Last week, we asked if the community had any questions for our Audio Team! Since there were so many great questions, we've split their answers into two parts. Today's questions are all answered by Kane, our Audio Lead. Check out part one in today's news post!

How big is the sound team?

We have 5 sound designers and 2 composers.

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Any stories of memorable unused SFX that you have hanging around because the original content it was going toward got shelved?

This happens occasionally. Something might change quite late in the process, perhaps a skill is redesigned for a monster or a monster is moved to a different place. In any case, we always keep things, as you just never know where it can be used.

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Do you keep a 'back catalog' for in house sounds / music that hasn't been used? What's that like?

When we have a bit of downtime between leagues or projects (which hasn’t happened for quite some time!) then we like to dig into making some sound palettes or building blocks. This usually involves theorizing a theme or sound and then collecting source and manipulating it to achieve various types of audio. For example, how does Vaal blood magic sound? This then gives us unique resources for the future and expands our sound library.

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How does the workflow go from creation to release and how much creative freedom is given proportionally to visual design?

Audio is inevitably last in the pipeline, other than quality assurance testing. Typically art in the game (depending on what it is) goes from game design to concept art through modeling, rigging, animation, visual effects and then finally… Audio! But we do our best to get ahead of the curve and create audio where we can in advance, as the final push when things all come to us can be overwhelming otherwise.

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Who is the Hans Zimmer of Game Sound Design, who are your professional heroes?

It is hard not to think of Ben Burtt when it comes to sound design in general, as he was such an innovator of how to approach sound design. Also, Matt Uelmen’s sound design on Diablo II is still inspiring to this day.

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Do you have a favourite sounding build(s)? How much effort goes into making all the sounds fit together? I've noticed that sometimes builds can sound almost rhythmical which I think is really neat!

When thinking of builds, this usually gets me thinking about problems that we need to solve. In our game, builds can get very intense with what is translated on screen. It’s a tricky thing for us to ensure skills sound satisfying both early-game and late-game.

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What is the most interesting part of this job for you?

Continually trying to improve on our work, to make things more satisfying and to try and find a balance of control and chaos, are all things I find really interesting to work on and keep things fresh on a daily basis.

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What sort of innovations do you have planned for Path of Exile 2 that you can talk about?

Ambiences will be much more dynamic. In Path of Exile 1, these are mostly stereo loops with occasional extra elements of control, like being near the shoreline. In Path of Exile 2, we have expanded on this greatly and have a lot of ways now to dynamically change how the environment sounds. This will help make areas feel more immersive and alive. We’re also more careful how we mix ambiences now, as I think they tended to be a bit too loud and dense in Path of Exile 1. We want Kamil’s music to shine, and we work closely with him to ensure any tonal elements in the ambience work with the key of the music. Music and ambience occupy a lot of the same space and we need them to work together without clogging up the soundscape.

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Other things we are doing involve completely rebuilding all on-hit audio from scratch, custom sounds for currency drops and other items, unique sounds for equipping, moving and unequipping items and a much more complex custom real-time mixing system for the entire game. There’s a lot of other things going on, but we’ll reveal more about it all later!

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Are there any online courses or specific schooling you would recommend for someone wanting to learn more about a job like yours?

There is such a huge amount of freely available knowledge out there now that I think it’s a great time to get into sound design. Start on YouTube, start recording and manipulating sounds, start redesigning trailers or clips from games and you are already heading in the right direction. There are of course schools and courses available too, but nothing sells your skills better than the work itself and having a great showreel is key. Having a good body of actual sound design work goes a long way. There’s also great tools that won’t cost you anything where you can get started. Such as Reaper, which you can trial for free until you are ready to purchase it: https://www.reaper.fm/

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Do you have any work tips for other sound designers?

Invest in yourself. Upgrade your skills. Don’t be complacent or lament not getting ‘that’ job. Continue to record, make awesome sounds and you’ll get there eventually!

