Sound Research WIKINDX

As the image on screen flits about incessantly drawing our eyes hither and thither, it is the sound track, with its constant scale, that provides stability and an anchorage. "It is thus the sound track that provides a base for visual identification, that authorizes vision and makes it possible. The identity of Hollywood spectators begins with their ability to be auditors."

By the end of the '30s, sound scale/image scale proportionality had been discarded in favour of (dialogue) intelligibility. The notion of the internal auditor (point-of-audition) was developed -- the spectator is required to identify with or inhabit the body of an on-screen character who will hear for us. Reverberation is used to identify sound intended for this character (little or no reverb) or not (greater ratio of reverberated sound to direct sound). The spectator is inserted into the film narrative "at the very intersection of two spaces [film space and the internal auditor's space (the character's body)] which the image alone is incapable of linking, thus giving us the sensation of controlling the relationship between those spaces." (p.61)

"Well Silicon Ice Development, the team behind Urban Terror, a great Q3 realism mod, has announced the release of the beta version 2.6 this Saturday November 9, 2002."

"Take the idea of telepresence, for instance, which was strange and new when described by Howard Rheingold back in 1991."

As an example of presentational virtualism: "But in dreams, our sense of presence assuming we have such can only be explained by the "projections" of the brain. In essence, Revonsuo is arguing that, as presence can be experienced in the absence of dynamic world coupling, such coupling cannot be necessary for (the experience of) presence. His conclusion is that being-in-the-world, and the experience of presence even in normal configurations, is virtual."

"The key components of the sophisticated presentationalist view are crucially disanalogous with what is going on in the use of virtual reality technology. When we use such technology, we exercise the very same perceptual processes when we are wearing the VR gear as when we are not."

"the virtualist is asking us to simultaneously employ the VR metaphor and ignore an essential, ineliminable feature
of the source (the use of VR technology by a pre-existing subject) while doing so. For this reason the metaphor (at least in its presentational virtualist form) fails in its attempt to portray a coherent, alternative conception of mind and experience."

"How is sensory contact actualized in such a way that perceptual experience is generated?
This actualization process happens, in all versions of Noë's theory, through acting. Put slightly differently, and in the terminology that Noë favors, perceptual content is given through occurrent deployment of our mastery of sensorimotor dependencies (originally contingencies [...]; that is, very roughly, the way that sensory information follows or frustrates our expectations that arises out of our mastery of sensorimotor flow. Perceptual presence on this analysis arises because of the mastery of dependencies we acquire as we move around and interact with objects. Perceptual presence for Noë is to be explained, like perceptual content itself, from our mastery of the laws of sensorimotor dependence."

"presentational virtualism holds that that the content of our experiences is virtual and perception is, in an important sense, similar to hallucination because it is ultimately internal perceptual vehicles that we perceive rather than the external worldly objects they represent. In contrast, enactive representationalism sees us as being in deep contact with the world, but at the "price" of conceiving of our representational systems as partly composed by the world. We have seen that the former trades on di±culties with the metaphor of virtuality itself while the latter tends to commit us to problematic views: either the Grand Illusion or the idea that external world contributes to perceptual content independently of our sensory contact with it."

There is a realism of form -- "staging, directing, acting, shooting and editing" -- and a realism of theme -- "plausibility of characterization, circumstance and action"

Defines two initial types of realism as they relate to television:

1. Verisimilitude: being like the real.
2. Reference - being about the real.

Quoting Gene Youngblood (Youngblood 1970, p.206):

""If the visual subsystems exist today, it is folly to assume that the computing hardware won't exist tomorrow. The notion of 'reality' will be utterly and finally obscured when we reach that point ... [of generating] totally convincing reality within the information processing system ... We're entering a Mythic age of electronic realities that exist only on a metaphysical plane.""

