Sound reasearch report

Sound Research

Sound is used within every interactive media product, it gives a sense of atmosphere, creates emotion and immersion. Sounds are needed in media such as films and television to keep the audiences attention and help them feel more indulged in the film. The way that they include these sounds into films is something called Foley. They always film the scenes and keep the original sound for reference, but every sound is added in afterwards. They have to record everything from the sound of clothing as it brushes against each other or the shells of bullets hitting the ground; a lot of these sounds would not be heard on the original recording, but are added into make the audience feel even more like they are within the film to give better viewing experience. All viewers can tell apart the various objects in a picture - an actor, a table the walls of a room, listeners barely ever perceive sound so analytically. They tend to take sound in as a whole, despite its actually being purposely built from many parts.

A lot of music is used in films which help set the atmosphere, sounds that do this is called ambience; this can also give a lot of emotion to the audience. All the sounds have to work with video to give the right feeling across, if its an upsetting scene then the music would go slower and quieter, but as things get happier the tempo builds and the pitch would change. Games use the same ways to keep players interested and focused so they want to play it all the way through. A lot of dialogue is used in film, TV and game to give information across and bring characters to life and you make a real bond with them. The basics of sound are things like pitch and tone. Pitch is how high or low the sound is, which the frequency is measured by the particles that vibrate. Tone is a sound in terms of the quality, pitch, origin and power of the sound. These would be used to create the right sound for what is happening, because sounds are always added on after the filming they have to make sure the sounds are at the right volume for the action that took place. With games they have to think of how the characters would each speak, using the right pitch to make the characters more believable; such as in a game with a dragon that talks, they would need the character to have a deep pitch to the voice and to give them characteristics they change how the talk. Most interactive media uses digital sound instead of analogue, this gives a lot of bonuses; digital files can be copied as many times as possible without the loss of quality, they can also be edited a lot more effectively also vocals are a lot clearer than when played by analogue. Sound is used often in the web, either for streaming purposes or music on adverts or pages. The sound can be found in many different formats, the one mainly used for streaming music such as radio broadcasts would be RealAudio, this is because the audio can be streamed with low bandwidth internet. A lot of music you get nowadays on the internet would be saved as mp3 files, this is because of how small you can compress the files to about a tenth of their original size, still with close to CD quality, because of their small size they are the easiest to download or use in videos etc.