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Sound / Music design

The importance of audio in Virtual Reality

I would like to start this article by sharing with you a particularly illustrative video. The scene is taken from the film ‘The Artist’, directed by Michel...

Posted on 21st July 2020 by Massimiliano Borghesi

Environment development

Matte Painting an Environment in VR

Matte painting (literally: ‘background painting’) is a technique widely used in the world of cinema, which makes it possible to create, probably without great...

Posted on 15th July 2020 by Thomas Iuliano

Environment development

Texturing the environment – Interiors and props

Once I received the 3D assets created by Yuri and the concepts carried out by Thomas, I set to work on the interior texturing. Although I had a fairly precise idea of ​​how to...

Posted on 10th July 2020 by Irene Zappon

Character creation

Character Rigging for Virtual Reality

We can consider the character rig as the link that connects the modeling phase with the animation phase. The rig, in fact, is the construction of a specific “skeleton”...

Posted on 6th July 2020 by Saverio Trapasso

Environment development

Modeling of the environment – Scenography and props

When modeling the internal environment of Vajont, I had to keep in mind three fundamental requests: The size of the room and the resulting arrangement of the interactive objects:...

Posted on 26th June 2020 by Yuri Giordani

Character creation

Texturing the characters – Dresses and accessories

As we have already seen here, texturing allows us to tell part of the story without disturbing the screenwriters. By using small visual clues, it is possible to communicate...

Posted on 22nd June 2020 by Irene Zappon

Character creation

Modelling the clothes

Most of the production phases in a 3D project involve a moment of research and reference studying. Character artists look for images that they will use to identify the proportions...

Posted on 17th June 2020 by Yuri Giordani

Character creation

Texturing of the characters – Skin and face details

How much history can a detail reveal? I think my work as a texture artist can be summed up in this one question. Texturing is not just the application of color to a 3-D model, it...

Posted on 12th June 2020 by Irene Zappon

Character creation

Hair in VR

How important are hairstyles in defining the ages of characters, their ages and their cultures? There is only one answer to this question: a lot. Probably, if we had not decided...

Posted on 4th June 2020 by Saverio Trapasso

Environment development

Concept Art – The visual design of the interiors

I can claim that Vajont’s concepts have grown as the general idea of the work itself matured. Since the appearance of the characters in the piece are inspired by real-life...

Posted on 1st June 2020 by Thomas Iuliano

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Sound / Music design

The importance of audio in Virtual Reality


Massimiliano Borghesi
Sound Designer
The importance of audio in Virtual Reality
Posted on 21st July 2020 by Massimiliano Borghesi

I would like to start this article by sharing with you a particularly illustrative video. The scene is taken from the film ‘The Artist’, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, released in 2011 and the winner of numerous international awards, including five Oscars, three Golden Globes and seven BAFTAs.

The film recounts the advent of sound in the world of cinema – until then, silent.

Have you seen it?

In this scene, the protagonist – a famous silent-film actor – has a nightmare: he dreams that objects, people, the world, suddenly start to produce sounds; everything has a sound, only he is left without a voice. I think this scene shows very well the importance and function of sound in association with images.

Since 1927, the year sound cinema was introduced, sound and image have been inextricably linked: the audiovisual was born. This concept, over the years, has taken on a wider and wider meaning: not only films, therefore, but any experience capable of combining sound and images. Including Virtual Reality.

Although the marriage between sound and images in the world of cinema will soon celebrate its centenary, we certainly cannot say the same for VR, where the new frontier of spatialized audio has been introduced.

The possibilities that VR offers are yet to be discovered, and its limits are being pushed further and further. With the advent of this new media, sound has become perhaps even more important than with other audiovisual channels.

The importance of sound in VR

Imagine you’re in a VR experience with the volume at zero. A character is talking to you, but you can’t hear what he says. Out of the corner of your eye you can hear the frantic movements of some people running away. You turn around, and you’re just in time to see a rather hungry dinosaur in front of you. Game over!

Well, if the purpose of this hypothetical VR experience was to confuse you, it would have succeeded perfectly.

Let’s try to imagine the scene again, but this time, with the volume turned up. You find yourself in front of a character who tells you, in an anxious tone, that a dangerous animal has escaped from the zoo. You distinctly hear the screams of people telling you to take cover; and at the same time, you hear the heavy footsteps of a creature fast approaching. A deep and frightening sound causes you to turn around, and when you find yourself in front of the T-Rex, you may have a better chance of getting to safety.

Mission accomplished: you will be saved and you can progress in the experience. All this has been made possible thanks to sound.

From this small example we can understand some of the functions that are conveyed by sound in VR.

The functions of sound in VR

  • It advances the narrative through speech (in our previous case, a character tells us about the escape from the zoo of a dangerous animal);
  • It promotes a sense of presence in a place, making us fully immersed in an environment (we know we’re in the middle of a screaming crowd);
  • It triggers emotional reactions in the participant (people’s screams will activate a stress reaction and a state of alert in every one of us);
  • It allows us to understand the localization of events (we know where the creature is coming from because we can hear the direction of its steps);
  • It gives ‘weight’ and ‘body’ to the images. It seems a contradiction, but it is the sound that creates the ‘body’, and not the other way around (the T-Rex becomes huge and heavy because its movements rumble like cannon shots);
  • Through the synchrony between images and sound – syncretion – it is possible to create the ‘suspension of disbelief in the participant’, a fundamental condition for the involvement of the audience, who suspends his perception and accepts to believe in the imaginary world in which the experience is set; even though he knows that it is not real, but virtual.

This last point is certainly the most important:

an immersive sound design for the VR must contribute to making the experience not real – but authentic.

We will see in another article what tools we used to convey these functions in the Vajont experience, what are the sound processing steps we faced, the challenges we faced and the solutions we adopted.

Massimiliano Borghesi
Sound Designer

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