Sound Layers and Semantics
| The card's front face | The card's back face |
This design pattern has been classified as
an Aggregator Pattern after version 1.0
Consequently, it is no longer represented as a card
(i.e. ceased being part of the deck) since version 2.0
Synopsis
| Grouping design decisions according to their semantics. |
Relationships
Context:
Sound Design in Games 
.
Parts:
Ambiance 
, Foley 
, Sound Effects 
, Music 
, Dialogue 
.
Makes use of:
Acoustic Ecology 
.
Description
Sounds can be structured in layers according to its semantics and communicative purpose. The layers are: Ambiance, Foley, Sound Effects, Dialogue, and Music ([pending Peck, 2001, 2007)]. Addressing sound design decisions according to such grouping may be useful when establishing high level exploration goals and/or when wrapping the lower-lever explorations according to the semantics of the sounds that will be needed to implement them.
According to mindset and guidelines([pending)] on the basis of the work here presented, the explorations of Sound Design in Games benefit from considering all these layers in a holistic manner that may allow to produce an Acoustic Ecology rather then a superimposition of sounds.
It is also worth mentioning that the exploration of each of the sound levels does not imply, by no means, that sounds representing that level ought to be included in the design. The exploration can consist precisely in not including sounds of a particular level (e.g., no Dialogue and no Music).
Examples
In Half-Life 2 the player feels immersed in an Acoustic Ecology where sounds belonging to each of the layers has been explored
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External Resources
Peck, N., Beyond the library: Applying film postproduction techniques to game sound design. in Proc. of Game Developers Conference, (San Jose CA, USA, 2001).
Peck, N. CoFesta/TGS Tokyo, Japan.(2007)
The presentation of the pattern in [pending] (Alves & Roque, 2010)
guidelines (Alves & Roque, 2009, 2011)