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How did you manage to achieve such a pleasant sound of Malachai's head explosion?

Plenty of bone crunching… Aka vegetable torture.

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How did you make that tasty sound when artifacts are collected from Expedition chests?

MichaelC was responsible for this, so I’ve asked him to fill in here!
MichaelC, Supporting Composer: Scraping leather, crunching gravel, and dropping bottle caps. Processing was then some light frequency shifting and saturation. Quite simple, but satisfying.

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More broadly than "what makes sound so satisfying?", is there any kind of science or psychology behind making a sound satisfying, or what sounds humans find satisfying to hear repeatedly? If so, how do you leverage that when designing sounds for skills, item drops, etc?

This is a great question! We have interesting discussions about this when working on skills. A sound designer may work on a new skill, create some great sounds and we get it into the game but then discover something doesn’t feel right. It might be that it actually is just too intense, and when it’s used repeatedly, it becomes fatiguing. Unfortunately there is no ‘secret sauce’ answer to how or why something works or feels satisfying, and it really is a gut feeling when something starts working. I maintain a cautious ear for making sure things do not feel ‘outside’ of the game or the mix, which I think is important for making everything feel inside the world. Just know that we take a great amount of care when making skill audio and we are always looking for that unique flavor or character to make something feel satisfying, and that can come from a variety of sources.

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Why is directional audio in the game and why is it so good?

Directional audio helps make the game feel immersive and gives a sense of distance.

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The shattering sound in itself is a feature that people go out of their way to build for, so I wonder why did shock never receive something similar? Or alternative ailments since those came out later.

It is difficult to determine exactly why a sound becomes notorious. There are some sounds that have a legacy and memories tied to them, and we shouldn’t mess with that. Some things we are reluctant to change in Path of Exile 1, just in case it has a negative effect on the player experience, as our goal is only to enhance that, not hinder it.

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How do you make the voice effects on bosses like Searing Exarch, Eater of World, Sirus etc?

Usually it’s a combination of pitch shifting, where we lower the pitch of the actors' recordings so that they sound ‘bigger’ and thus more scary or ominous. Then depending on the aesthetic or what we are aiming for, it’s a combination of various other effects such as reverb, distortion and modulation. The hard part is making sure we keep things intelligible with all the various effects going on.

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Would you give us a breakdown behind the transformation of voice-acted lines for bosses and NPCs? How do you decide what sorts of audio transformation effects to apply to match a character's personality or physical description?

There’s a bunch on this in the above answer, but I’ll expand a bit here on how we make decisions. Really, a lot is informed by what we see in the concept art, model and the animations. It can be very subtle changes that make a lot of difference in the end and most of what dictates the sound of these characters are the actors' performance. So it’s important that we give them the best direction possible during the recording phase, then the processing is the fun part!

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I want to know what kind of sound library is used in the process of making SFX. Do you use a self-made sound library that recorded it at GGG, or do you use a commercial SFX library?

We have a mixture. We record a bunch of stuff but we also have a substantial library of commercial sound packs.

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I’m just curious what the general process for coming up with a sound is. Is a lot of experimentation needed when a particular idea of a sound is needed? Or the audio guys will already have some sense what might create that sound from experience?

Over time, you gravitate towards particular things once you’ve established what works and where. But we are also mindful of trying to keep things unique and to challenge ourselves. We are all experienced enough to find what works eventually for the task at hand, but the cool part for me is that we all get there in our own way. That’s why having such a talented team of different people is so exciting and rewarding, everyone has their own artistic watermark.

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Can all kinds of sound be created synthetically from scratch?

I would say a great deal can. But for our purposes, we try to lean towards more organic sounds (albeit processed) as our game is quite dark and gritty.

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Are any of the team into modular synth hardware, and is it used at all in the game?

Michael and Dominic both have modular synth units. I sometimes make light of how they never seem to be turned on though… But when they are, they look pretty.

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