Interviews

March 31, 2008

Part 2: Sound Analysis With EA Audio Director Aubrey Hodges
By Louis Bedigian

“You don’t even want to know what we have to do to get the football tackle sounds.”

Part 1 of our sound analysis with EA Audio Director Aubrey Hodges.

“Real life is subtle,” he says. “If I jump up and down you’re never gonna hear the same exact sound twice. It’ll be close but not quite. We’re very sophisticated listeners – humans have very good ears. This is one of the things that used to drive me nuts when playing video games, when you hear the same sound over and over. Well, now it’s different every time. And of course we organize the group of sounds in logical ways that make sense. Small sounds, bigger sounds, even bigger sounds, over-the-top sounds.

“Additionally, we can have a lot of fun, for example, with the crowd. We have several thousand, maybe 5,000 or 6,000 fun things crowd attendees will say in NASCAR, Madden and NCAA. All fun things the crowd can say because now we have the disc space to do it, and we have a mechanism for deliver that. A lot of these things we just didn’t have before. It’s not that we didn’t think of them or didn’t think that’d be cool, we just didn’t have the technology – it didn’t exist yet. Now it does.


Madden 08

“Now the biggest constraints we have are really self-imposed and creative constraints. Disc space is still a little bit of an issue until we go all Blu-ray or all HD it will still be some of an issue. Another thing is, now we have the computing power to do more sophisticated reverbs and effects. On top of the playing of the sound, we can alter the sounds in real-time without nearly killing the CPU that it’ll kill the frame rate. And with the games of today you’ve got to have a high frame rate, so that’s a big factor for us.

“In the past, we just didn’t have the CPU cycles to give some of the things we could think of. Some of the more sophisticated reverbs that make, for example, the cars sound so believable in NASCAR, or the crowd sound so believable in Madden or NCAA. That couldn’t be done on the previous [console] versions, and that’s why we didn’t.

“There’s a lot going on in addition the fact that most of the systems now have surround sound systems built on, and digital outs right there out of the box. We’re supporting that – we’re going out and recording in surround sound for everything we shoot. That’s a very different approach to it. When you are listening to a car, for example in NASCAR, we actually went out to Daytona with a NASCAR and mic’d the living daylights out of that thing, and got that thing in surround several different ways and had the driver take it around and tear that track up. Now when you play the game, what you hear was what was there.

“It’s so cheesy ‘cause it’s been around a while but we say it all the time – if it’s in the game, it’s in the game. That’s how we try to approach it, we try to put it in there to give you the experience of actually doing what we’re trying to show you. So if it’s football or NASCAR, we want you to feel what that feels like. My fellow audio directors throughout the EA organization feel the exact same way and go to the same lengths to capture the sounds for their products as well.”


NFL Head Coach 09

How do you deal with the handheld systems? I would assume you’re in a situation where the consoles have evolved but maybe the handhelds are kind of like the console generation we just had.

Aubrey Hodges: Probably that’s fair. It’s not quite one-to-one because the consoles… Maybe in relation to the PSP, but the DS is a very fun and unique handheld to work on. But it’s pretty different, pretty unique, and it has some pretty serious constraints as you might imagine based on how small the game [cards] actually are.

But we’ve done some – I can’t get too much into this – but we are definitely taking some strides to make the handheld products really cool. Our team at Tiburon are working on a title that I can’t discuss for the DS that is very different. It is not a sports game. And it is very, very cool. And very fun for us to work on. We’re actually writing original music for that. We’ve got some very specialized individuals that are doing the conversion so that it fits nicely on the handheld and sounds great. And we’ve got a pretty nice set of drivers that we can do a lot with sound that the default drivers and default API for sound maybe couldn’t do. We’re trying to take that to the next level as well. It is a more difficult and challenging device to make games and audio specifically for, to be sure. But we are aggressively trying to do our best to ensure that when people buy an EA product for the DS or PSP that they are thrilled with the experience.

This game – the one you can’t mention specifically yet – is it going to be released this year? Or at least unveiled this year?

AH: It’s this year. I think it’s going to be a very pleasant surprise for the fans. I think it’s going to be very fun and very different.

That’s cool. I’m looking forward to it, whatever it is!

AH: It’s fun. I wish I could say more ‘cause I’ve been fooling around with it and playing it myself. I particularly like the DS and PSP. I have both. I have a seven-year-old sun so believe me, I have to have both.

Cool. I love all the systems. I get ‘em immediately when they’re released, and I know it’s maybe a couple years off, but I can’t wait for the next handheld generation. The Nintendo DS 2 or whatever’s going to be next.

AH: Who knows? Holographic screens maybe? [Laughs]

They’ll probably make a more detailed touch screen that one-ups the iPhone.

AH: I think so too, and have a multi-point touch. That’d be a lot of fun. I think it’s already come so far. When I started in this business in 1991, we were still doing with the 286 computers and it was really an interesting time in video games and computer games. I was proud of what I could accomplish way back then on those [platforms], and I took the music seriously back then as well because we had less ammunition to deliver something fun and compelling.

