Even though our hand-in date was June 2nd, and the final crits for the VR experience were on 22nd May, Ana wanted all of our sound assets and music sent to her by the 16th of May. I felt that this was fair, as this ensured she would have enough time to properly insert all of the sounds into the game in time for the crit, which in turn meant that there would hopefully only be small tasks to work on before the hand-in. This would’ve also been useful for her as we have not heard from the other VR student for the entirety of the process.

In the end, the process ended up being more collaborative between the sound artists than we originally had planned. We all had individual roles originally, however they tended to merge over time as different group members put in different amounts of work. This was helpful when it came to aspects such as foley, as the collaborative process in this instance was good for getting different ideas on how to make different sounds. When it comes to background music and recurring motifs, which had originally all been my responsibility, other group members also put music forward so as to not put all the burden on me for this responsibility, which was useful as there is a lot of music needed for the kind of experience we have made.

Just after our deadline for handing in sounds to Ana, she sent us some of the scenes she’d been working on for the experience. This was interesting, as I hadn’t seen too much of what she’d been working on since the first crit:

My music was mainly used in the Design School level of the experience (the experience is split into three levels once you make it into the lift – Screen School, Design School and Media School). There was a lot more music making involved in the creation of the project than I would’ve initially anticipated, so I’m thankful other members stepped up to help.

The design of the experience certainly leans into a more surreal aesthetic than I had originally imagined, but I think it’s overwhelming in a good way. It gets across the stressful aspects of the student experience and pokes fun at the university.

As artists in the 21st century, we need to take our carbon footprint into account when making our work to preserve the planet for future generations. I’ve previously heard about the immense amount of environmental resources that gaming requires, and I wanted to take a more detailed look at what this means for the VR industry, and hopefully try to find examples of companies attempting to work sustainably.

Having done some thinking and research, there are multiple ways in which VR can be harmful to the environment. Most advanced VR hardware is made from plastic, which in turn is usually is made from fossil fuels, and the process of turning the fossil fuels into plastic is also very resource intensive. There’s also the question of waste, after the technology has passed its prime and people move on to the next most advanced option. Whilst the hardware at the moment is generally of a good quality and built to last, this might not be the case in the future as the technology becomes more readily accessible, and we might see something akin to smartphones in recent years, where products gradually deteriorate over quite a short amount of time, creating a lot of ‘digital waste’. There are products such as Google Cardboard which aim to be a more sustainable way of accessing VR, however these really aren’t very advanced and require a smartphone.

According to a 2019 peer-reviewed study(1) on the environmental impacts of gaming, 24 megatons of carbon dioxide are made each year from the US alone when it comes to energy use. This doesn’t even take into account the other factors I mentioned in the paragraph above.

When researching companies that are trying to do something about the impact on the planet from VR and gaming, I could find surprisingly few examples. There were a few articles about certain industries moving a few operations over to VR to reduce carbon emissions (such as aerospace, car manufacturing and oil), but not any statements from companies that are leading the VR revolution on how they might pledge to keep their impact low. Also, from the industries I’ve found that do use it, it seems more like virtue signalling than meaningful change. Hopefully time will change this, but I’m not so sure.

Ultimately, I don’t think there’s enough being done to make sure that the VR industry is sustainable. Then again, the same can be said for most industries.

References

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40869-019-00084-2

Recently, we had a couple of lectures from Serra, who teaches the VR course. I found the topics she covered very engaging, and one thing she brought up which gave me food for thought was the idea of the ‘Digital Twin’, which is a concept being brought very much into the near future by companies such as Meta:

As someone who’s grown up with social media since the age of 11 (and even then as a younger child I was still on sites that let you create an online alter-ego like Club Penguin and Bin Weevils), I am very used to having a digital version of myself online, for anyone to see. It’s something that I only really thought about the consequences of long after I was given access to these kinds of sites as a young child, and to be honest I really wish I had not been given access to them until I was a lot older. There’s a strange sort of relationship that a lot of people of my generation seem to have with their digital lives – they already feel like an extension of reality, like a whole different world where we have to present ourselves in a completely different manner. In my experience, this has led to me feeling terribly unsure about who I really am, what I like and dislike, etc. This is most likely due to the sheer abundance of information and opinion that is spewed out at social media users on a daily basis. Whilst there has been good that has come from this technology, I feel as though we are losing sense of ourselves already.

