Worldizing is not a new concept. The term was first coined by Walter Murch as the process of taking recorded and edited sound or music into the field, playing it back then recording the result. The process was developed because of the limitations of the technology back in the day. Nowadays we have high quality convolution reverbs and processors such as Altiverb, TL Space, Waves IR, Space Designer, Speakerphone etc etc which can do a pretty damn good job of replicating a space or piece of equipment. However this stuff isn't perfect and more importantly (in my case) isn't cheap. So for me wordizing is still a technique I turn to when I want a particular sound or effect that I can't quite get with my meagre digital means.
Worldizing Links;
Nice example from Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring;
So where does this all fit into The Game Audio Tutorial? Well for one of the exercises in the book we needed some dialogue to guide the player around the map, this bit of dialogue was going to be delivered by a small radio. Now at this point I could have started adding eq and distortion to the dialogue lines trying to approximate the sound of a small speaker but I already had something a little different in mind.
A couple of years ago I bought one of these (see pic) its a Smokey Amp by Zinky Electronics it has a really thin raspy distorted tone which would be great for a walkie-talkie esque sound.
So finally processing steps;
- Original dialogue recorded @ 96k 24bit into Digidesign 003 using a SE Electronics 2200a
- For obvious reasons the Smokie Amp doesn't really like line level signals and seemed to produce the best results when run with audio from my iPhone
- Worldized dialogue recorded back into Digidesign 003 @ 96k 24bit using a Rode NTG-3