But it’s funny, I made an appearance at Video Games Live as a special guest, and everyone that came up to get autographs or whatever, was only talking about the old stuff. And that’s so weird – I kind of feel like… We are doing new stuff. But people are thrilled with all that old stuff. Probably 20 years from now people will talk about this [new music] as the old stuff! [Laughs]

You’re going to have people who grew up with the modern stuff, and you’re going to have young adults who, as we get older, will look back and say, “Remember that Medal of Honor game?” Actually, I’m doing that now. Frontline is still one of my favorites. I love the sound in that game. That composer, Michael Giacchino, is what got me hooked on the show Lost. I never wanted to watch it, but then one night I overheard the music. I had to turn and look at the screen – that’s how heavily the music got my attention. I was thrilled when EA got Mr. Giacchino back for Medal of Honor because he is amazing.

AH: It’s one of those things where, when we sit down to try and make a game feel, we really believe that we’re trying to bring the emotion, the plausibility, the suspense, we’re trying to add that to the game. We’re not just sitting there and going, “Well, let’s just throw in whatever sound we can find.” It’s really agonizing over every little sound to try and make sure that those are really compelling.

You don’t even want to know what we have to do to get the football tackle sounds. We have been banged up and we’ll do it if that’s what it takes. And we’re not afraid of failure. We try to fail fast if we’re going to fail at all. We’ll try to iterate on any idea we come up with to try to find something cool and better. It’s funny, sometimes downright hysterical. We’ll be down there tackling dummies and sledgehammers and hardhats and anything to try and make the game cooler.

And then of course you run into some brick walls technologically speaking, because all of that has to get programmed. You run into limitations – what can the physics system do, or what information does the game need to “know,” like if you don’t really know how many yards the guy just completed, there’s a certain timeframe you have to wait until you can get the report. How long was the play, so that therefore you can tell the announcer what kind of thing to say.

And you never think of these things until you’re the guy that has to sit down with these really brainy programmer guys and figure out how to make it all work. ‘Cause you can think, “Oh, it’d be so simple. It’s obvious, it must be simple.” But it isn’t simple under the hood ‘cause there’s a lot going on in the game.

A big part of my job is looking at the structure of how the game is built and making sure how the game is going to work and then monitoring it and making sure that we don’t break the game inadvertently. One year everything is working great, but the next year things change and a lot of the game breaks. We have to go back and make sure that all of the stuff that was working works, and that all of the new stuff works.


Tiger Woods 08

The biggest complaint of game commentary is repetition. Oh man, they just said that line, now they’re saying it again. Madden is better about that, but there are still a lot of sports games out there that can’t get away from them repeating lines. Is there anything you can do? Is the technology there yet? Do you need more years?

AH: It’s a couple of reasons. One of the first primary reasons is literally space – to include enough of the commentary at a good enough quality. If you make the quality low enough to really include a bazillion lines or whatever, you start getting so cheesy that you can’t make people feel that they’re there and that the commentary is what you get on television.

Once you get up to that acceptable quality level, then you have to deal with how much will actually fit. Well they have a huge amount in say, football or NASCAR or any of it, there’s a huge amount that’s utilitarian. You’ve got to tell them that he just got four yards. You’ve got to tell them that there’s a car in the rear or that someone’s gonna pass or that you’re out of gas. You’ve gotta say some things – there’s no way to get out of those. And, once you start saying one thing of a given nature, you’ve got to say all of it.

For example, first intent. Well, first and nine. First and eight. What about second and four? All of it has to be there. You can’t leave any of it out. You can’t say he’s on lap six and not seven, eight, nine, 10, and 11. Guess what – now you’ve got 50 lines. And you can’t say it once. You can’t say “that’s lap 10” every time the same way. You need five Lap 10s at 50 laps times five. Every line is like that. Every name has to be said three or four or five times. Every landmark. Every touchdown. Every score. Every city. Every team name. And you’ve got 15,000 lines of nothing but utilities eating up the disc.

Then you go to do the big fun stuff and they’re huge. So if Madden is ranting and raving about this, saying that, or they’re ranting for a full paragraph, we’re only going to be able to fit so many paragraphs on the disc and still have room for the game. We have to sort of limit it to [more concise] things so that you can have more content. And there’s always this yin-yang thing about how many in each given category is enough. Is 20 in each category enough? And even if you have 20 comments, if they were very interesting to listen to the first time, would they be interesting to listen to the fifth time? Because you’re still going to run into that if there’s only 20 of them, over the course of something you play for hours a day, and many, many months of that.

So the dilemma happens when we try to put all this stuff on disc, and the time it takes for them to record. You know these are superstar talent, some of the best in the business, and it’s very difficult to say, “Give us a month of your time.” We get as much as we can and we’re really grateful for how much time that they give us and how great they are in the studio. But there’s definitely a limit to how much we can get out of it.

And the more trademark stuff, like if Madden says something really funny, now you’re going to remember it more, so it’s a catch-22. The more fun and memorable a line is, the more bothered you are when you hear it twice.

These are the kind of constraints we deal with, not to mention the technical nightmare of tracking what was said, what wasn’t said, what happened – if there’s any errors whatsoever in the code, the way the game thinks, then sometimes the sound would play out of place. That we track all the time and try to find any and all of those and kill them and fix them. But it is definitely something where if we had more disc space that would help tremendously.

Given the nature of what we do, I think we do it pretty well. I mean we’re trying to mimic real conversation over the course of the game and make it sound like you’re watching a network broadcast. It’s pretty hard to do that when you have only 20,000 or 30,000 lines. My guess is, honestly, at some point we will probably be in the neighborhood of 130,000 lines. I’m not sure when that day will come.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer all of my questions. As more stuff gets announced, and as you can talk more about Madden and Tiger Woods and all the different games, let’s do this again.

AH: Absolutely. Take care.