Integrated Sound Effects
The sound effects that come with each Sound Family are short riffs
or clips that are extracted directly from the instrument Layers.
Every sound effect is therefore in the same key, timbre, instrumentation,
and style as the overall piece. By using these integrated sounds
for mouse events and transitions, rather than using unrelated sound
effects, you can create much more cohesive and professional sounding
interactive scores. Using stock sound effects such as booms, whooshes,
and hits, that have no correlation to your background music and
were not mastered to be sonically compatible, just makes your soundtrack
sound shabby.
Event Sounds: Mouse-overs and Transitions
Generally speaking, there are two types of event sounds: Mouse-over
events, which occur, you guessed it, when the user mouses over a
hot spot, and Transitions, which occur most commonly on mouse clicks,
but also can happen programmatically. The distinction between these
two types of sounds is based on three sonic attributes: attack,
rhythm, and blend.
Mouse-overs usually need to be soft-attack, arrhythmic and high-blend,
whereas transition sounds are usually more effective with hard-attack,
and have more flexibility with regard to rhythm and blend. Of course,
there are no hard and fast rules. This model assumes that you are
working with a background music track and therefore want mouse-overs
to occur smoothly, on top of the music. Transition sounds, on the
other hand, are often used to change scenes, and benefit by having
a hard attack, which acts as a distraction to cover up the abruptness
of a sudden stop or change in the background music.
The following is a simple
illustration of this concept:
First, lets create a button with a soft-attack mouse-over sound
attached to the "over" state of the button, and a hard attack transition
sound to the mouse "hit" state. For the sake of illustration, I
have imported two chunks and assigned one to frame one, and the
other to frame five. Set the number of loops for each sound to a
high number, so it will play continuously. On the next frame following
each sound keyframe, insert a stop action. This will stop the playhead
in order to wait for user interaction, but the sound will have already
been triggered and continue to play. I have added an instance of
the button we just created at frame one and frame five, also. The
frame one instance includes a "goto and play(frame 5)"
action, and the frame five instance includes a "goto and play(frame
1)" action.
We're pretty well finished. But there's one more important thing
we need to do. We need to tell the current playing loop to stop
playing when the button is clicked so that we don't end up with
a cachaphony of loops layering over one another. We could use a"
stop all sounds" action for our button, but that would negate
the mouse hit sound we just created. Instead, insert the sound on
the timeline you wish to stop, and set it's sync method to "stop".
[Watch
Movie]
hint: In case you were wondering why we did this on the main
timeline rather than attaching the stop sounds to the over or hit
state of our button, the answer is that buttons do not allow multiple
layers of sound, and therefore cannot render both our mouse-hit
sound and stop sounds.
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