Overbeast is a location-based augmented reality game from design practice Liquid City & big phone company Verizon, featuring Godzilla-scale beasts that battle over the local skyline.
As we say, these is big beasts. And beasts this big need to have some deeeeeep, bassy roars. Looking at the creature designers W0W’s early beast designs, we considered how the different species’ voice’s would be made; Do they have a voice box? Are sounds made from friction, like crickets? Do they flap blubbery tendrils? Could be anything with these guys.
Once we found our conceptual standpoints, we set about recording, mixing recordings of our own voices with some more unexpected sources:
Toy Horn in Custard / Harmonica
Green Tube / Animal Horn / Kissing Teeth
The object is to slooow doooown these recordings massively. But you can’t just slow down any old material. Slowing most recordings would result in the loss of valuable high frequencies, which can leave it sounding muffled and unnatural.
The Nerdy Bit
The Nyquist Theorem states that a signal must be sampled at a rate at least twice as high as its highest frequency in order to be accurately reconstructed. This means that, if we want to slow down a recording by 5x, we need to record it at a sampling rate five times the highest rate of human hearing. Since humans can hear up to 20kHz, we need to record rates of up to 100kHz]
But never fear, a hero comes along: the Hollywood Sound Designer’s best kept secret: the Sanken CO100K microphone. The CO100k is a special (read: expensive) mic that can capture frequencies far higher than most. With the CO100k, you can record up to 100kHz—that’s five times higher than the limit of human hearing!—allowing us to slow down recordings more than five times without losing any perceived high frequencies. From this we get deep, bassy, beastly roars that are rich in throaty, revolting, guttural detail. Rawwwwrrrr!!!
Hear for Yourself
Listen to this horse neigh recording as we slow it down to beastly depths. As you move down to the bottom of the playlist, you can hear the regular recording beginning to sound muffled and diffuse; far less terrifying than its supersonic counterpart.
The Final Roarsult
Here's one of the many examples of how the beast roars turned out, complete with rich, visceral splendour, thanks to the CO100K's supersonic recordings.
