How sound design shapes emotion in games, clubs and digital entertainment?
Photy by Yankrukov via Pexels
Sound is incredibly important, and it’s perhaps film buffs who most appreciate what a score can do. Most of the time, it tells us what we should be feeling emotionally, but it can do more than just that.
In a really good game, you may not even notice the sound – especially on the menu screen, because its goal is mostly to create an atmosphere that reflects the game. It’s a bit like how, with a good DJ, you don’t notice the songs constantly changing.
Table of contents
Tempo and frequency
Most people understand that fast music creates excitement. But actually, in a lot of cases, music is sometimes there to mimic our heartbeat, and sometimes there to lead our heartbeat towards it.
Clubs exploit this. DJs ease a room into the night at 120–125 BPM and steadily push toward 135+ as the night reaches its peak. Video games can do the same as you get deeper into the thick of a tense mission.
DOOM Eternal‘s adaptive score does this well, as the tempo and density move in real time and reflect the combat intensity (and therefore, the user’s heart).
Silence and contrast are as powerful as the sound itself
Silence can be more powerful than the music itself. A constant drone in a horror game creates tension. But sudden silence brings dread – an anticipation of when the drone will return, or worse…
The reason silence works is dynamic range and contrast. Everything is about contrast, from design in architecture to the storylines and characters. A sound that arrives after a moment of quiet hits a lot harder. In fact, we even hear that in songs themselves, especially techno.
The build, the cut, the beat drop is a three-act that is used in games. A reward jingle hits harder after a silent moment of anticipation as the wheel ticks over, slower and slower, quieter and quieter. Tension, resolution. The famous coin drops after the reels stop and align in free slots…
Learned audio cues
People aren’t blank slates. They know that minor keys signal threat or sadness. Rising arpeggios signal reward. Decades of cultural conditioning means that designers can play with this emotional responses at their will, much like a Blues guitarist purposely playing an off-note – you can subvert expectations and create more tension before resolving it.
Originally slot game designers leaned into the maddening circus sounds that make you feel like you’re at a buzzing community fair. Tones escalate, and the coin sounds are the ultimate pay-off. Even social media apps use little chimes and satisfying thuds, while the delay before we see the notification number is also straight out of the slot machine mechanic.
Spatial audio
Another element to emotion that gets overlooked is immersion – it’s something we often only talk about with graphics. But going from a mono to stereo to surround sound to object-based spatial audio is a complete change in where the listener positions themselves in the scene.
For gaming, this helps identify where an enemy is, and how close, and that only adds to the emotion. The intense immersion it creates is precisely what connects us to the world it has built.
Sound always works below conscious awareness – it hits the body before the brain. Sound designers are a huge part of what creates emotion and immersion in digital entertainment, be it a silly jingle or an originally composed score.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
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