We have been working on further audio design for the palaces. Last week a new Palace was born; designed narratively to sound dramatically distinctive, The Palace Of Glass has loads of levels all of which play with the acoustics of highly reflective surfaces. In one level there’s a major twist in functionality (but I can’t tell you what it is yet!)

The footsteps sessions are growing exponentially it seems and we have devised a way of delivering more footsteps more procedurally. This makes everyones life ten times more labour intensive *except* the player of course, who can now enjoy footsteps that are gradually adjust to changes in terrain – thus allowing us to circumnavigate the ‘peg-leg conundrum’.

I’ve just opened a  conversation with software developers ‘Flux’ hoping that they’ll let us try out the hotly awaited new plugins from Ircam Tools. Only just said hello but they seem very nice fellas and we hope that they dig Papa. One of the two plugins in question allow voices to be manipulated according to variables that change percieved age and gender – except it sounds like they’re taking a radically different approach to other tools that have done this in the past and the results are meant to be amazing. The other tool we’re hoping to get our hands on models acoustic space in new and exciting ways. More news to come on that…

I’m off on holiday next week but taking a friend with me – George or KU800 as he’s better known (god I’m a geek!) Anyway I’ll be taking George with me to some nice sounding places and recording binaural ambiences for use in the game. These will include a cornfield and a wood.

I leave you with some pics of the logic automation for the FWT’s voices  - if you dont know what an FWT is, you will.

Yesterday was an excellent day for Team Papa. The first in a series of playtests (this time for the good people of Apple and 4iP) we took over Channel 4’s Drum for nachos, beer and games.

With the glorious Alex Barrow on the accordion, proceedings kicked off with a few rounds of Sangre Y Patatas, the theatre game that inspired Papa Sangre. The rules are simple:

- Wear blindfolds
- One person is killer (‘Sangre’) and the others are prey (‘Patatas’)
- Keep moving
- If you bump into someone you have to greet them with your name – either Sangre or Patatas
- If you are Patatas and you hear Sangre you are dead, and may die as theatrically as you like and retire to the fringes
- The winner is the last Patatas standing

New games included hanging bells and Doritos on the floor as sound hazards. This gave everyone a look into the game world of Papa Sangre; a place where every step matters, where you have to listen and creep in a darkness so dark if you lit a match it would be invisible. And of course it was a good warm up for the ears:

Thanks to everyone who came along, and played both Papa Sangre and Sangre Y Patatas… we have some excellent feedback and playtesting notes to work with. And sorry to those that were freaked by Fluttery-wutteries whispering in their ears or Snufflehogs idly picking at their brains.

If you wondered what Team Papa Sangre looks like (minus Dan the Coder and Neil the Writer) here you go.

And for special bonus edit: chief Sangre Wrangler, Ben Cave, is not in this picture either. The author of this article sends his sincere apologies.

Short version: “When it’s done.”

Longer version: we reckon we’ll be done by early summer — to be specific, June.

Exact day to be determined.

It’s sounding pretty darn good by the way.

Dan Jones is the latest addition to the team, and is applying his considerable talents to turbocharging our audio engine.

Dan is part artist, part designer and part engineer. After pumping steroids into Papa’s world of sound he is heading off to the Santa Fe Institute - Mecca to all things complex and labyrinthine - to explore chaos and swarm theory in the desert. He is responsible for several site-specific audio/video performances, sound design and scores for film and stage, and web-based generative works, plus live and pre-recorded pieces for radio. Check his website, or follow him on Twitter… he is something of The Don™.

Below is a beautiful Dan Jones original. ‘Score Treatments’ sees the surface image of a series of classical scores subjected to techniques mirroring those found within contemporary digital music production: granulation, timestretching, mathematical repetition, and cut-and-splice collage. Welcome along El Jones.

The first time we met they (politely) refused to describe to me exactly what they did, preferring instead to demonstrate it. I was led into our large Black Room Studio here at Somethin’ Else, instructed to put on a pair of goggles (letting in light but basically blindfolding me) and a pair of headphones. They played a 10-15 minute sound file, recorded at 4am in what sounds like a playground with binaural voices and effects.