That’s why I’m quite terrified for concepts such as the Metaverse to become reality. I already feel uncomfortable with the digital version of myself as it is, and I have made great effort in recent months to try and mentally detach myself from it. I do not want my life to rely on this completely fake reality where I have a bad-looking caricature of myself being the only representation that most people see of my thoughts and my body. Especially when this caricature is owned by Mark Zuckerberg.

I remember watching the documentary ‘Life 2.0’ a few years ago, which was about a site called Second Life which in many ways is a precursor to the Metaverse. People would spend hours and hours every day on this site, looking at their alter-ego, maybe trying to escape their day-to-day life. I remember thinking then, that it was a bit strange and lonely. In my opinion, concepts such as these should not become part of mainstream culture.

Maybe this is why I’ve had some trouble engaging with this unit so far. All in all, I am not very interested in VR at all, and I believe people should seek real life experiences. I understand there can be some educational uses (e.g. learning how to perform surgery, etc.) but other than this, I really fail to see the excitement in it. This isn’t to say I’m right and everybody else is wrong, but the digital world is something I personally try to stay away from as much as possible (with not much success).

To make my next track for the game, I started off with a 3 note sequence using the ‘Lap Steel: Resonance Chaos’ preset made by Spitfire Audio. When I’m stuck for ideas, I often like to use a lot of the LABS sounds by Spitfire Audio, as they’re good at generating soundscapes to built ideas off.

I then added a counter-atmosphere made with the Hackney Angels preset, which I tweaked somewhat.

After the 40-second mark in the piece, I decided to bring in a melody on the electric guitar. Instead of just playing all of the notes in one take, I decided to record each note at a time and fade them in and out, as if they are kind of cascading like a sonic waterfall. This adds a lot more depth to the melody in my opinion, even if it was a pain to automate!

I think the heavily distorted sound blends well with the lap steel preset, as they both have some similar sonic qualities. When I brought the guitar melody in, I also decided to change up the notes on the LABS tracks, to make them more varied, instead of just having the same repeating loop. You can hear this most clearly at the end of the track above.

As opposed to the guitar sound I used in the previous track I made for the game, this time I didn’t really use any guitar-specific pedal or amp simulations. The sound is just the guitar plugged straight into Logic, just run through a couple of Logic’s stock distortion plugins which aren’t really designed for guitar, and the Space Designer convolution reverb plugin. I prefer this more dry sound when working on atmospheric pieces – I’m not sure why but when I’ve used it in the past it’s just seemed to blend into mixes better.

The rest of the track is quite simple. I kept all of the sonic elements the same, but added in more melodic ideas on the guitar, whilst occasionally returning to the original motif I started with. I think I am more happy with this track than the other one I made, as I feel like I put more time and effort into it. I also prefer the more chilled out, ambient aura of this piece to the anxious mood of the last one.

For the foley recording, we decided to all go into the foley studio at LCC to record the tracks together, instead of just 1 or 2 of us being lumbered with the task. We were given a list by Ana of all the sounds she required for the game, so on paper it was a very straightforward process. However, we hit a problem when half the time we had booked out in the studio was spent trying to figure out why none of the signal from the foley room was making its way to the composition studio, where our DAW was set up for recording. After one and a half hours, we decided it was best for us to just hire out other equipment as we couldn’t get anything to work and we didn’t want to waste all of our time. Theo from our group hired out a Zoom H5 interface and also a MixPre6 kit. We couldn’t get the MixPre6 to work so we just plugged a stereo shotgun microphone into the H5 so we could quickly get our recordings done.

