The Total Annihilation soundtrack is a thing of beauty and makes any attack that more dramatic. It’s a bit over the top but I don’t think people would have it any other way.

With multi-core processors, we’ll be able to utilize part of or even an entire core in the near future, which will open up a lot of possibilities. Software rendering gives us a lot of options for features which were never possible when we were restricted to hardware.

Don’t forget – there have been a number of advancements in tertiary fields that audio is benefiting from – one example is the proliferation of excellent compression codes, some even license-free such as Ogg Vorbis. We can now squeeze an insane amount of audio into a relatively small space. And naturally, we benefit from ever-increasing memory budgets of newer platforms / storage mediums as well.

It’s not as bleak as you make it out to be. I’ve been programming audio for games the last 10 years, and saying there’s been no breakthroughs for the last ten years is perhaps correct, but it’s incorrect to think there hasn’t been steady advancement in the field.

On the other hand, there isn’t a lot of demand out there, either, as most people use poor speakers on their PCs and turn off audio features because so many sound cards rely on the CPU to do the heavy lifting for them. Game developers often leave the soundscape of their games to a small team (of 1 in many cases) that isn’t given much consideration when the fundamental technologies are chosen for the game, binding their hands in terms of what they can do.

Even if this piece was first written for print, it only makes sense to support it with some audio now it has a new home on the internet.

I’d rather people thought of sound design as an area of design rather than as a purely technical persuit, and in that regard what you’ve written is a breath of fresh air.

Playing HL2 again atm, the music is so immersive and while many games do the whole – change beat, volume etc when you encounter new/dangerous scenario’s valve have hit this so perfectly in the hl2 games its uncanny.

The most common mis-use of the term is to use it as a synonym for ’sound effects editing’ which primarily comes about through the assumption that it is concerned with ‘designing sounds’. This is reinforced by the misunderstanding that well known sound designers, such as Ben Burtt of Star Wars and Wall.E fame, are called sound designers because they ‘design sounds’ (and indeed they do, but that’s not why they’re called sound designers, as one can see from the mix of sound designers and sound effects editors in the credits of the projects they’ve worked on) which is rather hard to escape from when all you can hear when Burtt’s name is mentioned is the sound of light sabres. This is confounded by the fact that there are actually so-called “Sound Designers” for hire who specialise in recording and creating unique sounds.

You’ve used the term in a holistic way, which is a lot closer to the truth (you clearly ‘get it’), but you’ve used it to encapsulate sound and music which isn’t right. You could argue that sound is a good umbrella term what with music being a special subcategory of sound, but then you’re left with no word to describe those sounds that aren’t music. The convention is to take the term ‘audio’ and use it as an umbrella term for sound and music. So, in the main your piece should be full of talk of “audio design” not “sound design”.

What you’ve written is akin to using ‘composition’ to encapsulate ’sound design’ and ’scoring with music’ – it’s a nice interpretation but incorrect none the less. Apologies for being anal :)