Sean Bain is an audio engineer, music producer, composer, remixer and sound designer currently living on Isle of Bute, UK.

Today is Tomorrow is a personal exploration of different environments in Glasgow during the COVID-19 pandemic. The reduced movement and displacement of the city’s population has made quieter voices in our environment more salient. This is a documentation of the changes in the ambient noise of the city during this period and a contemplation on the impact of human activity on our sound ecology.

The composition consists of field recordings collected during the months of March till November 2020. These have been edited, manipulated and layered with a soundtrack using synthesizers to emphasize the musical, atmospheric or rhythmic qualities of the environmental sounds used.

The piece can be experienced in combination with a photo and video journal, which can be accessed in this virtual space.  It gives a visual context to the sounds used in the composition.

Aidan is a sound artist, composer, and experimental musician based in and around Glasgow, and is a Master’s Student in Sound for the Moving Image at the GSA. Often with a focus on a more abstract concept of sound as imagery, incorporating modern sonorities and techniques with a blend of more traditional methods, their work is heavily steeped in improvisation and the drone; usually with the philosophy of ‘why make music if you’re not going to get werid with it?’

Frequently performing in independent venues in Glasgow and beyond, they have also had works performed at festivals such as the Edinburgh International Harp Festival, Glasgow’s Sound Thought Festival, and the US-based online zFestival.

Aidan also writes electronic music under Gaia Complex, and is part of the electroacoustic duo Failed System Test.

Simon is a musician, composer and producer based in Glasgow. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has played music since the age of six. A multi-instrumentalist, he has been writing songs and orchestral music since he was about fourteen.

Simon spent his sixth-form at Chethams School of Music, then won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He won the Avedis Zildjian Percussion Award, the Vice Principals Special Award, and is one of only five gold medal winners of the Shell/LSO Scholarship for Timpani and Percussion. In 2009 he was appointed an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music.

Simon has performed for 20 years at the highest level, beginning with the London Symphony Orchestra at the age of 20. Since 2003 he has been Section Principal Percussion of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. He has toured internationally and appeared on over 130 album recordings.

From 2019, Simon studied for an MDes in Sound for the Moving Image at GSA; learning the skills of sound design, recording, editing, mixing, post-production, foley, video production, surround and immersive audio, including Ambisonic techniques.

Over the last year, Simon has designed and produced visuals, sound and music for a wide variety of media; including a piece written for the RSNO brass ensemble. He is also a valuable member of the Digital Team at the RSNO; currently taking on the role of Score Reader/Script Supervisor during the production of the 2020:21 online Digital Season.

I am a young storyteller coming from Romania and currently living in Glasgow having many interests in the art world. I hold skills and experience within filming, directing, editing, and acting as well as creating soundscapes and sound design for innovative film and moving image worlds. Thinking the new and surrounding myself with inspiring individuals whilst working in diverse projects, from poetic filmmaking to fiction and documentaries. Standing for social equality, and integrity, I managed to establish what my art and storytelling mean to a creative authentic expression of self. I am an artist approaching life with full consciousness, vitality and intensity heading towards generating ambitious audio-visual flow who goes beyond limitations, always aspiring for poetic connection where feeling is heightened, and the spectator is made more active. The role of sound design is crucial in my practice and is represented by the interplay against the image that adds value to the screen. This imitates the natural function of the expressed world presented in cinema. Using collaborative techniques with Glasgow based musicians, I direct, sample, and manipulate the soundscapes created.

My cinema thought revolves around an audio-visual flow that processes a self, created in the film through symbolic representations that rest upon the phenomenology of vision. It is a poetic cinema of self-expression that seeks allegorical status in its attempt to articulate the past while using montage and sound as a sense of tropology. My films are an experience as well as a system of communication which utilises multiple perspectives to situate the viewer in a familiar position of relating to the world. The image is neither objective nor subjective but a process of transformation creating cinematic meaning while the sound is empathetic driving the story forward.

Art will exist in the audience’s imagination and interpretation so that one will recover the external phenomena, providing gatherings of cognition over time building composite understandings. Through the experience of uncertainty, the subject will relate to the reality of its perception, memories thoughts, and desires. The main motive that shall be recognized in my filmmaking is the reclamation of a re-enchanted relationship with nature as a source of orientation whilst opening new possibilities of thought through art.

My name is Eugene and I’m an audio-video pilgrim from Ukraine, based in Glasgow. My main music experience includes producing, DJing, and song-writing. But I always was attached to video production and particapted in various projects as a director, editor and producer, including conceptual event promotion and entertainment management.  Trying to find a balance between those two passions, I’ve summarized my skills in the music project “HIGHSHIFTING”.
“NERVOUS SOUND” was originally a complex project at the intersection of music, poetry, and video production.
This song is against self-accusation and personal distrust, based on the current pandemic situation and about my empathy  to the world.

