Splorch!
The sounds for Digital Eel games, particularly Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, were and are always a lot of fun to put together. They're full of subtleties, gags, incongruities and trivia that few people will notice or ever figure out. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I thought I'd list a few here for posterity and in case anyone is interested.
Consider this as a window into the heady world of Professional Sound Design. I'm winking.
Weird Worlds bridge crew chatter - actual chatter from JPL (captured via internet coverage) during the Cassini probe orbital burn as it neared its first encounter with Saturn's ring system
Tchorak greeting - derived from an obscure recording of an oil and gas refinery being "played" like a pipe organ
Tchorak lava bomb launch - Arthur spitting out untasty Heart of Gold tea, greatly modified (but you can still hear it), from the radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
SAIS splash screen alien speech - a sentence or sentence fragment from a Lovecraft story typed into a text to speech app, reversed, flanged and chopped into three pieces
Golden Disk - the actual recording of a child's greeting in English from the golden record carried by the Voyager probes
Finding life in SAIS - a bunch of short .wav files of animals, birds, insects, etc., just overlapping each other's tail forming "parade of lifeforms"
Black Monolith - just the timpani part (ahem) from Also sprach Zarathustra (not sampled from the 2001 soundtrack though)
Kawangi graviton disintegrator beam - derived from a Hammond organ glissando played by Keith Emerson, from Karn Evil 9 by Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Black hole - pitch-shifted .wav files, random ones, I don't even remember the three I used, shaped so as to form a "churning vortex" of sound, lightly sprinkled with the sounds of ballpark cheers and people screaming on a roller coaster
Whoops, it's getting late. I'll have to explain Splorch! specifically some other time but I think you get the idea, and Don Martin lives on.
Consider this as a window into the heady world of Professional Sound Design. I'm winking.
Weird Worlds bridge crew chatter - actual chatter from JPL (captured via internet coverage) during the Cassini probe orbital burn as it neared its first encounter with Saturn's ring system
Tchorak greeting - derived from an obscure recording of an oil and gas refinery being "played" like a pipe organ
Tchorak lava bomb launch - Arthur spitting out untasty Heart of Gold tea, greatly modified (but you can still hear it), from the radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
SAIS splash screen alien speech - a sentence or sentence fragment from a Lovecraft story typed into a text to speech app, reversed, flanged and chopped into three pieces
Golden Disk - the actual recording of a child's greeting in English from the golden record carried by the Voyager probes
Finding life in SAIS - a bunch of short .wav files of animals, birds, insects, etc., just overlapping each other's tail forming "parade of lifeforms"
Black Monolith - just the timpani part (ahem) from Also sprach Zarathustra (not sampled from the 2001 soundtrack though)
Kawangi graviton disintegrator beam - derived from a Hammond organ glissando played by Keith Emerson, from Karn Evil 9 by Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Black hole - pitch-shifted .wav files, random ones, I don't even remember the three I used, shaped so as to form a "churning vortex" of sound, lightly sprinkled with the sounds of ballpark cheers and people screaming on a roller coaster
Whoops, it's getting late. I'll have to explain Splorch! specifically some other time but I think you get the idea, and Don Martin lives on.
posted by Rich Carlson at 2:00 AM
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