Post Mortem Analysis: Mindful Escapes Virtual Reality

For the past 30 weeks I have been embedded into a project alongside Tim Allison to record, produce, mix, master and integrate audio into a virtual reality game using Unreal Engine. The game is titled Mindful Escapes, it was created by Jack Stedman, Cayden Finn and Spencer Gibson. The purpose of the game is to create a space of peaceful ecstasy that consumers can escape to (pun intended) and use in their day-to-day life; a way of meditation. What separates Mindful Escapes from the competition in the market is that the soundtracks have specific tones in them that are used as a form of auditory beat stimulation therapy. This technique, known as Binaural Beats, has been proved to induce certain states of mind in relation to the brain wave frequencies we emit when in said mind states (e.g. deep sleep, focus, anxiety), this is known as the frequency following response. If you would like further information on this technique and how it works, I have previously written about my research on the topic, here.

When producing audio for a project such as this, it becomes a lot more than just music. If anything, music composition is one of the last thing on the list of priorities for the final product. The first thing Tim and I had to focus on was the ambient field recordings and foley assets; What do we need? Where is the best location to record what we need? How long will it take us to capture it all? What processing would we need to do to these recordings? But even then, before we were to go out to the field and capture the recordings we need, we had to make sure that everything would go smoothly when we hired out all the equipment and took it on location. How would we prepare for that, you ask? We tackled this by simply hiring out equipment, going into the field and capturing any and all sounds we could. I headed off to Mt. Coot-Tha, walked up the mountain and set microphones up in the bush, many things went right but just as many went wrong. This was an excellent exercise that helped us figure out mitigation plans for things that could potentially happen on the day of of recording. Definitely go ahead and check out the post mortem I wrote up for the test recording, it covers a lot of crucial information about the recordings that won't be touched on in this blog. Click here for the Post Mortem Analysis of my test recording at Mt. Coot-Tha.

This recording session went extremely well, Tim and I had taken the recordings into the studio and made up a sample of what the final soundtracks would be like (Appendix A). From this we gathered a list of items needed for the game:

• 2 x Forrest sound scapes

• A waterfall

• Flowing water

• A flower field

• Cave ambience

• Birds chirping

• Suitable music composition

• Binaural Beat tone(s)

Appendix A: Mt. Coot-Tha sample

Recording and Producing the Game Audio

The feedback we received from the games team about the sample audio was very positive, this gave us a clear pathway as to what we had to do from here. The time came for our first session of field recordings, Tim and I met in Buderim, from here we travelled to Buderim Forrest Park. This location was perfect for the sounds that we required as it has a waterfall, a flowing river and a perfect rain forrest soundscape. On our way to the waterfall, we spent hours scoping out the trails and finding ideal locations to record all while monitoring the audio around us by connecting headphones to the Zoom H4 we were using. Eventually we landed on 4 or 5 places that sounded perfect for what we needed; flowing water, a waterfall, cave ambience and forrest ambience. Capturing as many varieties of each sample we required was fun and exercised our creativity in ways that we normally wouldn't get when producing music. We took the recordings we had and transferred them from the recording device to our computers, from there we listened back to all of the audio and edited them so that only the best quality snippets were left and available for us to take into the studio.

Aesthetic

The number one thing that makes meditation so powerful, is that it is such a deeply personal experience that is similar to all but extremely different at the same time. Natural sounds such as water flowing, trees blowing in the wind and bird chirping are all very pleasing and peaceful sounds. That is why the main aesthetic was to use that as the focal point of the audio and not 'over-do' the compositions with an excessive amount of instrumentation. I find that large harmonic content and ensembles are quite stimulating for me and can easily take control of my focus, making me hone in on the individual characteristics of an arrangement (maybe it's just my ears). Deciding to incorporate only one or two instruments to the recordings maintains focus on the natural ambience, while adding a euphoric essence to the piece. Slow and airy sounds was our aim; to give a sense of breath, the song is breathing and it has an essence of life to it. In some cases we chose to place the instrumentation in such a way that emulates the feel of someone being close to you while said instrument is being played, this gives a sense of comfort, support, acceptance, friendship to a certain degree.

Production

After further consultation with the games team about aesthetic and tonality, Tim and I were able to have one final look at the game to grasp on to the visual aspect for reference when laying music over the recordings.

As great as the ambient sounds were, it wasn't until Tim and I started producing the chord progressions and melodies on the files for it

to start sounding complete. This stage was a fun session for the both of us, we each took turns jamming out and playing notes in correlation to the ambience. We chose one key to stick to (Amin) for all of the sound tracks and recorded a huge amount of progressions, to which we cut and chose our favourite sections/ideas from the lot and then built upon those parts.

Once the composition of the tracks were complete, we needed to ensure that each track had the capability to be looped, this was done to ensure that a consumer could stay in one area of the map for the duration of the song and for it to seamlessly be able loop back (or cross-fade) to the start without there being any drastic interruptions on the flow of the calm progression of music.

upon finalisation of this project, I look back and can reflect on all of the new skills I learned and the ones that I strengthened. It took a long period of time to just gather a list of all of the final assets we need, this is a stage that should be reached at a much earlier time. In saying that though, once we had all of the information we required, there was a very fast turn around from when we recorded the soundscape(s) to when we had the final deliverables. If I were to re-do this project from the start, I would focus more so on making sure the games team was able to deliver us the assets that we needed much earlier than they did. Not saying that it was too late when they gave us the information (as the game had to go through large changes of scenery, with many new additions along the way), but more so for time management and optimising designated time for the project.