As my great-uncle often said: “To create art, sometimes you have to destroy an old and unwanted upright piano.” He was a strange man.
On the latest Inside Infinite blog, 343 Industries shared a ton of details and information on how they are creating the sounds in the upcoming Infinite halo. There’s a surprisingly large number of in-depth tech talks and diagrams found in the post, if that’s your kind of thing. But what I want to focus on is that to help create powerful and loud sounds for the game, 343 screwed up a piano.
Fortunately, they also recorded it and uploaded it to YouTube.
Oh yeah I really meant to say fucking.
Not just a few hammer blows or a sharp jolt. They destroyed this thing, hitting it with bricks, bats, and also cutting its cables. Over time, they started putting dry ice on it, and the results are some really creepy, alien noises. At one point, someone placed a block of dry ice on him and he took a strong step, which made a strange noise, which was the desired effect. But it also felt like someone just wanted to torture a piano and he was lucky that day.
According to the blog post, this piano was donated by a friend of lead sound designer Kyle Fraser. The friend didn’t want it anymore and Fraser decided to use it to collect various noises and audio snippets.
I also think some people just wanted to hit the shit out of a piano with baseball bats. And who can blame them? It seems fun.
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