AV: Here is the dreaded, but essential, creative process question! Tell us about the process of creating music and sound effects for a game. How were you able to create such driving, haunting music for Doom, and what goes into the creation of a sound effect, such as the mancubus from Doom 2?

BP: What helped the most with the sound in Doom was the Doom bible that Tom Hall compiled. Much of what was in it never appeared in the game, but it set a proper mood for starting on the project. Within a month or two of receiving that document, I had roughed out a lot of music and most of what turned out to be final sound effects. Later on, John Romero contacted me and said they had decided that all of the music should be heavy rock. I did up some cover MIDI files that I took with me the first time I visited id on the project. They were a big hit. But after the game was far enough along for music to be added, the rock didn't work in most levels. That's when I pulled out the music I had roughed out at the first of the project. It was dark and gloomy, and it fit more of the levels than the rock material did. John Romero actually did the final song choosing and placement; he is excellent at that sort of thing. Plus, he knew most of the levels backwards and forwards. For the sound effects, I tried to put life into the descriptions of the demons, then come up with what the creatures would sound like. The mancubus looked to me like he would make slow, deep sounds. If he were hurt, he would react like "w-o-a-h." I tried a lot of different things to come up with the right sound. Eventually, I recorded me making the sound backwards. To do that, I made a recording of the sound frontwards and reversed it. The end result was that it didn't sound as human as a straight, unreversed recording would have sounded. I also did some pitch shifting and put some delay on the final effect.

AV: How does the process of creating music and sound effects for a game-in-progress work?

BP: For all the projects I have worked on, this has been a very haphazard affair. Lists of required sound effects were rarely compiled ahead of time. If early lists were compiled, they would usually be ridiculously long, and include sounds that would never work in a game. The rule I always try to follow is simple: what sounds are absolutely necessary to keep the player's attention focused on the action? To see how sound must be focused, go to a busy location, like a shopping mall or a busy traffic intersection, and record ten minutes of action with a camcorder. Then go to a quiet place and watch the tape. Chances are you will hear sounds that you never realized you recorded, and those sounds will probably have nothing to do with the action on the screen. They will probably distract you from what you were focusing on with the camcorder. Well, this same thing will happen in a computer game if there are too many sounds. The player will not know which sound to focus on. We have to remember that in real life our brains are filtering out the unnecessary so that we can focus on the necessary. A sound effects person has to do this focusing for the player in a computer game.

AV: Are you ever given abstract notions of the game's design, or very specific details about characters, environments, and gameplay?

BP: For the most part, I have not had the luxury of actually seeing characters, environments and gameplay before I have started creating the music and sound effects. Usually, I had only a most abstract notion of these things -- my own feelings about what would be right given what I knew at the time. This changed with Duke Nukem 3D, where there was a system for me to plug in the music and sound effects I wanted to try. With my latest projects, I have been able to plug sound effects and music into a working alpha or beta to see how the sound works with the graphics. With Doom, I was supposed to have some software that would allow me to do this sort of thing, but it never got programmed. I depended on John Romero to plug the sounds in for me, and I could then see if they fit for timing. If they didn't, I would try to get a mental picture of what was wrong, correct it on my computer, save it on the network, and then John would plug it in for another trial. That was definitely not the right way to do it, but it did work. Many hours were wasted, though. This sort of system would have caused a Hollywood sound person to commit suicide!

AV: What level of input from the game's developers do you feel comfortable with, and how does that exchange work? Do conflicts ever arise?

BP: I like a lot of input, but only if the developer has a clear idea of what he wants. Conflicting input is very harmful to any endeavor, but especially to a creative one. A developer's only knowing what he doesn't want is almost as harmful, but it is a step in the right direction. There has never been any large conflict over this sort of thing. The projects where I feel things have turned out the best were those where I had a clear idea of what was desired, or those where I was given free reign to do what I thought was best.

AV: For the technically inclined out there, tell us about your setup. What equipment do you use to create music and sound effects? We imagine what you use today is vastly different from the equipment you started out with. Does the technology ever get in the way of the creative process?

BP: Actually, the equipment is very similar to what I started out with. The software is very much advanced, though. My basic setup for writing music is a MIDI keyboard with velocity sensitivity. The MIDI keyboard senses when I first press a key and how long it takes it to bottom out. The harder I hit a key, the less time this takes. That means that I intended a certain volume on the sound. On a piano, pressing the key slowly usually results in a very soft sound, whereas banging on the keys increases the volume. This is important if I want to make the music expressive. I connect the keyboard to a 16-bit soundcard via a MIDI kit. The soundcard has an FM synthesizer chip right on it and I also have a wavetable daughtercard piggybacked on the soundcard. I use a middle of the road set of multimedia speakers, and that's it for the music hardware. I do have a lot more equipment, but only use that when I need to deliver digital audio. For music software, I use Cakewalk for the most part. Sound effects is really where the software has changed. The first computer game sound effects I designed were for Wolfenstein 3D. The only digital editing software available at the time was SampleVision by Turtle Beach. It was expensive and nowhere near as powerful as the shareware editors available today. The best thing about it was that it allowed me to use a keyboard sampler to record the sound effects, and I could then transmit them via MIDI to the PC. Without this capability, the sound effects would have been much lower quality; I would have had to record them directly to the PC with the 8-bit sound card I used at the time. I do not think that technology has ever gotten in my way. It has frustrated me at times because it wouldn't do what I wanted to do. The latest technology in MIDI allows recording musical nuances with greater ease than ever before. There is still a bit missing, but there are more creative avenues than ever before in the history of music. Generally, I take a minimalist view of getting a job done. Just because something new has come out does not mean that it is better. If something makes it easier for me to translate emotion into music, I buy it. If it makes it more fun, I'll buy it. But just because it is right for someone else doesn't necessarily make it right for me.

AV: How is the technology for computer sound changing and how will it affect games? Is there anything earth-shattering on the foreseeable horizon?

BP: The future for sound is more discrete channels, but those will generally require that the sound be preprocessed for the system, like surroundsound. 3D sound cards are moving in the right direction, though they are not really 3D. They are more like widened stereo. True 3D will trigger a new generation of extremely believable computer games. At this stage, though, such technology requires a game player to wear earphones. But, the right game could sell a lot of earphones!

AV: We nearly omitted the traditional "What advice do you have for someone wanting to break into the industry?" question, thinking that you long ago tired of answering it.

BP: My advice is really very simple. Find some up-and-coming developer who needs what you can offer and start working with them. Meet as many people in the industry as you can. Don't be afraid to e-mail them or walk up to them and introduce yourself. In fact, that sort of thing will tell you a lot about what type of people they are. If they are less than friendly to you, would you want to work with them anyway?