In racing games, sound evokes speed and position and even signals the player to change gear. It is as crucial as graphic design.
But Formula 1 sounds are not easy to capture. The cars rarely run and are effectively thrown away after a year, the race weekends are incredibly noisy with all kinds of hard to control noises. Its crashes aren’t something you could (or want to) deliberately stage.
With Codemasters’ F1 24 released earlier this week, we spoke to the sound design team to find out how they captured the unique sound of the championship.
In reality, much of the audio recording for F1 24 was captured on site during pre-season testing in Bahrain, where all ten teams were racing for three days ahead of this season.
It’s easier to capture audio during pre-season testing because teams are at least a little more relaxed about their time compared to a race weekend.
Chris Greenman-Ralph, audio artist at Codemasters, explains: “All the audio in the engine bundle is brand new [in F1 24]. That includes transmissions and turbo sounds, which we don’t always update [for each yearly release].
“We place a microphone in each sidepod and one just in front of the exhaust, and mix them together to create the full beam for each team.”
Note that, as mentioned above, that ‘bundle’ includes the sound of transmissions and turbos – although none of these components work in the same linear way as the engines.
“If we can get it, we use actual on-location recording – and we have a library archive to draw from,” adds senior audio designer James Kneen, alluding to the experience Codemasters has built creating the official F1 game from 2009 to present.
The engine sound should be updated every year to reflect the changing sound of each engine each year; Even if there is no change in engine regulations, every engine sounds slightly different every season.
But that’s only part of the picture. Pit stop audio, which you’ll hear again and again, is also crucial to the experience.
Brad Porter, audio director at Codemasters, added: “One of the great things we do when we get to pre-season testing is when teams do pit stop drills. You will see how they push the car into place, so you will understand that effectively [pitstop audio] isolated.
“Because we have very good relationships with the teams and we work in the garages with the teams, there will be cases where we will ask them to do something specific.
“For example, when you hear the air blowers in the game, they are the air blowers that the teams are actually using. We record everything… and then the wheel jacks, we record the mechanics driving them around and then jacking up the car, and then the nose-on-nose-out stuff.
“We also include insulated wheel guns.”
Atmosphere is another part of the audio design for F1 24. When your car is in the garage or on the grid before a race, or during a red flag, the sound of the crowd and garages that you hear has been recorded by the Codemasters . audio team at various locations, including Bahrain, Silverstone and Zandvoort.
If you play F1 24 enough, you might also be able to pick up some aural Easter eggs that the Codemasters developers left in the game.
Kneen explains: “Another thing we like to do in the [team] garages, we like to try to capture the personality of the teams.
“There’s different Easter eggs and jokes and songs and whatever, so we like to try to capture that. There will be certain bits and pieces that we’ll play in certain garages, but not every time you’re in the garage.
“It’s almost a nod and a wink to the team to express their individuality. That’s always fun to do.”
Tire noises cannot be captured individually, so Codemasters records the sounds of tires screeching across the tarmac – to evoke the cars at their very limits – in separate sessions.
And to capture the sound of a crash, Codemasters built a sound bank from sessions conducted to simulate the crushing of carbon fiber against Armco barriers. A few years ago the audio team obtained a piece of carbon fiber that it crushed and bent to give F1 crashes extra fidelity.
Just as different assists and settings give each player a personalized experience in F1 24, the sound settings can also be customized to suit each player. For example, the ‘driver mix’ will evoke what each driver hears in his helmet. Codemasters achieved this by placing microphones inside a racing helmet and recording audio from inside.
After recording the audio, the team must match the sounds to what the player is doing on the court. This is done by linking audio to physics, so that when a car accelerates, idles, slows down – or crashes – the game knows which specific audio to play, at a specific tone and pitch.
‘There is sound designbut there is also audio code,” adds Porter. “The physics system is connected to the audio.
“We have a piece of software called Wwise, a third-party software that many other game developers use, that maps the RPM [of the engine] to the car and scale it. We can find a time that says, for example, the car is running at 12,000 rpm and everything matches.
“It’s similar to tires. It [the software] knows the wheel slip ratio or the wheel rotation speed – pretty much anything you can think of.”