Comms Sound Design

'Loes all, sorry i've been a little quiet.

I've been working on some ideas to make all the communication as faithful to the movies as possible.

I think the voices can be split into a few distinct groups:

Rebel Radio (command)
Simple walkie talkie-ish squelchy sound for command

Rebel Radio (character)
Simple walkie talkie-ish but a drier, more open sound. As if you are hearing it over the radio and cleanly in real life and the same time.

Imperial Radio (command)
Same as rebel command, maybe cleaner sounding (less likely to have radios that a cobbled together)

Stormtrooper/Helmeted (character)
this is more tricky and making a convincing voice that sounds like it's coming from within a helmet is a bit of a pain. I've been working on a few things using impulse responses (sampled reverb). Next week i'm going to have a go at capturing my own impulse response of the inside of a plastic bucket. I expect good things. I might document this as people might find it interesting.

Imperial Radio (character)
Probably the same as rebel for the characters without helmets.


SPACE

One thing, though not very essential at this point of time (though maybe it would be interesting to implement it for rebel command?) would be to use VFO modulated sounds, like you get in Ham radio. In the films this is in the space battles comms on the receiving end of things. But anyway i thought this might be kind of cool to implement somewhere, my dad does a bit of ham radio so I can definitely sample from that for general comms background chatter, and there are a few ways to create the sound with synths plugins... If I can find a way to process through the actual radio, that would be very badass, but i'm not sure how feasible it is.

But anyway, It might be cool to implement the space commands with it as an effect when players are in-ship. What do you guys think?


If you have no clue what i'm on about, please see these:

Ham Radio frequency shifting: https://youtu.be/m2pQ8Jrk0bI?t=1m26s

Synth based: https://soundcloud.com/highkoo/red-leader/s-taUyz

The first one sounds cool. There was something like that in the films IIRC.
Sounds like the stuff they have on battleships.
Yeah I agree. it sounds awesome. I'm all for it.

My father has just informed me of this: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

So I may try (I won't authorities, if you're looking at this - it is mere speculation) and transmit some of them over the waves with my dad's radio transciever and then dial into them and record them through that

But it is illegal... However I can happily record the weird sounding shit you find in there, which can sound a lot like the comms sounds from the attack on the death star when it's being relayed back to the bridge on the republic cruiser. If what I record happens to sound a lot like star wars dialogue then all the better

Thanks for sharing that link, it's awesome.

Yeah, seems like a good idea, you'll be able to make some really cool effects with that.

I'm soooo excited for this! Great job Calum, can't wait to hear your final stuff. The actual Ham Radio effect definitely sounds alot more authentic so I think if you could sample the real one that would be best. If you find a character or something that hasn't been filled and you think my voice will be suitable for it, hook me up.

By the way, how do I access the voice clips on Megacloud/dropbox AIFF Do I need to download the CE3 SDK to access them? What do I need to listen to them and stuff.

Alt I still need you to do a bunch of VO! Two actors voices is not enough Just need to sit down and have a proper sort out of what we've got and what needs to be done at some point.

It's a logic project in the megacloud, but if you go into the audio folder, all the seperate samples are there as .wavs or .aiffs one of those... It's only the raw audio, I haven't uploaded my offline edit yet.

Alrighty.