Les Pierres Sauvages
2016
Narrative game installation
Vertical screening, 5.0 setup, and endless rotary encoder.
Design | Adaptation | Programming | 3D Modelling* | Sound
3 month work
Voice Over artist : Philippe Vallepin**
Gregorian Singers : Philippe Lenoble, Jean-Claude Rapein***
Arduino HID programming: Thomas Bernard, Rémi Hertrich
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Year 1161, a cistercian architect heads towards the construction site of an abbey.
Adapted from the book Les Pierres Sauvages, Fernand Pouillon.
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Tough living conditions
Austerity
Poverty
Isolation and remoteness
...were the keywords for the sound design.
All sounds aimed to portray their living conditions and the burden of the Rule of Saint Benoit.
As the story is based in a remote place in the XIIth century, my only potential sound sources were environmental sounds, rough weather, dramatic winds, foley, gregorian chants, acoustic spaces.
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All sounds, voices, and music are original recordings.
This project was firstly made with the intention of learning Wwise, audio implementation in C#, and Unity.
I didn't know anything about programming prior to that project, so a big thanks to the online Unity ressources and community.
All the sound interactivity is based on : rotation, XYZ position coordinates, acceleration, speed, raycasting, triggers and counters.
The whole mix happens in real time with RTPCs, blend tracks, random containers, bus automations...etc.
Attempt to recreate a virtual field of 12 loudspeakers in the church of Le Thoronet, using Spat, then exported as 12 seperate sync 3D wav files to Wwise with analog attenuation curves, then placed in Unity's 3D terrain.
Complete Walkthrough
Binaural AAC 320 compressed audio
Game mastered at -26LUFS, so crank up the volume !
> All audio content is original
Stone impact source material recorded by
Note : this is a binaural downmix of the original 5.1 output.
Production shots
Meeting the monks of Saint Pierre de Solesmes,
a day listening to silence and services...
One of the three recording sessions in Saint Julien's Cathedral. I recorded two gregorian singers, one of them being the choirmaster.
Recorded with:
- Soundfield st450mk3 10m
- Schoeps MS841, 4m
- Rode nt5 Ortf, 35m
Also done some location foley recodings here.
copyright : Georgina Corcy
5.0 setup - vertical screening - diy room acoustic treatment - diy rotary controller. Installation is experienced in the dark.
Ableton Live controlling Ircam Spat.
Spat was used to make a virtual field of speaker in the church sequence.
It was done so as to give the player the impression of being in the middle of the sound reflection.
With a such system, the imaging is stable and coherent wherever the player is standing in the church. Localisation of direct sound is very good, and reflections comes from the walls. On top of that it helps attenuating the weird radius/pan law in Wwise.
The group of monks singing is walking in circle in spat at 4km/h sometimes turning their back.
This was made prior to the introduction of ambisonic format in Wwise 2016.1
Dirty C# scripts...
All the game was made on C# and all the audio is driven/called through code.
I have not used the "ready-made" Wwise components for Unity.
Notes on sound narratives(27/04/16)
I try to give each sound its own micro narrative.
In the third scene, when we are looking back at the room with a steaming bucket filled with healing herbal tea :
Somewhere in the left of the room, there's this small fragile flying moth, living its single night life.
Its fluttering is as fragile as the painful eyes of the harassed resting monk in the center, whose slow breathing and motions gives us an insight on the burden of their daily tasks.
This burden is supported by the lower pitched sound of distant cicadas in our back. Memories of the crushing heat of sun in the daylight.
An other story is given by the soothing chittering of night insects outside of the house, singing in waves , softening the environment (the first sound in that role since the beginning of the game). This scene is a pause in the construction of Le Thoronet.
The ecology in which the monks try to settle down seems to stop temporarily its assaults against them.
One can listen to the light bubbling when watching the sides of the wood shack, then move into low underwater sounds resonating as we delve deeper into the monk's disease as we hear his ghost sitting on the stool.
Day Time in the scene facing the quarry is a complete shift.
Cicadas tend to fill the whole sonic space, as if they were trying to suck all the air that there is to breathe. Hence the lost of all perspectives, and possible communications blocked by this dense wall of sound.
Even the inert hard rocks seems to throw violently themselves at their faces projecting sharp edged debris.