Sam Welch is a multi-media artist working in the mediums of sound, audiovisual and spatial sculpture. He creates work using location recorded sound, video, found objects and synthesised sources. His work explores the relationship between perception and the self, capturing what it means to notice something. Influenced by rapid visual collage, music concrete and electronic music production he focuses on recontextualising the world around us and challenging our predefine notions of what ‘things’ are and how they ‘should’ belong. The message in his work is simple, no reaction is expected or desired. The action of reacting to the works themselves is the basis of the human condition.

This piece explores remixing and mashup culture through an audio visual piece. The clip uses remix techniques such as Scratch video’s use of found footage aesthetic, rapid cutting and rhythmic editing style to completely transform the media into a new composition. The visuals are accompanied with an audio mashup with songs blending and combining into one another to make create a large humongous track. The clip is named Palindrome as the clips starts and finishes similarly in a loop.

My film ‘Back to Life‘, which is an in-game recording film, will show audiences ‘my quarantine life’ under the pandemic through the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

My Machinima film ’Back to Life’ has three parts: Dreaming, Daily routine, and Day Dreaming. In the final part (as the video shown), I simulated the New York subway station in Animal Crossing. ‘Me’ playing the DJ controller at the front of the stage, the train passing through the station and dragging out to the street views. Passengers are enjoying and shaking their legs along with the music.

As the Queen addressed the nation,  “We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.” Indeed, with hopes, we will definitely meet again, whether in virtual games or in real life.

Audio development in both digital games and movies has lagged behind the development of visuals for decades. Despite surround sound technologies like Ambisonics having been used since the 1970s, it has only recently been adopted into audio formats outside of the music domain. Ambisonics is a full-sphere surround sound format that can represent sound above and below the listener as well as in the horizontal plane. Unlike surround formats like Dolby Atmos, it does not carry speaker signals and instead contains a speaker-independent representation of a sound field, which can be decoded into any speaker setup. Therefore it is one of the most versatile sound formats and offers both the sound designer and the listener an incredible degree of flexibility. The first Ambisonic game was developed by Codemasters in 2007, called “Colin McRae: DiRT”, but the Ambisonic format was only released on PlayStation 3. Since then, Ambisonics has become more widespread across games and platforms, and has potential to become the new audio standard in video games.

This study investigated Ambisonics by developing and testing an Ambisonic game, which can be split into two main parts. The first focused on the game development and reasoning, 3D spatialisation and automation, and the result of the two audio mixes. The game, Pirate Ship Revenge, does not focus on audio as a method of gameplay, but instead uses the sound format to enhance the player’s experience, much like a standard video game. The second part of this study took the two versions of the game, a binaural mix and a stereo mix, and tested their ability to enhance player experience. Ethical approval was given for participants to play each game and compare their experience through an online form.

The final version of the game had a range of sound effects and ambiences that varied and changed as the game progressed. The main ambience consisted of a collection of sounds automated around the listener, including seagulls, ship creaks and the sea. This ambience gave a fantastic opportunity to explore 3D spatialisation panning and automation due to the amount of movement required for each of these sounds, and was the most notable difference between the binaural and stereo mixes. The seagulls were played in a random order combined with randomised movement around the emitting game object through automation. The sea was automated to sound from below the player. The ship creaks were automated to creak from left to right followed by right to left and were attached to the ship. The sound of the sea changed when the ship started moving, and also contained rattling and thrashing of the sails which was automated to sound from above the player.

There were two additional game objects which emitted interesting soundscapes for the player to listen to. The first being the hatch in the middle of the ship, and the second being the cabin doors. These were included to give the player a dynamic sound environment to experience and explore which were not part of the main ambience. These soundscapes also had no player interaction, which meant the sounds played with no prompt from the player, unlike any game objects with attached sound effects. The cabin doors emitted a conversation between two pirates counting and describing the gold they had stolen. The sound had the same filters and effects as the hatch, but the low-pass filter attached to the cabin doors’ attenuation was never zero at the closest distance, simulating the sound travelling through the door. The hatch was the only soundscape to change once the ship started moving – from a lively party atmosphere to heavy lifting and movement from the pirates at work.

Sound effects are a key part of any video game to acknowledge player interaction. For this game, the main game objects to make noise were the barrels, the treasure chest and the wheel, when picked up or dropped. The player also emitted the sound of footsteps to indicate walking, which would change depending on whether the player was walking on deck or up and down stairs. Each barrel had a distinct sound depending on whether it was big, small or had rum in it, and the treasure chest followed suit with a distinct noise for being picked up, dropped and thrown overboard. The wheel was the only game object to have an additional sound for when it attached itself to the helm. These player interactions were encouraged by the game objectives in the top left corner of the screen, for example, “throw loot overboard”, so that the player explored the many sounds in the game. It also forced the player to move a great deal, meaning all the 3D spatialisation would have been more noticeable, and therefore aiding the participants’ comparisons between the binaural mix and the stereo mix.

