Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

Last week in my Introduction to Game Audio class a few students were inquiring on how to make the perfect background loop. This is a loop that will play as an ambient sound and needs to create the illusion of a never ending background ambience yet use very little disk space. Here is one basic  way to create such a loop. First I am going to start with an opensource ambient sound from a former student of mine Glenn Forsythe called “bottleambient” from the Berklee Sounds for One Laptop Per Child initiative.

Here is the sound

raw ambient sound

You’ll notice it trails off at the end which means trying to loop it simply by playing to the end and wrapping back around to the beginning will not sound seamless. Additionally, if we listen closely to the very beginning of this loop there is a slight “tick” sound which will easily key the listener into the repetition.

There are many ways to create seamless loops but one thing remains consistent no matter what the approach, we must NOT hear the end of the loop wrapping back around to the beginning! Many times a student will become fixated on exactly where the loop must begin and end, but in reality we, as the creators of this sound, can choose exactly where the loop can begin and end. One thing we know is that there is continuous sound happening in this audio, it is not happening naturally at the beginning or the end but it IS happening in the middle!

What?!#^$? you say… yes.. there is a perfect loop point in the middle of the audio. In fact, let’s separate our audio right in the middle of the sound! and then let’s place the first part of the sound at the end of the 2nd part of the sound.

Ok, now we can see visually why the file would not loop naturally… the original ending does not match up at all with the original beginning!

However, we know specifically that our new “end” of the sound will wrap perfectly to our new “beginning” simply because they  worked as a linear section before we made our edits. This is a powerful realization…. by simply cutting our audio in the middle and placing those cuts at our loop point we have created the seamless transition we need! If you are playing along at home try it for your self… set your DAW to loop and listen to how the beginning and end loop perfectly…

So now we have one simple task… we need to make the edit in the middle of this audio be imperceptible. Now we can use our DAW tools to move and fade any of the audio in the middle, realizing that because this is not music we have no boundaries around meter and time.

The following is a quick, very short looped ambient section built from the original, notice the fades and repetitions of audio that allow for extending the loop slightly while still maintaining an imperceptible loop from end to beginning.

bottle ambient loop short

This is one very quick way to create seamless background loops when working on video games or film.