Quoting Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e), 2003:

"...no contemplation is possible. ... Montage and codification demand, in effect, that the receiver construe and decode by observing the same procedure whereby the work was assembled. The reading of the message is then only a perceptual examination of the code." (119-120).

Talking of digital media (including games) and arguing that they emphasize spectacle over semantic meaning: "They do not propose spectators who are bent on interpretation, or who are looking for semantic resonance. The activity mobilised in this instance is not primarily intellectual, not reflective or interpretative in character, but rather sensual and diverting in other ways."

Argues that computer generated images, as they do not involve recording, are iconic rather than indexical in the Peircian sense -- this despite any attempt at photo-realism on the part of the animators.

"Special attention was put to the realism and amount of details in our Navigation Sounds"

"Fidelity reflects the development of sound in games from a technological perspective while verisimilitude reflects the cultural emergence of authenticity, immersion and suspension of disbelief in cinema"

"If fidelity refers to the faithfulness of sound quality in computer games, verisimilitude concerns itself with the experience and nature of truthfulness and authenticity in a game context, as conveyed through the game soundscape."

"In its traditional literary/theatrical definition, verisimilitude reflects the extent to which a work of fiction exhibits realism or authenticity, or otherwise conforms to our sense of reality. In film, the notion of verisimilitude signifies the relative success of cinematography at creating an immersive, engaging fictional world of hyper-realistic proportions both in terms of image and sound, but also of intensity of emotion and experience"

Re Gibson, "action takes precedence. The experience depends more on what can be "done" than on the quality of visual or acoustic images."

"the reality of experience (i.e. presence or immersion)."

"A VE with higher immersion, so the argument goes, should lead to higher fidelity, and generate a greater sense of presence, the subjective experience felt by the user. But if I put you in a highly immersive environment and give you badly designed content to experience, will you perceive the VE as realistic and experience presence? Probably not. What’s missing from this dichotomy of immersion (objective, system-focused) and presence (subjective, user-focused) is a computational theory about the extent to which the VE reflects the expected regularities of world that it is attempting to represent—its authenticity. Authenticity draws on two streams of thought: expectations and motivations."

"I suggest that immersion is the system-based factor that influences presence, and that authenticity is the human-based factor that influences presence"

"The myth of the possibility of 'objectively' documenting reality, so unquestioningly accepted by sociologists anxious to achieve 'scientific' status, seems now to have spread to a majority of those involved in the humanities and the arts. The fetish of realism-too often manifested as a detailed portrayal of pathology in the name of the whole truth-is widely indulged in by the very 'creative' intellectuals who scorn the social scientists for their conformist scientism."

Bot Killer: "Ever since we were kids we all have imagined what it would be like to be on an elite team of Navy Seals, or a deadly group of angry terrorists. Now with the power of id Software's Quake III engine, Silicon Ice Development will be capable of making a more realistic environment than anything ever seen before in a total conversion. Our goal is to make a fast pace, action packed, brand spankin' new, totally realistic, gore-covered, super mod."

WU: "Urban Terror is a total conversion that aims to achieve the realistic sense of suspense and action that real life situations would provide. Although its primary inspiration is realism, we are not forgetting the community we are developing for."

