Sound Design

* This document was written by Geoffrey Brown.

With the exception of the shuffle effect, found at the Free Sound Project (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu) all other sound effects were recorded a sound free room in the UIC EVL.
Sound effects for the cards actually had to be done on the floor, since the table I was working on was metal and bumpy. The sound effects were done multiple times so that the best contender could be edited in Audacity. I used real cards for card sound effects, but for the sound that plays when the camera zooms in to the player's hidden cards, I made a sound that imitated what I thought the zoom should sound like, then edited it in audacity by adding normalization and a “phaser” effect.
The background music, “Vegas Glitz” by Kevin McLeod is borrowed from at the royalty free site Incompetech.com. This was chosen because it fit the gambling scene so well. I had to find the perfect “looping point” and cut it in Audacity, so that it would repeat well.

A lot of voice acting was recorded in the sound free room, for the over 140 interesting comments I had written in the transcript for AI reaction. For each type of response you can get from certain gameplay actions, there are around 10-15 comments that may come out of the opponents mouth. I recited each line multiple times so that I could choose from the best sounding samples. When editing, I would sometimes take the first part of a sentence and combine it with the last part of a repeated part of the sentence because it sounded better. By doing that, I also had to make sure that it flowed in the best possible manner.

Unfortunately, in the end, we couldn't use any of those recordings, Since they were recorded before the motion capture, they didn't sync up correctly with it. Fortunately, sound was recorded during the video of our motion capture session and we were able to use that instead.