According to the internet, Claude Debussy said famously that “Music is the space between the notes”. The downside of compression and the inexorable drive to make pop music ‘loud’ however is the loss of dynamics, because the quiet parts are made as loud as the loud parts. Don’t worry too much about that how it does it, just know that the effect is that the song or album becomes very loud, often so that it stands out from the crowd. A compressor acts a bit like a big squeeze on the music, making the quiets louder and the stopping the loud parts from going quite so high and including unwanted distortion. There’s nothing wrong with “loud”, and in fact many contemporary pop music albums stretch the limits of volume through the application of what is known as “compression”. Like so many other aspects, the sound design in Gears of War 2 is loud and proud. Lets start with a review of the sound design aesthetic present in Gears of War 2. Two things happened: firstly, Gears of War 2 metamorphosed into an ironic, satirical comedy game and secondly I realised how superfluous most of the sound was.
I also found myself getting more and more irritated and distracted by the sound and music of the game, so I did the sensible thing and turned it off. I was playing Gears of War 2 the other day and, I’ll be honest, enjoying more the conversations I was having over MSN and twitter. But we also like to listen to things that stimulate our aural senses in a pleasurable way and to have a bit of a think about how videogames do this. One of the things we like to do here at SLRC is play games: specifically, videogames.