a resource website for voice and dialogue specialists working in game development and interactive media
Articles
2015 to Present
Adam Ritchie
"A guide to attending recording sessions remotely. This guide was developed and refined between 2016-2024 with the help and support of many amazing people. It is one of many possible approaches to the challenges of working with actors and recording dialogue for games at distance. Please use this guide to develop your own workflows and tools. It is a guide, not a rulebook." - Adam Ritchie 2024/04/15
April Tucker
"In-depth “course” on the basics of dialog editing" - apriltucker.com
John Broomhall
Game sound now arguably exceeds film’s potential for sophistication, artistry and story-telling. Some of the best in the business explain the ‘state of the art’. - audiotechnology.com 2024/02/15
Alex Riviere
What exactly does game audio mixing entail? In the guide below, Audio Director Alex Riviere explores what mixing means and requires in a game audio content, the unique possibilities and challenges it offers - and he outlines the key areas and processes to focus on to make your game sound its best. - asoundeffect.com 2023/07/17
Charles Pateman
An overview of Voice Design as a discipline in game audio; its growth over the years, the range of tasks we undertake and the creative opportunities in the field. - Audiokinetic Blog 2023/01/26
Maize Wallin
The third and final part of Maize Wallin's article on the VO pipeline forWayward Strand. - Audiokinetic 2022/10/28
Maize Wallin
The second part of Maize Wallin's article on the VO pipeline for Wayward Strand. - Audiokinetic 2022/10/21
Alyx Jones
What it says on the tin! - Guildford Game Audio 2022/10/06
Maize Wallin
With a cast of 14 actors, and 3 in-game days, while a single playthrough takes around 4 hours, the content is equivalent to over 18 feature films, with over 18,000 lines of fully voiced dialogue. - Audiokinetic Blog 2022/09/29
James Stant
James Stant, Dialogue Manager at Frontier Developments talks about how he approached the audio for Planet Coaster and creating a global language that reflects the spirit of the game. - Behind The Glass 2022/04/13
Huang Chao
Huang Chao describes how to create temporary VO assets automatically with WAAPI and TTS. - Audiokinetic Blog 2022/03/04
Fred Proud, James Stant, Robert Mann, Rhys Young
Behind The Glass speaks to Dialogue Designers about the challenges of creating dialogue for games (page 4). - Behind The Glass 2021/09/01
Jake Gamelin
This week, Jake implements dialogue centered around narration using Wwise and Unreal Engine! - Audiokinetic 2021/09/01
Jake Gamelin
Join Jake as he creates a functioning dynamic dialogue system in Wwise and Unity! - Audiokinetic 2021/08/27
Mathieu Fiorentini
Dev diary for Tell Me Why from Dont Nod, covering their approach to mixing, including voice and dialogue - Audiokinetic 2021/06/10
Louis Martin
Dev diary for Tell Me Why from Dont Nod, covering their approach to voice and dialogue - Audiokinetic 2021/06/10
Idyll Sounds
"When editing dialog, I have found that a few key concepts are at the forefront of my decision-making process. I’m 100% certain I will miss some things, as I’ve never actually codified my thought process until now. Furthermore, this isn’t a checklist I go through on each decision. A lot of editing becomes rote. But when I have a difficult decision, or a major one that will impact the way I work on an entire scene, this is how I will proceed." - idyllsounds.com 2020/03/12
Obsidian Audio Team
Part 1 of this behind the scenes with the Obsidian audio team includes a section covering AI barks systems and runtime FX. - Audiokinetic 2019/10/29
Nikola Lukić
Current accomplishments in AI have had a positive influence on game development, including game audio. I want to share with you an example of how developments in AI have helped our team save time and effort in voice over production for our latest project. - Audiokinetic 2019/08/06
Jaime Cross
Blazing Griffin's Jaime Cross talks about the dialogue and conversation design in Murderous Pursuits (Part 2). - Audiokinetic 2018/10/30
Jaime Cross
Blazing Griffin's Jaime Cross talks about the dialogue and conversation design in Murderous Pursuits (Part 1). - Audiokinetic 2018/10/16
Will Tidman
"On the surface the dialogue in games can tell a story. The voiceover or dialogue on a cut scene, in-game conversation or the internal monologue of a character is all enforcing the narrative of the game. But the role of dialogue goes much further than telling stories and this is what stands game dialogue apart from other mediums." - Audio Media International 2018/03/12
Frontier Audio Team
An in depth look at Planet Coaster's crowd system (part 3/3). - Audiokinetic 2017/07/18
James Stant
James Stant, Dialogue Manager at Frontier Developments, discusses creating the Planco constructed language for Planet Coaster. - Game Developer 2017/07/13
Frontier Audio Team
An in depth look at Planet Coaster's crowd system (part 2/3). - Audiokinetic 2017/07/11
Robert Mann
A note of transferable skills; post production sound and game audio (page 39). - Behind The Glass 2021/07/01
Frontier Audio Team
An in depth look at Planet Coaster's crowd system (part 1/3). - Audiokinetic 2017/06/27
CD Projekt Red Audio Team
A multi part talk about the audio of The Witcher 3, with this part covering crowds/walla. - Audiokinetic 2016/11/29
Scott Lawlor & Tomas Neumann
During Audiokinetic's Wwise Tour, Project Audio Director Scott Lawlor, and Senior Software Engineer 2 Tomas Neumann, presented their work. The considerations, successes and lessons learnt are demonstrated in a series of very educational Wwise Tour videos from the event. (Part 2) - Audiokinetic 2016/09/13
Scott Lawlor & Tomas Neumann
During Audiokinetic's Wwise Tour, Project Audio Director Scott Lawlor, and Senior Software Engineer 2 Tomas Neumann, presented their work. The considerations, successes and lessons learnt are demonstrated in a series of very educational Wwise Tour videos from the event. (Part 1) - Audiokinetic 2016/09/13
Alexander Murauski
In this article, we will share some tips on how to interact with recording studios and localization services, how to optimize and accelerate the process, and how to reduce the risks as well as the costs of audio localization. - Game Developer 2016/03/04
2003 to 2014
Khris Brown
Gamasutra speaks to voice director, consultant and game industry veteran Khris Brown to better understand how high-quality voicework in games comes together from a developer perspective. - Game Developer 2014/07/16
