"The sound came first. In a San Francisco Bart train tunnel, Don Veca took his recorder and captured a train's metallic roar like demons in agony, beautifully ugly, he remembers. That recording became one of the most chilling sounds in 2008's Dead Space. We dropped that screeching, industrial noise at full volume right after the vacuum silence creating one of the game's most jarring sonic contrasts, Veca, who made horror history as the audio director for the Dead Space games, recalls."
"Ask anyone who's worked on a great horror game, and they'll probably tell you the same thing: true fear starts with what you hear. Veca says it begins in the mind. It starts with psychology not the fear of what is, but of what might be, he says. Real horror isn't a mugger with a gun. It's the shadow behind the door, the silence that lingers too long, the certainty that something is coming but you don't know when, or what."
A train's metallic roar was recorded in a San Francisco BART tunnel and used in Dead Space to produce a screeching industrial noise juxtaposed with sudden vacuum silence. That contrast created one of the game's most jarring sonic moments and later became iconic. Horror sound design emphasizes psychological unpredictability: fear arises from what might happen rather than what is. Tension is built like a slow tide, alternating small reliefs with sudden, violent releases to maximize impact. Sound and music prepare players for scares through buildup and release. Musical elements can be treated as infected, organic forces that reflect and amplify on-screen corruption.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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