We managed to record a few sounds, such as footsteps, fire, water, speech, fish sounds and more, and overall I’d say this foley recording session was a success, even though we did run into difficulty at the start. Once we managed to get our setup running, we could get through the sounds on our list very efficiently, and it was useful having a pre-made list of sounds to go through, as it meant we weren’t stuck for ideas halfway through and we knew exactly what we had to do.

The plan now is for another member of the group to mix the sounds we recorded and send them to Ana to put into the game.

My first finished track for the background music in the VR experience is the one I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs about our first crit. Unfortunately, due to not being able to access my laptop before the the session I hadn’t been able to upload it to the google drive for feedback, however I have now finished it.

This track was primarily based off a session I booked for myself at the synthesis workbench at LCC, and started off as a repeating sequence on the Make Noise 0 Coast synth:

I recorded the sequence playing for about 3 minutes whilst gradually adjusting the controls on the synth, adding and taking away elements of the percussiveness that make up the sound.

I then placed the London Atmos 2 patch from Native Instruments on top of the sequence to provide some ambience, and added some distortion on top.

This was about as far as I got before the first crits.

When I came back to the piece later on, I decided to keep it mostly the same throughout. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. I want to keep the tracks fairly minimal – this is so they don’t overpower the other aspects of the game
2. It’s best if they are simple so they can be looped easily, as you don’t know how long a player will stay on a certain part of the experience

The only other element I added was an occasional piece of guitar feedback that comes in and out of the piece:

This sort of gives a sound reminiscent of radio static, which I feel reflects the mood of confusion and overwhelm that is going to be a part of the experience.

Now the piece is finished, I am happy with it. Obviously, this is only the first and I aim to make more for the game, but I think the use of low, repetitive synths with a clicky-percussive noise gives off an anxious feeling which is what I wanted to get across from my sonic contributions to the piece, as it represents a lot of my feelings towards university – being neurodiverse I can often feel very overwhelmed, anxious and stressed about my work. For my next piece I will try to make something that contrasts this.

During the break between terms, I visited a private view for the Juliette Sturlèse and Marjan Moghaddam joint exhibition at the Anna Kultys Gallery in Cambridge Heath, East London. I was invited to this last minute, but it became very relevant to what I am studying at the moment as it is a mixed reality exhibition – i.e. part real world, part virtual world.

This was an interesting experiment in terms of gallery design. The actual space itself is quite small, so the gallery has opted to make use of a VR headset to expand the amount of works they can show. There is definitely a stark difference between the physical and digital space, both in terms of what they can show but also the impact they both leave on the viewer. Personally, I still preferred the physical gallery space. The works shown physically were that of Sturlèse – her work is about sense of space, and was mostly made with astroturf among other materials, depicting abstract scenes and making use of lots of greens and blues. Although I found it somewhat difficult to find what specific message Sturlèse was trying to convey with her pieces, they were large, and they certainly gave me a sense of perspective, that I felt was missing from Moghaddam’s virtual works.

Moghaddam’s art was displayed in a giant virtual gallery, full of digital sculptures and art hanging on the ‘walls’ – this was interspersed with old Iranian revolution songs that were linked to each piece. Personally, although the idea may have been a strong one, I found the presentation rather lacklustre. The walls and floor in the virtual space were very plain, and overall it just had a very unfinished feel to it. Maybe if more effort had been put into the presentation of the world around the art, I would have been more convinced by this digital exhibition space, however it felt like this way of showing the art was more of a novelty than it was something that genuinely added to the emotions and ideas behind Moghaddam’s work. I didn’t really get a sense of scale that I had experienced with Sturlèse’s work, and ultimately I felt unimpressed by the digital space, as I have been before when I’ve previously encountered these kinds of spaces (albeit on my laptop, not on a VR headset).