Participants were told only the names of the two games and not which was which. For clarity, Game X was the stereo mix, and Game Y was the binaural mix. When comparing the two versions of the game, a large majority of participants were in favour of the binaural mix of the game. 85% of participants (17) found it both more immersive and more enjoyable than the stereo mix. Two participants (10%) could not tell the difference between the binaural and stereo mixes, but guessed correctly when asked to tell them apart, indicating that whilst not consciously recognising the difference, both guessing correctly indicates a subliminal appreciation of the difference. Only two participants (10%) guessed this wrong and mistook the binaural mix for the stereo mix. Therefore their answers for game immersion and game preference were answered as if the games were the other way around. One participant claimed it was because Game Y felt “a little emptier”, while the other thought Game Y had the mantra, “if the sound happened lets make it loud”. Only one participant preferred, and felt more immersed by, the stereo mix knowingly. They stated their reasoning as “you could hear the voices fade in and out which was cool. However, Game Y seemed more clear where the sound was coming from”. Consistently, participants preferred the game they found most immersive. Of the two participants who could not tell the difference, neither had hearing problems. Interestingly, their musical or audio experience did not influence their ability to distinguish between the two games, but both participants regularly play video games. It is likely both participants could not tell the difference because they are are more used to the gaming experience and would not have experienced the same level of immersion as a non-player.

Despite the vast majority of participants preferring, and feeling more immersed by the binaural mix, the intensity of immersion varied dramatically. While some felt the binaural mix made it more “real”, “authentic” and “involved” because of its directionality, others believed they would not have noticed the difference had they not been looking for it. One participant stated “with [Game] Y it was much easier to forget about the fact that it’s a game with audio clips playing and just accept the ambience as ‘real’ and move on. Also, the sound mix in Game X often seemed to mush together in a way that made it very difficult to pick out relevant noises, and the volume changes from distance felt oddly artificial”. Another stated “without knowing there was a difference, I didn’t notice any difference. So I didn’t think one was more immersive than the other”. Despite the varying level of immersion, participants still preferred the binaural mix. When asked for any additional comments, a few participants said they had gone back and played both games again and enjoyed them more, after realising the difference between them at the end of the survey. Other participants used this opportunity for additional comments to convey how impressive they found the difference in sound between the games – “very impressive how you can manipulate the sound in such a way in which the two games feel different despite the narrative and the visuals being the exact same”.

The results from this survey suggest that players can successfully tell the difference between a binaural game and a stereo game, and felt more immersed by, and thus preferred, the binaural game. Participants felt the binaural mix’s directionality aided their immersion and added to the realistic nature of the game. The majority of participants who took part felt sound is an important part in games and proves that the role Ambisonics has to play with game sound should be examined closer. It has many exciting current uses and many promising future opportunities, possibly in a learning environment to add further realism to simulations.

This study has its limitations, and although participants were overall more immersed by the binaural mix, this level of immersion clearly varied and was not quantified. One possible explanation could be due to the individual’s Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs), which characterises how an ear receives a sound from a point in space. As head and ear shapes differ, so does their HRTF. The Auro Headphone effect will have filtered the sound to create a standardised HRTF, which will have been experienced differently by each participant. It is possible that those with an HRTF closest to this standardised HRTF felt most immersed by the binaural game, which could influence further research. This could involve measuring this level of immersion in each version of the game similar to studies done by Gormanley and Manuel et. al or measuring participants’ HRTF and testing its immersive properties.

Furthermore, there was no possibility of keeping participants’ listening environments and technological restrictions consistent due to the remote nature of the study. Another future investigation might invite participants to use the same computer and speaker setup, and even use a surround speaker array, such as the Sound Lab at the School of Simulation and Visualisation, instead of headphones. The game itself did not require sound to be able to progress, as most games are not dependent on audio for their gameplay. Further research could involve repeating this study, still comparing spatialised sound and stereo, with an audio game or an audio-only game, whereby the game would be unplayable without sound. This would determine if a forced direct focus on the game audio influences a player’s immersion and enjoyment of the game.

T. Farkaˇs, “Binaural and ambisonic sound as the future standard of digital games”, Acta Ludologica 1(2) (2018).

F. Zotter and M. Frank, Ambisonics – a practical 3d audio theory for recording, studio production, sound reinforcement, and virtual reality, Vol. 19 (Springer Topics in Signal Processing, Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland, 2019).

S. Gormanley, “Audio immersion in games – a case study using an online game with background music and sound effects”, The Computer Games Journal 2(2) (2013).

D. Manuel, D. Moore, and V. Charissis, “An investigation into immersion in games through motion control and stereo audio reproduction”, AM ’12: Proceedings of the 7th Audio Mostly Conference: A Conference on Interaction with Sound, 124–129 (2012).