Throughout the adventure the duo use the space they are moving in, different types of illusion, touch and sound to create something that defies description. The experience was as surprising as it was wonderful and I found myself clumsily thanking them a lot.

Today was the turn of Paul and Nick for the L&S treatment and both absolutely loved it. Martina and Christer have over a decade of experience in sound art—often choreographed and with binaural audio—for audiences all over the world.

Their current project asks some serious questions about how the sense of self itself is created through stimulus — serious shizznit — and in that they’re working with Henrik Ehrsson from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm who can make you feel like a doll’s fingers are attached to you. He was featured in a recent BBC Horizon programme … here’s some more about Henrik from the Beeb.

We really want to find a way to work with them on Papa (fingers crossed it will work out) but in the meantime if you ever come across their work make sure you take time to put the headphones on and turn off your eyes.

1: You are You — this is a first-person game where you, the player, are the person. There is an immersive visceral kick of feeling immediately that it’s you in there. This is not the real world (surreal), but it also isn’t abstract.

2: This is Horror — there are things in the space trying to kill you.

3: Finger Man Walking — walk with your fingers. Every step you take is meaningful and full of feedback; it locates you. It carries an outcome in relation to the threat. You need to understand the stakes on every single step.

4: Sound and Music — the world has sound and music in its fabric. It is the first game created with dynamic binaural sound.

5: Sightless World — it’s a game in pitch darkness, where immersive sound transports you in your imagination wherever you are.  There is no visual representation of space whatsoever. Instead there are safety nets such as *** REDACTED *** to help you. Playing the game teaches you audio cognition in the early stages.

6: *** REDACTED FOR SUSPENSE ***

7: *** REDACTED SPOILAR!!!1!! ! ***

8: *** REDACTED BECAUSE WE CAN ***

9: *** REDACTED TO SAVE KITTENS ***

10: Playing this enriches peoples’ lives — through positive subversion, confidence building and / or co-operation.

It features an interview and pic with Paul Bennun, wearing a very fetching set of yellow and pink headphones, freezing his arse off near London Bridge one February morning, 2010.

It’s a good article and the newspaper industry needs your support, so go and buy the excellent Wired immediately.

We’d love to hear from you!

The most interest we’ve had in the game is about the audio — probably unsurprisingly. So let’s have a quick look at that for our first post.

Well, here’s a couple of members of our team building the first teaser for Papa Sangre, which you can hear here … the rather fabulously good-looking Benjamin Cave, project producer, and the fantastically talented Dr. Nicholas Ryan (sound designer and composer).

There are two main types of audio in the game, both of them binaural.

One comes from a software engine that can simultaneously position a number of sounds behind your head — or anywhere else — and move them about in real time relative to where you move in the game (which, we may have mentioned elsewhere on the site, is BLOODY HARD TO DO, at least on a handheld device).

We haven’t got a name for our engine (maybe suggest one — we’ll use it forever and give you a credit!).

The other type of sound involves a few novel techniques using the extraordinary dummy head Neumann lent us (thank you Neumann). The head has the same shape, density and features as a human head, with two exceptional microphones in the ear canals. These shots show Ben and Nick moving around some of our studio speakers (playing mono audio) relative to the dummy head, which records what it hears. This creates flat two-channel files (left and right), which are beautifully binaural when you listen back on headphones.

This is not the first iPhone game to feature binaural audio: you can find a few games on the App Store that use a dummy head or something similar to record two-channel binaural files. The beautiful Zen Bound springs to mind. To the iPhone CPU this is as demanding as playing a stereo file (mainly because it is just a two-channel audio file!). The difference here is that we’re also generating binaural audio in real time.

It means the player can move about freely inside the game, and the game procedurally uses an HRTF to work out how sound sources should change relative to the player’s movements in real time.

This was, by the way, BLOODY HARD.