Altman, R. (1992). Introduction: Four and a half film fallacies. In R. Altman (Ed), Sound Theory Sound Practice. (pp. 35–45). New York: Routledge.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 23/04/2007, 21:17
Altman, R. (1992). Sound space. In R. Altman (Ed), Sound Theory Sound Practice. (pp. 46–64). New York: Routledge.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 16/02/2006, 07:28
As the image on screen flits about incessantly drawing our eyes hither and thither, it is the sound track, with its constant scale, that provides stability and an anchorage. "It is thus the sound track that provides a base for visual identification, that authorizes vision and makes it possible. The identity of Hollywood spectators begins with their ability to be auditors."
Summarizing 1930's film sound theoretician J.P. Maxfield "the sound track must carry, independently from the image, all the information necessary to reconstruct the "real" space of the scene (that is, the one represented by the image)."
By the end of the '30s, sound scale/image scale proportionality had been discarded in favour of (dialogue) intelligibility. The notion of the internal auditor (point-of-audition) was developed -- the spectator is required to identify with or inhabit the body of an on-screen character who will hear for us. Reverberation is used to identify sound intended for this character (little or no reverb) or not (greater ratio of reverberated sound to direct sound). The spectator is inserted into the film narrative "at the very intersection of two spaces [film space and the internal auditor's space (the character's body)] which the image alone is incapable of linking, thus giving us the sensation of controlling the relationship between those spaces." (p.61)
An important point here is the relation between sound scale and image scale and the effect on film sound of single microphone technique, multiple mikes, mixing, sound editing, microhpone placements etc. In the early '30s, the emphasis was directed to authentic spatial recording (with a human body analogy) but, with the development of condensor microphones (required to be close to the sound source) and boom technology, this shifted to an emphasis on clarity (of dialogue). This had implications for mixing in post-production leading to the contruction of a sound track rather that its recording. By the end of the decade, attempts to match sound scale accurately to image scale had been all but discarded.
Ambrosetti, F. Urban Terror 2.6 released. Retrieved June 2, 2006, from http://www.gamershell.com/news/4383.html
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 02/06/2006, 07:49
"Well Silicon Ice Development, the team behind Urban Terror, a great Q3 realism mod, has announced the release of the beta version 2.6 this Saturday November 9, 2002."
Chalmers, D. J. (2017). The virtual and the real. Disputatio, 9(46), 309–352.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 03/05/2026, 01:18
Cheng, K., & Cairns, P. A. 2005, April 2–7. Behaviour, realism and immersion in games. Paper presented at Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, Oregon.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 27/11/2009, 04:15
Clowes, R. W., & Chrisley, R. (2012). Virtualist representation. International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 4(2), 503–522.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 06/06/2023, 14:37
"Take the idea of telepresence, for instance, which was strange and new when described by Howard Rheingold back in 1991."
"Interfaces in standard VR can be viewed as modes of coupling with the (virtual) environment that transform an already existing sensed-embodiment. To put this another way, in the original context presence is assumed (perhaps as produced by unconscious neural mechanisms) and then, through an interactive interface, presence is "projected" into a virtual world."
As an example of presentational virtualism: "But in dreams, our sense of presence assuming we have such can only be explained by the "projections" of the brain. In essence, Revonsuo is arguing that, as presence can be experienced in the absence of dynamic world coupling, such coupling cannot be necessary for (the experience of) presence. His conclusion is that being-in-the-world, and the experience of presence even in normal configurations, is virtual."
"In its unelaborated form, presentational virtualism faces several traditional problems. First, the position is internalist to an extent that appears to put us radically out of touch with the world, in familiar ways. For those acquainted with the history of the philosophy of perception, it is hard to resist seeing this kind of virtualism as an old, discredited theory of perception — the indirect theory — in modern technological guise. On this picture, virtualism is advocating that: (1) when we are dreaming there is no further reality beyond the virtual, dreamed reality for our experiences to be of, so they are of the virtual objects, properties, etc., that constitute that virtual world; and therefore, in the same way, (2) when we are not dreaming, our experiences are not of a further, external world to which we have no access, but are again of virtual objects, properties, etc., that constitute a virtual world (those created by the neural "interface", which is the same, after all as the "interface" in operation during dreaming) that we merely take to be an actual world."
