的声音。那些声音有很多，我们永远不会使用的。比如在制作沙漠的场景时，会听到一只红尾鹰的叫声。于是，当你看到沙漠时，总是听到同一只鸟的叫声。”

他提醒，不要落入那个陷阱。“制作新内容并不难，只要你有自己的麦克风，保持随时录音的习惯，你就能制作出新的声音了。这不是不可能，更且效果更好。我们的枪显然是有个性的——我不是说它们有人性，而是它们显然有自己的独特之处。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

BRZAP! 5 tips for creating unique sci-fi sounds in video games

By Brandon Sheffield

Everyone has their own vision of what sci-fi should sound like. To some, it’s Star Wars lightsaber sounds and juicy thumps of phaser blasts. To others, it’s the steady electrical hums and tweets of Star Trek. To yet others, it’s a theremin, a musical saw, and some well-placed Moog synth tones.

With so much strong history in movies, games, and musical experiments, how does one go about creating a new sci-fi universe’s aural landscape, especially when it’s a shooter? We asked Tracy Bush, 5th Cell’s audio director, who recently crafted the sonic style of the company’s third person action shooter, Hybrid.

1. Start with the guns.

“Everybody has their own kind of approach,” says Bush. “I started off with the guns; we wanted to get that solid, first of all. When you’re making a shooter, guns are your meat and potatoes. It took a little bit of iteration to get a lot of the guns where I wanted them, to have them have enough hit and power and, for those smaller guns that don’t do as much damage, to not sound like little pop cap guns.”

But you don’t have to go sci-fi with it right away. “They all have their basis in real life guns because we’re still dealing with shotguns, and being not in the distant future we still haven’t evolved that much in terms of powders and cartridges and stuff like that.” he says. But with the more unusual weapons, you have to look a bit further afield, which is where things get interesting. “There are a few weapons that are decidedly futuristic,” says Bush. “The Swarm is one of them; it’s an area-of-effect that creates a little dome or sphere of annoying death, and that doesn’t sound like anything [in real life]. It’s got a charge-up, so I play with a lot of electricity sounds and power kind of sounds. I did a lot of work with distortion tube effects on amplifiers because that gives you this crackle and weird kind of burbly energy that you can use.”

2. Go analog.

That leads us to the second point – in a world where we’re so used to digital sounds chiming around us all the time, oldschool analog electronics actually sound a bit otherworldly, and can link you to reality while also inspiring the fantastical.

“For the sci-fi weapons, I just mic-ed them as you would a guitar amplifier,” he says. “I did a lot of things where I took a couple of effects, recorded a version of it, then put it on my iPhone, then put that through a pedal board effects chain for guitars, and then put that through a tube amp and re-recorded it; it’s very convoluted, but it sounds crazy at the end.”

Bush says he doesn’t like to rely simply on the standard sound design software programs for asset creation. “I try to think outside of those tools because you get a lot of character out of that,” he adds. “One of the robots that I’m actually very proud of is the Preyon, the high-end assassin droid. That’s the way I did that one, with a guitar amplifier and the tube filters and stuff like that. [In the original recording] I’m actually inhaling and screeching at the same time. I just did it as long as I could, recorded it, and then stretched it out; it’s a freaky, freaky sound, and I’m very proud of it.”

3. Integrate with the soundtrack early.

“I had a lot of input into [the soundtrack], at least as far as how we wanted the musical direction to go,” he says. “We went through a lot of iteration trying to get the right tone for the instrumentation and what-have-you. Once we finally got all that, we were able to start writing all of the tracks—the main menu tracks, the in-game tracks, and all the wrap-around effects. Then, as the maps came online, we did map ambiences as well, and those were a lot more straightforward. You’re looking at a space, and you’re like, what should this sound like? We assign sounds based on things within the map, do those individually and set those to frames, and the world’s alive.”

4. Give it the smell test.

What makes a sci-fi sound believable? What seems implausible? How do you link these sounds to our existing world, without straying too far from what people expect? “A lot of it is based on sound choices and how you make those sounds,” says Bush. “I use a lot of old-school synthesizer type sounds like analog generators and things like that to make things sound sci-fi-like but not so strange that they’re out of place.”

“That’s one of the tricky things about doing sound design: making sure it sounds right and that your brain doesn’t stop what it’s doing and say, ‘Well, that’s… that’s not correct,’” he adds. “It’s a kind of line that you have to thread there. But I like living in a sci-fi world and playing with sound within it, making dark matter lightning and things like that. There’s a map that has big capital ships that fly in, destroy buildings, and fly away. It’s fun playing with that and not using the same things that everyone else has done—making a big ship come in and land and use a laser that doesn’t sound like the same laser you’ve heard thousands of times before.”

5. Don’t use libraries!

That brings us to the final point, where our article began. There’s such a cultural history of these kinds of sounds: lightsaber sounds, laser sounds, and phaser sounds that already exist. How do you avoid re-treading old ground? “You have to be very aware of it,” asserts Bush. “I made a game several years ago, and I had a team working with me at the time. We had to do 40 or 50 weapons; it was a lot of weapons. On just one of them, one of my junior sound designers pulled a weapon from a sample library. I listened to all of them, and it sounded fine; I’m like, ‘That sounds… Yeah, I’m okay with that.’”

“When we shipped the game, I got calls from all of my other sound designers friends and audio directors, and they were like, ‘Why would you use just that same gun? Here’s the other places where that gun has appeared.’ That was definitely one of those moments where I realized you’ve got to pay attention to everything that you did, because you don’t want to use the same sounds that someone else did. Even that Wilhelm Scream that everybody seems to use; they’ve been putting that in games lately, and I won’t do it.”

Now he’s getting a bit worked up, when I mention the “man falling and screaming” sound that was in every game trailer in the early 2000s. “There’s a fireball as well,” he adds. “There’s a lot of those that we know that we never use. There’s a redtail hawk that they always use for an establishing shot for a desert. You see a desert and hear (screech sound); it’s that same bird.”

Don’t fall into that trap, he warns. “It’s not hard to generate new content; as long as you’ve got your own microphone and ability to record something, you can come up with something new. It’s not impossible. And it’s good, too! Our guns definitely have personality—I’m not saying that they have more personality, but they’re definitely their own thing.” (source:gamasutra)