# Reimagining Audio Design for the Metaverse (Experiment 1)

Apr 6

Written By [Notion Theory](/content/blog?author=5e5d8c129fa79863f7d0dbf6/index.html)

Already deep into their production schedule ahead of the release of their open world action-adventure game Ghost of Tsushima, the audio designers at Sucker Punch received the directive that additional species of birds needed to be added, but they had no time to travel back to Japan for field recordings.

To get around this, the Sucker Punch audio team had the idea of taking natural bird sounds, pitching the sounds low enough to be able to mimic the sounds, and then pitch their improvised audio back up. It was a brilliant idea that helped to grow the immersive ambient soundscape found in Ghost of Tsushima on a short deadline.

Inspired by these sound design experiments, we set out to replicate this process ourselves to unpack it and then embed it into a tool that could be used within any Metaverse experience.

**What would we experience if people in the metaverse had simple tools to create their own immersive soundscapes,** **with nothing more than a library of pre-made audio clips and their voice?**

What sounds could we expect to encounter within these uniquely crafted worlds?

Given the natural inclination of the metaverse as a medium for creative expression, we were excited to start exploring these possibilities ourselves.

The process below is a result of this simple experiment sourced from a prototype we created in Virtual Reality to enable building custom soundscapes.

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First you take an audio file of an initial reference. Here, we used an existing sound of a bird chirping.

### Real Bird Reference

Then we pitched the audio down 3 octaves (36 semitones) to place the audio in a range that allowed us to reproduce what we could hear.

### Real Bird Reference Pitched 3 Octaves Down

Then we tried to reproduce the sound we heard from the pitched-down audio with our own voice. We took some time trying to reproduce (approximately) the pitch inflections we heard from the original audio file.

### Attempted Bird Improv

Once we were happy with the improvised result from our own voice, we pitched the recording back up 3 octaves to put the audio back into its natural pitch. In this case, that was the natural pitch of a bird. When we placed our improv audio result into our test scene where we had some existing environment ambient, this is how the result turned out:

### Attempted Bird Improv Pitched 3 Octaves Up

And below you can hear a side-by-side comparison of our voice alongside the final improv result we pitched back up (without the environment ambient). What you hear is nothing from the original reference clip, but instead our own voice pitched back up into the range of a bird.

### Comparison between final improv result and the original improv result

The result turned out incredibly well and from here, we’re continuing to explore different audio references to see how far we can take this concept and turn it into a simple tool which would allow for people to create their very own, and unique, soundscapes for the metaverse.

Until next time.

[audio](/content/blog/tag/audio/index.html)