According to our wonderful friends over at Wikipedia, the role of a sound designer is;
“Sound design is the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating audio elements. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including filmmaking, television production, theatre, sound recording and reproduction, live performance, sound art, post-production, radio and video game development.” – Wikipedia (Sorry, David).
For the most part I agree with this statement, however the role of a Sound Designer within the world of the video game world is much more than that. With video games often being interactive worlds, it is important for a the sound designer to understand how the audio will be implemented and how that audio will be interacted with. Rob Bridgett explains in his article, The Role of an Audio Director in Video Games, “The title of ‘sound designer’, and I guess the role, has changed somewhat significantly over the past 10 years or so to encompass the implementation stage as a crucial part of the sound design process itself. By that I mean that creating the sound effects and then creating and setting up the rules and behaviors under which those sounds will be played back in the game are two parts of the same ‘sound design’ process”. With the evolution of technologies used in the video game industry, we have seen the role develop from a Sound Designer to a Technical Sound Designer, a term which was coined by Gene Semel (Epic Games, ex-Naughty Dog & PlayStation).
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