Anna Kipnis
The Double Fine senior gameplay programmer and experienced public speaker explains her inspiration for pitching an indie-focused talk about dialog system design at GDC Europe 2014. - GDC 2014/07/02
George Sutherland Howard
An article about the narrative of Spec Ops: The Line; has some interesting use of progression oriented contextual barks to support the narrative. - Game Developer 2014/04/08
Julian Kwasneski & Darragh O'Farrell
In this reprint from the November 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine, Jesse Harlin speaks with voice directors from LucasArts and Telltale for some industry insights. - Game Developer 2013/10/15
Mark Estdale
These are my views as a casting and voice director working with video games. This is for actors, to help better equip them for not blowing their foot off. - Game Developer 2013/08/10
Mark Estdale
Voice Casting for Video Games - Part 1: Follow The Brief. Casting characters for video games brings to light many wrong assumptions about work in the medium from both the agents and the hopeful 'talent'. - Game Developer 2013/07/23
Ariel Gross
Voice is often considered the most important audio in a video game. In some cases it absolutely must be heard, but in other cases, not so much. How do we draw the line? - Game Developer 2011/08/27
Rob Bridgett
How do you organize and structure the creation of dialogue for video games, "perhaps the single most important aspect of video game audio"? Game audio veteran Rob Bridgett examines the key issues and possible solutions. - Game Developer 2009/10/29
Brent Ellison
In an in-depth Gamasutra analysis piece, Ellison looks at the universe and history of player-NPC dialogue interaction in games, analyzing titles from Mass Effect through Facade to The Sims and beyond. - Game Developer 2008/07/08
Greg deBeer
Voice acting is a surprisingly vital part of character-based game creation - and Gamasutra talks to Sony dialog manager deBeer on his work aiding titles from the God of War series to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. - Game Developer 2008/05/28
Le Dour
Screen/Play is a regular feature that discusses best practices for storytelling in games. This article, the first in the series, discusses how to properly document voice assets in a flexible, intuitive spreadsheet, with an example extract from the fictional game King Arthur Up In This Piece. - Game Developer 2007/02/15
Rafael Chandler
Screen/Play is a regular feature that discusses best practices for storytelling in games. This article, the first in the series, discusses how to properly document voice assets in a flexible, intuitive spreadsheet, with an example extract from the fictional game King Arthur Up In This Piece. - Game Developer 2006/06/08
Rafael Chandler
Red Storm writer/designer Rafael Chandler (Rainbow Six: Lockdown) discusses processes and systems that will help a game writer minimize dialogue change during production, and analyzes some of the dependencies that a writer can account for along the way. - Game Developer 2005/11/18
Matt Case
This article focuses on the latest Hollywood production methods being adopted by game producers to create better voice-over assets. From getting the right start by ensuring that you have a well-polished script (because paring the world's best actor with a poorly written script leaves you with nothing more than bad entertainment), to securing the ideal actors at below-market rates, dealing with the unions without dealing with the unions, directing professional actors to capture your characters' personalities, all the way through to systematically managing the dialogue files. - Game Developer 2003/03/07
Wikipedia
"The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling..."
"In humans, vocal cords, also known as vocal folds or voice reeds, are folds of tissue in the throat that are key in creating sounds through vocalization..."
"The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics that studies articulation and ways that humans produce speech..."
"The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of the brain's ability to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, such as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room."
"In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation."
"In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract..."
"Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together..."
"The precedence effect or law of the first wavefront is a binaural psychoacoustical effect. When a sound is followed by another sound separated by a sufficiently short time delay (below the listener's echo threshold), listeners perceive a single auditory event; its perceived spatial location is dominated by the location of the first-arriving sound (the first wave front)."
"An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people."
"Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech..."
"In speech communication, intelligibility is a measure of how comprehensible speech is in given conditions..."
"The Lombard effect or Lombard reflex is the involuntary tendency of speakers to increase their vocal effort when speaking in loud noise to enhance the audibility of their voice..."
"In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound..."
"The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception..."
"The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates..."
"In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose.
"In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words..."
"Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign...
"Phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds (or constituent parts of signs, in sign languages)..."
"In linguistics, prosody (/ˈprɒsədi, ˈprɒzədi/)[1][2] is concerned with those elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm..."
"A vocal register is a range of tones in the human voice produced by a particular vibratory pattern of the vocal folds. These registers include modal voice (or normal voice), vocal fry, falsetto, and the whistle register."
"Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood..."
"In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence..."
"A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. It is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants)..."
"A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract.