The oldest Internet users among us may remember the era of opening up a random web page and being greeted by blaring music alongside flashing colours and graphics. Thankfully, that era of web design has long since passed, and the way sound and music are now used online is something far more refined.
With the number of online platforms exploding in recent years, the number of ways that music is used has also increased and diverged alongside them. Below are just some of the ways that we’ve seen sound used to enhance the growing online experience.
Online Casinos
Slot games are an interesting example because they have layers of both simplicity and complexity. For the user, the initial impression of many slots is that they are simple in terms of their controls and overall layout. Then, if you dig a bit deeper into the coding and the mechanics behind it, you find a lot of complex parts. If you ask ‘what is RTP in slots?‘ you’ll uncover extensive mathematical formulas and calculations not obvious on the face of the game.
The music behind these slots is a mixture of both. All of the sound design in a modern slot game is deceptively simple, usually going for a minimal and casual feel without much depth. However, you shouldn’t mistake this for being overly basic. Slot games, like real casino games, are designed to be played over longer periods, and all the sounds are crafted to be unintrusive so as not to overwhelm the game itself.
AR and VR
Compared to other kinds of digital entertainment, both augmented reality and virtual reality need a very different approach to how they handle music and sounds. The goal of both AR and VR is often to integrate or replicate real life and so the music and sound effects have to match. It means that in many cases, music is kept to a minimum while sounds are sampled and engineered from real life.
VR developers are constantly looking at how to make their experiences more immersive by integrating realistic sensations and sound plays a big part in that. It’s a leading area in terms of ambient sound engineering, taking cues from Hollywood in exploring the scientific and technological depths.
Future Digital Platforms
Upcoming technologies look like they’ll need equally unique approaches when it comes to sound. For example, AI speech is still in the early stages of development and the quality is rapidly improving. We are rapidly approaching natural speech that can be completely automatically generated, and there is a growing market for AI versions of famous voices, albeit with emerging debates over how they should be used.
Beyond that, the technology of sound itself is changing all the time, not least with the AI mentioned above. Digitally generated sound and music looks set to change the entire world of audio engineering and there will be a race amongst professionals to keep up with it.
Like all tech, we’re expecting things to develop quickly and a lot of changes to come in a short time, so stay tuned for plenty of big changes on the horizon.
