How I Became an Interaction Designer
In 2005 I was working as a sound editor on the PlayStation 2 game, “Unreal Championship 2,” at Technicolor Interactive in Burbank. Months earlier I had finished editing dialog on a different Xbox title, “Jade Empire,” that set the current record of lines of dialog in a game, at just over 12,000 lines. Dialog editing is not fun. The sound editor is handed a script of lines that has been annotated by a voice director, instructing them which parts of which “takes,” performed by the voice talent, should go into a completed file. The sound editor then locates those takes within a recording session in Pro Tools, merges them together, and proceeds to make anywhere from five to fifteen edits to the waveform—removing unnecessary pops, gargle, replacing plosives, etc—and finally consolidating the edit into a new file that might be called something along the lines of, “jen_ninja_princess_final_battle_13476b.wav.” Day in and day out, on “Jade Empire,” I felt more and more like I was performing the task of a machine. One day, at last, the work was complete. Then entered a new title, “Unreal Championship 2.” This time, I was faced with the task of editing only 4,000 lines, which was typical, since this was more of a first-person shooter and less of an RPG. But the these lines were to be in four different languages (1,000 lines for each language), and each line needed to sound as if it were coming over a noisy short-wave radio, with a random in and out sound effect on either end (i.e. “[beginning squelch] Sargent, we’re going in. Rodger that. [end squelch]”).
Just as I began to dread the annoyance of manually adding radio squelch effects to the beginning and end of special processed dialog, and looking forward to the day when I might no longer have to edit dialog at all, a light-bulb went off in my head. A program can do this for me! While a Music Technology student at CalArts some years earlier, I had become obsessed with a visual programming tool called Max/MSP. In Max, you can drag a number of objects that perform a series of functions, onto a stage, and then connect them together to describe an application. For instance, you may have one object that accesses files in a folder and another one that applies a low-pass filter to an audio buffer. The end result can be compiled to a desktop application with a user-interface with sliders, buttons and read-outs.
With the Unreal Championship project, I could envision how Max could permit us to load a raw dialog file from a folder, place a sound effect at the beginning and end of this file, process the entire file with a DSP filter for the short-wave radio effect, and then output the resulting file into a new folder, while maintaining the naming scheme of the original file. I ran this idea by our lead sound editor and he encouraged me to go for it. A day later, after recruiting the help of a colleague, “Radio-This-Batcher” was born. Instead of taking the weeks that it would have required a sound editor to edit in Pro Tools, in a number of hours, the program processed each of the 4,000 lines of dialog automatically, with only a few crashes. In the years that followed, I became an interaction designer. However I still bring sound design into my work today.