"The key components of the sophisticated presentationalist view are crucially disanalogous with what is going on in the use of virtual reality technology. When we use such technology, we exercise the very same perceptual processes when we are wearing the VR gear as when we are not."
"VR technology parasitizes the pre-existing, biologically endowed (in our case) sensory capacities of an autonomous subject to create an experience of a virtual world, a world whose virtuality is defined relative to the actuality of the world made available by the preexisting sensory system."
"the virtualist is asking us to simultaneously employ the VR metaphor and ignore an essential, ineliminable feature of the source (the use of VR technology by a pre-existing subject) while doing so. For this reason the metaphor (at least in its presentational virtualist form) fails in its attempt to portray a coherent, alternative conception of mind and experience."
Enactive virtualism (after Noë description of perceptual presence): "when we perceive an object, we are only really (occurrently) sensorially in touch with a small part of what we perceive or see, but nevertheless the whole object is perceptually (but virtually) present to us."
"How is sensory contact actualized in such a way that perceptual experience is generated? This actualization process happens, in all versions of Noë's theory, through acting. Put slightly differently, and in the terminology that Noë favors, perceptual content is given through occurrent deployment of our mastery of sensorimotor dependencies (originally contingencies [...]; that is, very roughly, the way that sensory information follows or frustrates our expectations that arises out of our mastery of sensorimotor flow. Perceptual presence on this analysis arises because of the mastery of dependencies we acquire as we move around and interact with objects. Perceptual presence for Noë is to be explained, like perceptual content itself, from our mastery of the laws of sensorimotor dependence."
"For Noë, perception is actional or enactive but is also in a certain sense projected. What we experience is not what is simply given in our occurrent sensorimotor contact but what is somehow generated in that contact. Perceptual content is generated because we are constantly in touch with the world."
"presentational virtualism holds that that the content of our experiences is virtual and perception is, in an important sense, similar to hallucination because it is ultimately internal perceptual vehicles that we perceive rather than the external worldly objects they represent. In contrast, enactive representationalism sees us as being in deep contact with the world, but at the "price" of conceiving of our representational systems as partly composed by the world. We have seen that the former trades on di±culties with the metaphor of virtuality itself while the latter tends to commit us to problematic views: either the Grand Illusion or the idea that external world contributes to perceptual content independently of our sensory contact with it."
Corner, J. (1992). Presumption as theory: 'realism' in television studies. Screen, 33(1), 97–102.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 28/03/2006, 11:02
There is a realism of form -- "staging, directing, acting, shooting and editing" -- and a realism of theme -- "plausibility of characterization, circumstance and action"
Mentions a further emotional realism based on Ien Ang's Watching Dallas book which is "deep-level resonances with the emotional organization of the viewer"
Defines two initial types of realism as they relate to television: 1. Verisimilitude: being like the real. 2. Reference - being about the real.
Darley, A. (2000). Visual digital culture: Surface play and spectacle in new media genres. London: Routledge.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 05/11/2006, 10:59
Quoting Gene Youngblood (Youngblood 1970, p.206): ""If the visual subsystems exist today, it is folly to assume that the computing hardware won't exist tomorrow. The notion of 'reality' will be utterly and finally obscured when we reach that point ... [of generating] totally convincing reality within the information processing system ... We're entering a Mythic age of electronic realities that exist only on a metaphysical plane.""
1995 saw the release of "the first feature-length computer synthesized film Toy Story".
Quoting Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e), 2003: "...no contemplation is possible. ... Montage and codification demand, in effect, that the receiver construe and decode by observing the same procedure whereby the work was assembled. The reading of the message is then only a perceptual examination of the code." (119-120).
"They lack the symbolic depth and representational complexity of earlier forms, appearing by contrast to work within a drastically reduced field of meaning. They are direct and one-dimensional, about little, other than their ability to commandeer the sight and the senses."
