[WIPz]Immersive Sounds - Magic

[vaultguy]

Download here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rkrr3ylwb1ws93v/ismagic.zip

This is just a hastily thrown together preview for feedback purposes. Just replacements with no .esp so far. It's part of a larger project where I'm overhauling many of Skyrim's sounds. Eventually I decided it would be better to split the project into different modules. I've been working on archery, melee weapons, world interaction (doors, looting, etc), footsteps, UI and of course magic.

 

Magic is one that I feel needed the most attention. Skyrim's vanilla magic just sounds so thin and homogenous, most of it being little else than high frequency sizzling and crackling. It's also one of the hardest aspects to do sound for given its abstract nature. That's what I recall the sound guy saying in one of Skyrim's Making Of videos and he was definitely right.

I'm also doing this as a learning experience since I'm very interested in sound design but have next to no experience with it. In particular with magic sounds I learned a lot of cool tricks on the way like EQ automation to shape the "swooshes".

 

So instead of everything sounding like a frying pan I've tried to make the sounds meatier with a bunch of drones and such. More in line with what you'd expect from classic high fantasy magic. Each school of magic should also have its own set of drones to help set them apart more. Restoration for example has dissonant choirs which is pretty typical of "holy" magic sounds. For conjuration I used a lot of whispers and rhythmic gates (this is a very popular "modern" sound design trick which I think is blatantly overused, so I try to use it in moderation).

 

While I was working on this I ran into some obstacles though. It's not something you really think about since the vanilla sounds all sound so alike, but there really isn't much coherence in where the different school sounds are assigned. All of the staple illusions spells like fear and fury use the firebolt sounds, for example. I haven't gotten around to remedy that yet. I plan on creating some new unique sounds for those spells, then I'll have change the assigned sounds for them in the Creation Kit. This will likely cause conflicts with popular gameplay mods like SkyRe though so I'll also have to make compatibility patches. In addition, most of the new sounds are in stereo but are still assigned as mono in the game, so I'll have to make some edits in the sound descriptors for them.

[_echo]

Most of the sound rather good, though im not a huge fan of the restoration. Sounds mostly like an added track to the default sounds.

 

Keep it up and Ill probably replace my sounds with these.

[vaultguy]

Aye, that was the first one I did before I got the proper routines in. I was thinking of redoing it, so you're probably right.

[vaultguy]

And here it is

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/40190//?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETyBCfH1nE4

 

I'll see about getting this up on TES Alliance as well later.