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The Squelchy, Messy Art of Video Game Sound Effects

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“Step into my office,” says Joanna Fang. OK, but to the untrained eye it’s a kleptomaniac’s hoard: rolls of Astroturf, mud and moss, wooden planks, violin bows, smashed keyboards, plastic boxes brimming with shoes, a full armory of axes and swords, a sand pit, a bamboo fence, rocks, half a bike, smashed iPhones, a boat’s anchor chain, a grimy car door. “Never trust a clean foley stage,” she says.

Fang is a senior foley artist at Sony PlayStation. Her job is to put sound to video games. So of course her stash includes a lot of leather jackets, since “in games, everyone wears leather.” But other common video game tropes—assault rifles and the like—aren’t close at hand in her San Diego studio. Her work is all about improvisation: Fang trained as a classical musician, and now everything is an instrument. “I always say that the best props are ones that you can play like a Stradivarius,” she says. “They just sing and they sound great. And you could do them anywhere, anytime, and get super expressive with them, right?”

Shake a hunting knife and a torque wrench together for the sound of a gun being reloaded. Tape wooden sticks to gardening gloves to make a cat’s paw. Toilet plungers on concrete are a clopping horse, crushed charcoal becomes crackling snow. To break bones, Fang crushes a pistol holster packed with pasta shells; smashed skulls require hammering melons—for the squish of the goo inside.

Just as droning strings can transform a humdrum street into a threatening alley, Fang uses her sound effects to prime our emotions. “It’s like weaponized ASMR,” she says. “We’re trying to get the audience to feel something.” But even with such a well-outfitted space—she extols the virtues of her concrete water pit—foley is an art of limitations. Struggling to embody a simple sound effect (Whoopi Goldberg in flat shoes, sauntering up to a bar) led her to a personal revelation. “I was having such a hard time with that cue because I didn’t feel right in my body,” Fang says. “I used foley for so long as this perfect art form that helped me shake off, frankly, my gender dysphoria.”

Foley artist Joanna Fang
Photograph: Beto Soto

Fang’s recent projects include one of the most acclaimed games of 2022, God of War Ragnarök. In one scene, at a Norse bar, a character named Atreus places his bow and arrow on a table. For that sound, Fang rubs wood and leather together on wooden planks. Later, Atreus slides down a collapsing balcony, so Fang scrapes the planks vigorously with leather and metal and, incongruously, a boxing glove to simulate armor. At the denouement, as a bouncer is strangling Atreus, the melon and shell pasta come into play, along with a wet rag and some snapped celery as the mythical hammer Mjölnir flies through the air and explodes the attacker’s skull.

Foleying a game takes months. So, as with every art form at the moment, a question hangs in the air: Does Fang feel threatened by the rise of creative AI? In a word, no. She welcomes the help, the chance to cut down on the sheer manual labor. “The cartilage in my knees has been withering away since I was, like, 20,” she says, stomping up and down in heels.

An AI could conjure the din of cars and citizens in a dense cityscape, but the characters in a scene are her domain: “The game is all about their mission, their goals, their beliefs, and their textures and performances. So I can imagine a future where machine learning is in foley, but I don’t believe it’ll ever take away the simple and beautiful performative nature of it.”


This article appears in the October 2023 issue. Subscribe now.

 

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate – Cracked.com

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate  Cracked.com

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96 – CBC.ca

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96  CBC.ca

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A misspelled memorial to the Brontë sisters gets its dots back at last

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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.

More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.

The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.

They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.

“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”

It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.

Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.

“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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