Talking of digital media (including games) and arguing that they emphasize spectacle over semantic meaning: "They do not propose spectators who are bent on interpretation, or who are looking for semantic resonance. The activity mobilised in this instance is not primarily intellectual, not reflective or interpretative in character, but rather sensual and diverting in other ways."
Makes the case that narrative cinema in the early C20th. supplanted the early cinema as spectacle which was derived from vaudeville, circus, amusement parks, dioramas etc.: "...the marvellous gives way to realism and characterisation." Darley gives no reason for this.
Argues that computer generated images, as they do not involve recording, are iconic rather than indexical in the Peircian sense -- this despite any attempt at photo-realism on the part of the animators.
Claims that the idea of producing realism has dominated the computer image industry/research since the late 1970s. Realism is defined as the degree of resemblance to real-world objects with, for images, photography being the yardstick.
Dion, L. P. (2017). Game design deep dive: Dynamic audio in destructible levels in Rainbow Six: Siege. Gamasutra, Retrieved July 7, 2021, from https://www.gamasutra.c ... n_Rainbow_Six_Siege.php
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 07/07/2021, 09:12
"Special attention was put to the realism and amount of details in our Navigation Sounds"
Droumeva, M. (2011). An acoustic communication framework for game sound: Fidelity, verisimilitude, ecology. In M. Grimshaw (Ed), Game sound technology and player interaction: concepts and developments. (pp. 131–152). Hershey (PA): IGI.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 30/05/2021, 07:59
"Fidelity reflects the development of sound in games from a technological perspective while verisimilitude reflects the cultural emergence of authenticity, immersion and suspension of disbelief in cinema"
"[...] sound's role in games is not simply descriptive, one of reflecting reality in a high-fidelity manner, but it is largely about function! Interface sounds, warning sounds, alerts, and musical earcons must continue to be part of this acoustic ecology, subject to issues of acoustic balance, masking and fidelity, as well as the informational ecology of interactive play."
"If fidelity refers to the faithfulness of sound quality in computer games, verisimilitude concerns itself with the experience and nature of truthfulness and authenticity in a game context, as conveyed through the game soundscape."
"[...] game sound has developed historically to conform to our sense of reality while at the same time it has constructed a sense of reality, particular to games, that we now expect."
"In its traditional literary/theatrical definition, verisimilitude reflects the extent to which a work of fiction exhibits realism or authenticity, or otherwise conforms to our sense of reality. In film, the notion of verisimilitude signifies the relative success of cinematography at creating an immersive, engaging fictional world of hyper-realistic proportions both in terms of image and sound, but also of intensity of emotion and experience"
Flach, J. M., & Holden, J. G. (1998). The reality of experience: Gibson's way. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 7(1), 90–95.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 11/09/2018, 17:21
Re Gibson, "action takes precedence. The experience depends more on what can be "done" than on the quality of visual or acoustic images."
"in the design of experiences in virtual environments the constraints on action take precedence over the constraints on perception."
"the reality of experience (i.e. presence or immersion)."
Galloway, A. R. (2004). Social realism in gaming. Game Studies, 4(1). Retrieved November 14, 2021, from http://gamestudies.org/0401/galloway/
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 14/05/2021, 14:12
Gilbert, S. B. (2016). Perceived realism of virtual environments depends on authenticity. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 25(4), 322–324.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 23/05/2021, 09:53
"A VE with higher immersion, so the argument goes, should lead to higher fidelity, and generate a greater sense of presence, the subjective experience felt by the user. But if I put you in a highly immersive environment and give you badly designed content to experience, will you perceive the VE as realistic and experience presence? Probably not. What’s missing from this dichotomy of immersion (objective, system-focused) and presence (subjective, user-focused) is a computational theory about the extent to which the VE reflects the expected regularities of world that it is attempting to represent—its authenticity. Authenticity draws on two streams of thought: expectations and motivations."
"Authenticity’s second stream of thought comes from art historians and archaeologists who think carefully about the past, and who often seek to establish whether artifacts found in the present are authentic. While establishing an artifact’s date and place of origin might be a matter of objective fact, Lovata (2007) argues that these facts are simply nominal authenticity, and that a richer, more complex sense of authenticity is context dependent, and depends on the motivations of the observer."