Maybe as technology develops, these sorts of ideas will become more impressive in practice, however at the moment I am still much more in favour of physical exhibition spaces.

Our first group crits for our project so far also provided me with the chance to look at the first visual draft of the VR experience so far. Before we went up and presented what we have at the moment, Ana gave us all the opportunity to walk through the space on a VR headset. At the moment, it’s still quite basic but I’m very impressed with how Ana has managed to model the building so far.

So far the walkthrough allows the player to walk through the entrance of the building up to the lift in the tower block, and then to be transported to a different level of the building (this will eventually become 3 levels). At the moment the level that is available is just an idea of a surrealist landscape, but this will probably change at some point.

Annoyingly, although I had worked on a sonic idea for the experience in preparation for the crit, I didn’t have access to my laptop over the weekend before the session so I couldn’t upload it to the Google Drive for ideas to be presented, due to me moving over the weekend and accidentally leaving my laptop at my old home. The idea I wanted to present was based on a sequenced loop I had worked on at the synth desk in LCC a few weeks ago. I did try to come in early before the crit on the day to recreate what I had made but I wasn’t happy with the result so I decided not to upload it.

Overall, we had mostly good feedback on the sound assets and visual elements of the experience. One thing that was mentioned was that we might want to work more collaboratively on each aspect of the sound design, instead of dividing up roles and only focussing on one element each. This would mean that we all get to learn something about each aspect of the sound design of the experience, whilst also preventing certain aspects of the sound being left to the last minute if the person who is responsible for it doesn’t put enough work in. This is something we have taken on board, and we will try to work more collaboratively with each other when it comes to the foley, music, background ambience etc.

It was also useful to see how the other groups are getting along as we can compare their progress to ours and also take inspiration from the way they are working together.

We recently had a meeting with one of the students from the VR course, Ana. We were supposed to meet with another collaborator, but unfortunately they couldn’t make it to this session.

In this meeting we (the sound artists) brought our ideas to Ana to see what she thought of them and to think about how we could get the project moving. We’ve decided to move ahead with the satirical walkthrough of LCC that I explained in the previous blog post, and in this meeting we divided responsibilities and looked at possible points of reference for inspiration. I put myself forward for making soundtrack music and reoccurring motifs for the experience. These were the other collaborator’s roles:

I’ve chosen to mainly focus on the music, as I come from a popular music production background – when dividing roles we all decided we should play to our strengths. We did mention having small teams to do everything on each individual floor i.e. group 1 does all the sounds for level 1, group 2 does all the sounds for level 2 etc, but we thought that this would lead to a disjointed experience for the viewer – The whole experience should be cohesive.

Below is a moodboard of aesthetic routes the VR designers might want go down:

There is a lot of surrealist imagery in here – this is different to how I thought we might want it to look, however I’m sure we can still explore the same concepts with these aesthetics.

Ana also came up with a preliminary timeline for when we will want to get certain tasks done, which we will try to stick to as much as possible, although from experience in the past I know that this can be difficult with group work:

Having been put together in our groups for the the collaboration unit, the sound artists from our group had a discussion at the end of one of our lectures about our preliminary ideas for the virtual reality experience that is being made in collaboration with the BA2 VR students at LCC.

The idea we had the resonated the most with all of us who are at the discussion was a satirical walkthrough of the tower block at LCC where the experience explores a lot of the stresses/problems a student might have with their time at the University i.e. overwhelm from workload, a lot of our fees going towards the new campus we will never study in, homesickness, etc. This is a topic we were all able to get behind as we all have our own unique experiences within the university that we feel we would be able to get across through the project.

We could use a lift to transport the viewer between all of these experiences on different floors – this would allow for us to allow different sonic and aesthetic concepts on each level, and ensures that every member of the group will have something to do.

We were also thinking of potentially adding some aspects of horror/surreal imagery to the experience, but we will refine these ideas once we talk to our collaborators from the VR course.