Designing Ambiences

Forest

The forest ambience is made up of a bed of ambient wind and birds that I recorded out on a quiet field. This sound is a 2D loop that covers the entire area of the forest. 

I wanted to make the wind in the trees sound realistic so for this I decided to have them be 3D emitter sounds that I would place on top of the tree areas and would cover a spherical area around them. I created a simple loop of wind and leaves that had no variation and in Wwise used an RTPC curve to modulate the sound. Using an LFO with randomised frequency and depth, I modulated both the volume and low pass filter over time. This gives the effect of the sound rising and falling naturally as wind does.

Spread is a function in the positioning tab of Wwise that affects how sounds are attenuated. Throughout the project I used this function to simulate realism in how sound acts. When you are far away from a sound, you hear the direction that it is coming from in a 3D space. As you get closer to it, this positioning perception will lessen and it will sound more stereo.

In this case, as you walk along the path, you hear the wind sounds coming from the trees themselves. As you walk towards the trees, the sound envelopes you and becomes stereo.

In a blend container with the trees, are some scattered bird sounds. I created a random container full of different bird sounds with randomised pitch and volume and then used the position editor (seen above) to select some positions that the birds could trigger in the stereo field. These different positions will randomly cycle, simulating bird sounds coming from different trees around the player.

Pond

I wanted to create a serene summer atmosphere around the pond. To achieve this I created a loop of lapping water that I placed around the pond for coverage; this can only be heard when very close to the water. 

To supplement this, I created a loop of a cicada using an LFO modulated wavetable within Serum. To give this sound some randomised movement in game, I used a similar method to the LFO affecting the RTPC on the wind. However this time I modulated the frequency of a peaking filter effect with a slow LFO.