"I suggest that immersion is the system-based factor that influences presence, and that authenticity is the human-based factor that influences presence"
"While the perception of a virtual environment (VE) is usually described in terms of its level of immersion and users’ sense of presence, the construct of authenticity might be more useful. The authenticity of a VE depends on whether the affordances and simulations chosen in its implementation support (1) users’ expectations based on their Bayesian priors for regularities in the real world and (2) the users’ intentions in the VE . . . the term ‘‘authenticity’’ refers to whether the virtual environment provides the experience expected by the user, both consciously and unconsciously."
Gormanley, S. (2013). Audio immersion in games: A case study using an online game with background music and sound effects. The computer games journal. 2(2), 103–124.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 28/05/2021, 09:01
Grimshaw-Aagaard, M. (2024). Video game sound design and the fetish of realism. In W. Gibbons & M. Grimshaw-Aagaard (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound. (pp. 861–874). New York: Oxford University Press.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 10/03/2024, 09:35
Hutcheon, P. D. (1972). Value theory: Towards conceptual clarification. The British Journal of Sociology, 23(2), 172–187.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 23/05/2021, 16:33
"The myth of the possibility of 'objectively' documenting reality, so unquestioningly accepted by sociologists anxious to achieve 'scientific' status, seems now to have spread to a majority of those involved in the humanities and the arts. The fetish of realism-too often manifested as a detailed portrayal of pathology in the name of the whole truth-is widely indulged in by the very 'creative' intellectuals who scorn the social scientists for their conformist scientism."
"American sociology has tended to develop in isolation from the humanities, and in the form of a highly specialized technique rather than as a broad, philosophically and historically sophisticated perspective for the study of man. This may have been due as much to the trend toward professionalization and kingdom building in academic life as to the widespread acceptance of the philosophical assumptions of Weberian neopositivism. The establishment of separate departments in universities no doubt encouraged competition among the social sciences for funds, students, and better means of sharpening data-manipulating techniques. It is easy to see how values, with their notorious resistance to precise measurement, might be assigned low priority in this situation."
Janz, B. B. (2019). Virtual place and virtualized place. In E. Champion (Ed), The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places. (pp. 60–75). London: Routledge.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 03/05/2026, 01:24
Latour, B. The powers of fac similes: A turing test on science and literature. Retrieved July 14, 2006, from http://www.ensmp.fr/~la ... %20TURING.html#_ftnref6
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 14/07/2006, 13:45
Law, C. Urban Terror! GameSpy, Retrieved June 2, 2006, from http://archive.gamespy. ... ghts/urbanterror_a.shtm
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 02/06/2006, 07:33
Bot Killer: "Ever since we were kids we all have imagined what it would be like to be on an elite team of Navy Seals, or a deadly group of angry terrorists. Now with the power of id Software's Quake III engine, Silicon Ice Development will be capable of making a more realistic environment than anything ever seen before in a total conversion. Our goal is to make a fast pace, action packed, brand spankin' new, totally realistic, gore-covered, super mod."
GottaBeKD: ""Urbanites" will get lost in the reality of it all. From the beautiful present day locations to the frighteningly real models, there will be tons of things working together to give our players that action fix that they all need."
WU: "Urban Terror is a total conversion that aims to achieve the realistic sense of suspense and action that real life situations would provide. Although its primary inspiration is realism, we are not forgetting the community we are developing for."
Dokta8: "The science fiction theme of Quake is replaced by conventional weapons and urban landscapes. Gameplay is also enhanced to add more detail and realism to the gaming experience. By enhanced I mean that there will be more to winning a round than simply fragging opponents with a rocket launcher as weapons respond differently when you are running or crouching, and at long or short ranges. Skill and strategy plays an increasingly important part in Urban Terror."
Levy, L. F. (2020). The Edison Realism Test: Early experiments in capturing the soul of live music in a recording. Retrieved May 25, 2021, from https://insheepsclothin ... om/edison-realism-test/
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 25/05/2021, 08:23

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