Many of the creepy sounds created for Singularity are just recordings of ordinary things that are used in effective ways. Sometimes all it takes is a little player imagination to make players feel tense. For example, under the right circumstances, even the innocent bell-like music of a child’s toy can be a fearful thing. Most sounds grew to life through signal processing, like pitching sounds down to make them bigger and more menacing. On occasion we started off with a sound that was eventually removed; it’s only purpose to help inform us that, “Hey, this type of sound just isn’t compelling enough”.

Infected Life

Many of Singularity’s creatures are ordinary people deformed by E99, so it seemed appropriate to use the human voice as a starting point and then “infect” it. Recordings of pigs, horses, elephants, and even sounds you might hear around home like a toilet getting plunged provided some ugly sonic textures to mix in, which made the voices more twisted and horrific.

Creature sounds always developed from organic ingredients and most of them had some sort of wet quality. People generally don’t like the sound of wet things even a quick kiss can come across as uncomfortable if it sounds too wet so we really wanted to take advantage of that. At various points in the game you may be walking through rooms and hallways that are covered with slimy nests and tentacle things. One doesn’t pay much attention to them after a while but the oozing sound they produce makes them very uncomfortable to be around.

Sometimes vocalizations such as breathing and choking sounds were used as templates for sequencing animal growls and grunts. The timing and order of sounds coming from the actor’s mouth and throat is just as useful as the sound itself. Making creatures sound like they are breathing is an effective way to make them more realistic. For example, a monster should take a big breath in before letting out a big scream and will need to take another breath before letting out another one. If a monster happens to accumulate some saliva in its mouth, it may have to swallow it at some point to prevent choking on it. Such subtle behaviors are present in the actor’s performance and are cues to help the sound designer create more believable creature sounds.

Zeks

Zeks are the most prominent creature in Singularity and they come in several varieties, which seemed to grow over the course of development. Early in the project, Raven outsourced sound for the original Zek’s voice. We weren’t all together happy with the result the voice sent to us sounded not unlike an infuriated monkey – so a lot of signal processing work was done to make it scarier. Namely, we enhanced it by making the sound deeper and more guttural. The process of evaluating and adjusting creature sounds occurred regularly. In most cases, when a creature sound was revisited, the goal was to make it a little more powerful and threatening because the entire game was sounding scarier each month.

For each species of Zek, the sound came together differently. For example, the voice of one particular species of Zek has a speech-like quality, which was created by mixing in gibberish based on Russian language Russian words were diced up, re-pitched and reversed into something altogether different. This gave the creature an air of intelligence. Since he is especially large and strong, thunder cracks were occasionally mixed in to add a more oppressive vibe. These two elements helped to provide contrast against sounds produced by the other Zeks.

In the following recording a number of human vocal sounds can be heard, which were used as starting points for a Zek’s voice. Immediately following each of these examples is the final sound that developed from it. Without hearing the originals, you might not have guessed these sounds started out relatively characterless.

Read the rest of the post along with audio examples here:

http://www.ravensoftware.com/blog/2010/07/09/the-origin-and-design-of-sounds-for-singularity/