Sound Designer Joanna Orland gave a talk back at GDC ’09 about the construction of ambience, entitled: ‘Bringing Ambience To The Foreground: Enhancing Emotion Through Ambient Sound Design’, and this has also formed a foundational basis to my approach to the sound ambience in Taphobos. The whole talk is fantastic, but I have particularly honed in on the section in which she talks about surreal vs real sound within a soundscape.  I’ve used this to great effect in my approach to constructing the sound of Taphobos – Orland talks about the use of surreal sound in horror specifically, and how the ambience leans heavily on surrealist sounds to sell the fear element of the visual. She also notes that the character sounds, the footsteps and foley, are kept painfully real, in order to connect the player/viewer to the character. I’ve done the same in Taphobos – the player sounds, footsteps, foley etc are all very dry, very clear and very real sounding. The ambience however, is not – the actual sound of a church is very mundane, and very bland. I’ve hyped it however, and included a lot of extra elements – to give it more life. I also included elements – such as the bowed cymbals – which add a lot of surrealist creepiness to the scene.

(LO4)