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Many eons ago I noticed that many TV and film sets seemed different (dead and lifeless) when viewed in behind-the-scenes documentaries. What was missing were all those atmospheric ambiant sounds that we're often not concious of yet make a big difference. I tried a little experiment. I found the sound of howling wind on an old BBC sound effects LP and dubbed it repeatedly off onto tape (thus extending the running time from about 1.5 minutes to about 30 minutes). I played the tape for some friends ... quietly in the background while we talked about other things. It was a hot day in the middle of summer but in less than 10 minutes they were complaining of feeling cold! Realising I was onto something I bought a little 4-channel mixer from Tandy, 4 cheap walkmans (with auto-reverse), and the necessary wires and connectors and installed it all into an old briefcase. At the same time I hunted down as many sound effects LPs, cassettes, and CDs as I could find, and dubbed off each one that I thought was useful onto tape (just as I had done with the howling wind, but the same sound on both sides). And it occured to me that if I was to avoid getting districted from refereeing by playing DJ I needed to concentrate on the general atmospheric background sounds and not on the event sounds. I introduced this into my Traveller games. I'd take the modified briefcase, and a selection of tapes, and plug it into the hifi system of whereever we were playing. It worked really well. I had a general starship interior hum, something louder and slightly different for engineering, starship bridge sounds, low-tech urban, mid-tech urban, distant firefight, various alarms and claxons, sea wash, crowds, etc. I even had opening and closing theme music for the beginning and end of our game sessions. Once the players became experienced with the sounds it was gratifying to see their faces turn white when I'd play the "emergency decompression alarm" ... whereas before they'd just say they were donning their vacc suits, now there was real tension as the scrambled into action. (Of course, its not just the sounds but how you use them that creates the emotional context ... a variation on Pavlov's Dogs!) I've since built a second sound machine ... but it gets quite inconveinent lugging it and the growing tape library around. So I've turned to a more high tech solution: computers. |
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Soundz is just a simple program the jackets multiple instances of Media Player 2 simultaneously. (You must have Media Player 2 already installed for this to work.) There are 4 separate instances that will select sounds from a subdirectory and play them in a continuous loop, and an additional instance that can play a sound (not looping) for event sounds. Each time the program starts it will scan the Backgrounds subdirectory amd build selection lists for each Media Player control. Once selected the sound can be toggled on and off either by clicking on the appropriate [Play] button and/or by pressing the appropriate [F] key ([F1] for player 1, [F2] for player 2, and so on). Event sounds must reside in the Events subdirectory, have a single letter filename (a.wav, b.wav, and so on), and be 'registered' in the file Soundz.ini. An event sound is triggered either by clicking on the appropriate letter button or by pressing the appropriate letter key. To install Soundz you must first download and unpack the zip file, then run Setup.exe. Next, from where Soundz was installed create two subdirectories: Backgrounds and Events. Place any suitable WAV files into the subdirectories ... remembering to rename any Event sounds to a single-letter filename. Then edit Soundz.ini ... there are some old lines left there already so you can see the format (remove any unused entries). The number on each Event entry is a volume setting (0 = max). |
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THERE ARE NO SOUND FILES SUPPLIED WITH THIS SOFTWARE FOR REASONS OF COPYRIGHT. YOU WILL HAVE TO FIND YOUR OWN. SORRY. Have fun. |
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Okay, so you want to make your own 'radio' sounds (like a Star Wars Stormtrooper or the X-Wing fighter pilots). In addition to a way of recording wave files you'll need a shareware sound editor called Goldwave (3.24 or better). To make a Stormtrooper dialogue:
To make an X-Wing fighter dialogue:
That's all there is to it! |
